Istanbul by the numbers

People who haven't been here often ask me to compare Istanbul to other cities; having been to sadly few of the world's largest ones, the best I can usually muster is a "Uh, it's kind of like New York, except I think even bigger?" But now, armed with some data from a conference I recently attended on the future of cities, I can confidently say that:

• Istanbul has more people than London, New York City, or Mexico City, and quite a bit fewer than Shanghai.*


• It is growing faster than Mumbai or São Paulo, going from around 1 million people in 1950 to some 14 to 15 million today. (The image at right shows the dramatic growth in the city's developed area between 1950 and 2000.)


• In its central area (where I live), Istanbul is denser than New York and more than twice as dense as London.


• It is more polluted than Mexico City, and not far behind Mumbai.


• Its residents are very worried about crime, even though the murder rate is less than half of that in New York.


• Its quality of life (according to the U.N.'s Human Development Index) is considered higher than that in Johannesburg, but lower than that in São Paulo or Shanghai.

Of course, numbers don't say anything about which city's views are the best, or whose street vendors are the loudest, or any of the other things that make urban life interesting. For that, you've just got to see for yourself.

* We're talking city proper here, not metropolitan area.

It's all relative

This week, feeling my out-of-shapedness (because really, sometimes only a made-up word will do) especially acutely due to the pending departure of my pilates teacher, I finally got off my butt and went to check out a couple of Istanbul's overpriced gyms, including a hotel spor salonu that promised a fitness center, outdoor pool, sauna, Turkish bath, and jacuzzi. What I didn't expect it to provide was a culture shock.

But there it was, staring me in the face when the blasé young fellow showing my friend and I around opened the door to the sauna area: A man and a woman, lounging in white robes. Together. In the same room. With almost their entire legs and arms showing.

Every door our guide opened seemed a window onto an almost Caligula-esque scene. A man in shorts pouring water over a swimsuit-clad woman inside the hamam. Men and women mingling freely inside a shared sauna. I couldn't help feeling I was violating their privacy, and my own.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a prude. In general, I'm pretty much a live-and-let-live type, donning long sleeves and a headscarf when entering a mosque and doffing, well, pretty much everything at a hippie California hot springs. And I know that Turkey -- especially in Istanbul -- is hardly the world's most restrictive society.

What amazes me is the rapid adaptability of the mind, how bare shoulders and knees and mixed-gender bathing can come to seem, momentarily at least, shocking. And when the norm you've become used to is even more modest, it takes even less to scandalize.

In the book I'm currently reading, Shadow of the Silk Road, author Colin Thubron describes an overland trip from western China to eastern Turkey. After spending a few weeks in Afghanistan, where the women pass by anonymously, fully shrouded under burkas, he crosses the border by bus into Iran and steps out into the northern city of Meshed, where he writes:

"As for the women, framed in chadors leaving the face bare, they seemed scandalously exposed. I stared at them rudely as they passed. They had feathery brows and dark, swimming eyes and lashes. Many were softly beautiful. Some wore a brazen hint of lipstick or eye-shadow. They might have been naked."

* Photo from the awesomely I-can't-believe-this-is-really-necessary-well-actually-yes-I-can "Put Your Brits Away" responsible-dress campaign by the UK travel magazine Wanderlust.

What didn't stay in Mardin

After pointing out the wall crypts, the sun-worshipers' chamber, and the "angel" carvings, the two boys who had appointed themselves our tour guides to the necropolis complex in the ancient Roman city of Dara wrapped up their patter: "Bitti. Başka kalmadı." That's it. The rest didn't stay. Now how about some lira?

Kids seemed to be on the hustle everywhere we went in the Southeast, whether waiting outside each of Dara's sites to follow us through the ruins or tailing us down Diyarbakır's back streets calling out, "Hello, hello, money, money!" It seemed especially pronounced due to the notable lack of adult "buyuruncus," the where-are-you-from-would-you-like-buy-a-carpet-I-have-very-nice-terrace bane of my every trip to Sultanahmet. Perhaps the most persistent was the boy who cornered us outside the Kırklar Kilisesi in Mardin, insisting that we come try some "very nice" wine. ("How would you know?" we asked, seeing as he was all of about 8 years old. He didn't seem to get the joke.) Having been warned about the unfortunately poor quality of this ev şarapı, we still decided -- correctly -- that a family of Christians who make wine in their house were worth meeting.

After begging off buying a bottle with many gracious teşekkür ederiz and empty promises to return after we finished our walking around for the day, we dined at possibly the only real restaurant in town, the much-recommended Cercis Murat Konağı, where the waiters only sniffed slightly at a pair of grubby backpackers settling into a table in an old Mardin mansion with a spectacular view across the desert toward Syria. The house wine there was amazingly good (keep in mind, our standards are low after so much time in Turkey) and the food tasty and different as promised -- what we could get of it, that is. For whatever reason, a good two-thirds of the items on the long, mouth-watering menu were "yok." (Unavailable.) We joked that at least they weren't "kalmadı," to our (North) American ears a strangely passive way of saying "we ran out of that." And then, yep, one of the main dishes we ordered... kalmadı.

We lingered as long as we could at dinner, trying to avoid going back to our ghetto hotel, with its windowless room and dirty squat toilet. Fortunately, a diversion presented itself on the walk back, a musical performance in the town's central çay bahçesi (tea garden). The over-sexualized 8-year-old belly dancer was of course a highlight, but most memorable was the guy who walked up to the stage at (presumably) key moments in the music and threw stacks of napkins into the air above the band members' heads, letting the paper pile up like snowdrifts.

I suspect if anyone tried to buy napkins the next morning at any of the neighborhood stores, they would find that they had... kalmadı.

Taking tea in Urfa

Up until now, probably the strangest place I have ever found myself sipping a cup of tea was a dingy Uzbek roadside chaihana in almost literally the middle of nowhere, a place that looked like it hadn't seen any other customers for a couple of decades but had not one, but three Britney Spears posters hanging on the wall. Well, the pigeon coop in Urfa completely blew that one out of the water.

(Come to think of, the local tire yard wasn't bad either. We had a few nice glasses of çay there while waiting for a fan to be installed in a car.)

Urfa, in southeastern Turkey, is, perhaps uniquely in the country, a city of equal-opportunity head covering, where men and women alike don silk lavender scarves called Yamşah; a city where people adorn themselves with facial tattoos, where a motorcycle is not road-ready without a carpet covering its seat, and where pigeons wear bracelets and earrings. Oh, yes, and it's also the reputed birthplace of the prophet Abraham. But we were mostly there to see the pigeons.

Inside Urfa's old bazaar, where men and boys pound designs into sheets of copper, making gorgeous platters and kitschy souvenirs alike, the courtyard of the Gümrük Han is an airy oasis. Built in 1562, this old Ottoman caravanasari (a place where travelers -- and their camels -- could stop and rest) is shaded by sand-colored tenting wafting in the light breeze and full of men sitting on low kürsü stools drinking tea and playing tavla, or backgammon.

Some, though, choose to spend their leisure time in a slightly less atmospheric location -- a dark, tucked-away room filled with the sound of flapping wings and tiny clinking jewelry and the blended perfume of dust, smoke, and pigeon shit.

Occasionally a man would pick up a bird and examine it, but if anyone was actually buying or selling the pigeons, they were sure taking their time doing so, puffing on cigarettes, sipping their tea, and watching the room's feathered occupants (likewise all male -- spare the strange blond foreigner) skitter and strut about, just as naturally as Americans -- and, OK, practically everyone in the world now -- hang out at Starbucks.

Çok güzel Türkçe ama...!

I've had this conversation in Turkey so many times--at döner stands and train stations, in restrooms and art galleries--I've begun to feel remiss about not writing it down earlier:

Me: "Afferdersiniz..."

("Excuse me..." and then whatever question I have to ask.)

Them: "Alman mısınız?"

("Are you German?")

Me: "Hayır, Amerikalıyım."

("No, American.")

Them: "Çok güzel Türkçe ama...!"

("But your Turkish is very good...!")

Perhaps knowledge of Americans' general ineptness with other languages precedes us around the world. Or perhaps there are so many Turkish immigrants in Germany that your average German knows a few words of Turkish, like Americans (at least in the West) know "gracias" and "cerveza." Either way, I certainly can't say I don't benefit from the low expectations.

Food envy

Earlier this week, I traveled 15 hours each way by train to eat bacon-wrapped cheese skewers (at right) in Bulgaria. (Well, there was a bit more to it than that, but it makes a better story this way.) I've stood outside an Italian supermarket with all my luggage waiting for it to open so I could pull as much pork, cheese, and wine off the shelves as I could in 10 minutes and then race to the airport. I've carted champagne back from a Greek island so we could celebrate Obama's election in style. I've picked raw bacon out of a friend's clothing after the package exploded inside her suitcase during an ill-fated smuggling run. I've even asked a vegetarian friend to bring chorizo from the United States for Thanksgiving stuffing. (She declined.)

Here in yabancıköy, my gang of Istanbul expat friends likes to joke that if we spent half as much time working as we spent scheming how to bring maximum quantities of food and drink back from our various jaunts, we could all retire. (Below, at left, my so-far personal-best haul, from Spain and Portugal.)

Although Istanbul is a massive city with much to offer, it seems to lack the thriving immigrant communities that give other urban areas such a delicious mix of cheap ethnic restaurants. This, combined with the fact that Turks are generally fairly conservative about food, means that ingredients not commonly used in Turkish cuisine--and the few restaurants that specialize in non-Turkish eats--are priced for the presumably fat wallets of foreigners and the local elite.

Bacon, blue cheese, maple syrup, limes, imported alcohol, Ben & Jerry's--we've got them all, just at ridiculously inflated prices. Other items, from black beans and cilantro to celery and raspberries, seem impossible to find on store shelves. Yes, we could eat well and live happily just with what's readily and reasonably available here, without competing to see how many kilos of sausage and liters of wine we can stuff into our suitcases, but where's the fun in that?

* * *

For another expat's take on eating abroad, check out Yazar's blog post "A scone, a goat and the Conor Pass." An Irishwoman living in Çanakkale, Turkey, she's the next link in today's food-themed "World Blog Surf Day," organized by Sher, an expat living in Prague, and Twitter-reported by my fellow Istanbul expat Anastasia Ashman.

Bu sana ibret olsun

Us yabancıs often find Turkish warning signs amusing, in large part because there are so few of them -- Want to fall off our ancient castle? Feel free! It's not like we're going to put up a railing or anything -- and because those that you do see are largely ignored. Case in point: The admonitions to wait for the gangplanks to be laid down before leaping off the ferry. As if.

But two signs I saw this week on a trip to the Princes' Islands particularly jumped out at me. The first, inside the St. George's Monastery on Büyükada (roughly translated from Turkish):

Do not write your petitions on the walls or the icons.
We have a box for petitions.
Write them on a piece of paper and put them in the box.

Who knew there was such a problem with monastic graffiti?

And the other, along the island's shoreline:

Yüzme bilmeyenleri denize girmek tehlikeli ve yasaktır.

It is dangerous and prohibited for those who do not know how to swim to enter into the ocean.

Why, that's practically right up there with "Caution - contents may be hot" on a cup of coffee. Who says Turkey isn't getting more Western by the day?

Can I have a power outage with that pizza?

Their timing may be unpredictable, but power outages--and the dropped Skype calls, suddenly cold showers, and fumbling around for your cell phone to provide a little glow since you couldn't possibly be expected to keep a flashlight and batteries on hand, now could you? that go along with them--are a reliable fact of life in Istanbul.

And though far too localized to create city-wide community spirit--it's not at all uncommon for my apartment's electricity, water, and/or Internet connection to go out while that of my neighbors, whose house I could hit with a rock if I had any kind of arm at all, stays on, or vice versa--our mini-blackouts do knit us yabancıs closer together, as we load up our laptops or bathrobes to use the Internet or shower at someone else's house. They also somehow seem to lead to ordering pizza.

After a cranky day at work today, a chance phone conversation led me to invite a friend over so he could use the Internet while his power was out, which in turn converted an evening with no plans into a nice one of drinking wine and ordering from Domino's (I know, I know, but they have a two-for-one deal)--a "tradition" initiated one time when our electricity went kaput, though only after much befuddled wondering how in the world we could order take-out without the Internet. Ah yes, that little thing with the numbers and the buttons and the ring, ring, ring. How quaint.

Just another day

Maalesef, I did not get to run around getting tear-gassed this May Day, instead "celebrating" Worker's Day by... working. (After going to much trouble to get to the office in the first place, since so many of the roads in my neighborhood were blocked off.) My friends report that it was "boooring" compared to last year, despite the workers' historic return to Taksim Square. And they're not the type to say that in order to make me feel better about missing all the fun.

Just a few photos, then, of the morning scene, captured on my way to work:


Union members laid red carnations in memory of the 37 demonstrators killed on May 1, 1977.


At this point in the day, the police were doing a lot of standing around.

And in a brilliantly photo-op-ready PR move, they even handed out the flowers.

In-flight oenephiles

Cruising altitude is no place for connoisseurs. Even for an, uh, aficionado like myself, the alcohol served on international flights really only has two virtues: it's plentiful, and it's free. But somehow I managed to recently find myself seated--not once, but twice--by people who seemed to have mistaken the economy section of an Airbus for the plush lounge of a wine bar.

En route to Lisbon last Thursday, the man sitting in front of me called the stewardess over and handed the bottle of wine she had previously served him back to her, explaining in stilted English that the wine was French. And he wanted Turkish. (I know what you're thinking, and he was clearly not a Turk.)

Returning on a connecting flight from Geneva this weekend, I heard the stewardess patiently responding to the (alas, unheard) questions of someone sitting behind me that the wine was "from California... it's a blend of grapes... it's dry, but it's very nice."

But, apparently, not too nice to serve with a BBQ chicken hot pocket.

(Photograph by the great William Eggleston. Untitled, from the series Los Alamos, 1965­-1974)