We are staying in a very nice little hotel with traditional kilims and traditional decorated throws…well…thrown everywhere - over couches and as a canopy on our four poster bed. The rooftop terrace, be-cushioned and be-flowerboxed with geraniums and small lemon trees, overlooks the harbour of the Bosphorous on one side and glimpses the spires of the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia on the other (and serves at least half a dozen types of cakes at breakfast much to the girls’ delight – adds that much needed alternative to the staple diet of bread). (I also like the very modern new bathroom with the best plumbing quite frankly since we left Perth! – ah, the things that start to matter after a while.)
We’ve done the essential sights - the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and Harem, and several Lamp shops. They (the sights) are very beautiful – but in quite a different way to the Moorish architecture which had more pronounced filigree plasterwork and pointy arches – the Turkish style is more plain in structure but much more decorated in the tiles – every surface in the blue mosque is covered in beautiful tiles, and the domes and arches soar so high that photos really cannot capture it (Jase is bemoaning that he did not after all buy the wide angle lens he had been coveting – and yes Kingsley he has been dropping into the odd camera shop here and there). The Palace Harem was a very strange and interesting place – some amazingly beautiful palace rooms for the sultan and his sons and mother but the rest of it really was a glorified prison and felt like that even now. Some suffering and tragedies must have occurred in those little laneways and rooms over the centuries (So I think Jase’s suggestion to have Barry White songs piped throughout the Harem wouldn’t have been well received).
And….the OUD. We all took the ferry across the harbour (crossing from the European side deep into the Asian side of Istanbul) to meet Jason’s master oud-maker, Faruk Turunz. And what a genial, charming little old man he was (complete with little leather cap much to Jason’s envy). He was a most warm and generous host entertaining us for a few hours so he and Jase (and a French guy who had come to enquire about ouds) could discuss all things oud-like, whilst I tried to keep the girls from tearing the place apart - and invited us to share lunch with him in his factory, cooked I think by his oud-makers. So we ate some traditional fare – a kind of lemony-flavoured barley soup (yummy) and a dish of mixed up rice, mince and spinach with egg on top (and of course just bread for the girls), together with a typical Turkish yoghurt drink called Ayran. After a few hours we caught the ferry and a couple of taxis home, cradling the precious oud all the way, and my over-joyed hubby strummed his oud all night (no that is not a euphemism for anything) – and despite the fierce concentration in his face in the photos he is actually very happy with it! (despite half wishing that he had gotten a different wood selection similar to one in the shop that caught his eye – Arggghhhh!!!) So that’s Jason’s bit of paradise found.
As I said, we have done most of the sights now. Which leaves me a couple of days to scour the Grand Bazaar and the rest of Istanbul for the perfect lamp(s)! And there are so many to choose from. Jase is quaking in fear – my capacity for procrastination seems to increase in direct proportion to how badly I want to buy something. (NOW aren’t you all, who know me well, glad you didn’t come with me?!)
2 observations on Turkey – this also a paradise for cats obviously – they are Everywhere, dozens of them snoozing and prowling on every street. A kitten was miaowing on our little window box very early hours this morning and then simply hopped through our open window and climbed into bed with us. I kept telling Jase to chuck it out with whatever fleas and germs it had but we were both too sleepy to get out of bed so it stayed with us until breakfast-time when it tired of the girls fussing over it and calling it “puss-puss”…..And secondly, the guide books that said people here like children did not tell the half of it. We can’t walk 10 steps down the road without people clucking over the kids, wanting to hug them, play little teasing games with them, joking them they have a little brother for them to marry, giving them little gifts – it’s nuts. At first we were finding it bordering on the slightly creepy, but every one is like that and in a very good hearted way. The girls are not quite sure how to take all the attention – Gizane giggles and Francesca becomes quite over-silly. The other funny thing is that no one here picks us for Australians and they always start talking to Jase in Spanish or Turkish. One guy thought Jase was Pakistani, which seemed to get up his nose a bit!
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