Nov 11 2008
in which I return to the subject of converses
Remember my post about Converses? I forgot to mention one other point about them. After watching Doctor Who and Pushing Daisies but before visiting England, I went to the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. And they sell everything there; it’s crazy. The actual bazaar is the largest traditional covered market in the world, I think; it was built—well, around 1453, I imagine, when Constantinople was conquered, but sultans added onto it over the years, and the result today is an unbelievably mazelike layout with probably thousands of little booths for vendors selling jewelry, scarves, clothes, leather, lanterns, toy guns and swords (seriously, there were a lot of these), tea sets, porcelain, and of course, knock-off name brands. Hard to say how many of this stuff was real and how much was knock-offs, but considering everyone and their mom was trying to sell designer t-shirts or Gucci bags or designer suitcases or whatever, probably a good portion of it was not the real deal.
Apparently Converses count as designer-brand shoes or something, because they sold a lot of those, too. In fact, this particular stall made me add to my personal canon the idea that the Tenth Doctor got at least one of his pairs of Converses from the Grand Bazaar. (The real question is, would he be really good at haggling or really awful? Nothing in between, definitely—it would be one or the other.) So that’s part of my rather dumb reason for being disappointed at the ubiquity of Converses in England. You know, because I’m weird.
