Nov 16 2008
in which souvenirs, I swear, deliberately annoy me
When I was in Turkey shopping in places like the Grand Bazaar, I noticed something I found rather annoying but assumed it was a product of, I don’t know, a developing nation that didn’t completely know how to cater to modern tourists. Or something. If nothing else I figured it was probably isolated more or less to Turkey. And that was The Case of the Missing Womens-Sized T-Shirt. Look, I hate oversized t-shirts. I wear them to bed and that’s basically it; I won’t wear them as a normal shirt. If I’m going to wear it, it needs to fit. And I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but guys and girls kind of need different cuts in their shirts. There’s really no such thing as unisex.
Well, in Turkey? The vendors sold shirts in women’s sizes, sure. They always cost 5-10 lira more than the men’s t-shirts, and they never looked as cool. I found at least four different t-shirt designs there that I really liked, ones sold by lots of vendors (once you walk around the Grand Bazaar a little, you realize that everyone and their mom pretty much sells all the same stuff), and not one came in women’s sizes. No, the women got the boring t-shirts, ones that look like cheap tourist junk, with Turkey’s little logo on and stuff. The men got shirts that you’d actually want to wear. I did find a shirt I liked, but it took some serious doing and then some even more serious haggling.
