Nov 18 2008
in which turkey has shops in funny places
Because I didn’t get this blog until recently, I’ll be talking about memories from earlier trips pretty much whenever I want to (read: whenever I can’t be bothered to think up something else). That’ll be a lot of Turkey, at least to begin with, since it was my first real bit of international travel and one of my more interesting destinations.
I might have mentioned that I loved Istanbul. I loved it for a lot of different reasons, but in large part I adored all the little ways in which it was foreign and strange—like, for instance, the fact that you can find vendors set up everywhere. I’m thinking specifically right now of pedestrian underpasses and bridges. These were pretty big, the underpasses feeling more like the entrance to a subway system rather than just a little tunnel under the street, and every single one was full of shops—people selling bikes and I don’t even know what else (I really don’t remember, the bikes were the only things that stand out in my memory). It was just sort of funny, I guess: people are so eager to sell their stuff that they’ll set up shop wherever there happens to be space.
(My other strong memory of such an underpass was watching some poor sod use a giant push-broom to sweep up the even more giant piles of trash, and my thought was, “Oh, so that’s how they deal with it…huh. Instead of, I don’t know, having more public trash cans or running major anti-littering campaigns…? Well, okay, sure.”)
