Bazaar and... bizarre?

Sorry for the extended silence on the blog! We have VISITORS! Very special ones as well, Ozayr's sister-in-law and her two boys. They are the same age as my kids, and we are having fun showing them around the city - when Ozayr is at work, the girls and I are actually the tour guides!! I will admit to at least one late night reading up on facts on the internet to be better prepared, but really there is barely any point trying to be intellectual about the Grand Bazaar - you just have to shop, shop, shop. The interior of the GB is large and overwhelming (for me at least - 4,000 shops!) and while we did a moderate amount of shopping and lots of browsing, I was pretty determined to take Nancy to yarn bazaar, the han where they sell yarn - LOTS OF IT. And it's really cheap :-). So it was quite an adventure with several stops for directions (Turkish people are sooo friendly and helpful), and we finally made it. And the yarn did not disappoint. I won't bore you with the details of our purchases, but I will show you pictures of what I call "Wedding Dress Street" along the way - as you remember, shops are often grouped according to their wares, and this was a fun one to see. The kids enjoyed looking at all the crazy dresses (you can see from the pictures that it is not necessarily custom here to wear only white) and swearing up and down that they were NEVER getting married. "YUCK!"

Tea and Games

I snapped this picture of a familiar scene around Istanbul: people playing backgammon. There is a place to stop for chai in Istanbul on virtually every corner, and when the weather is nice, the patios are full. There will be generally a few pairs of men playing backgammon while they drink their tea (and usually smoke). It was a little cold when we first arrived, but now we are starting to see this more and more often. Chai, like cappuccino in Italy, is a much more economical and quick affair here, something you can buy from a tea seller on the street in a plastic cup, on a ferry crossing the Bosphorus, or in one of the many tea gardens that dot the city, for just a lira or two (around $1.00). It's part of the fabric of the city and we use as many excuses as possible to stop to drink it!

Blue Mosque

Unspeakably beautiful - one of my favourite places in Istanbul.

Opening

Lots of excitement here: last night was the study center's grand opening. Faculty, regents and the Dean of the College arrived from the University of Minnesota this week, and Ozayr has been giving walking tours and hosting dinners all week. At the center last night there was a reception to celebrate its opening, with guests that included the US Counsel General to Turkey and the mayor of Beyoglu. This center, which will be run by Accent when U of M students are not using it, is the first North American school for the study of design in Turkey, and will bring many more students to this exciting and vibrant city. A long time dream for Ozayr and UMN alums Mark and Nedret Butler come true, something they have been working on tirelessly since Ozayr first started bringing students here in 2007.

Below is: Ozayr Saloojee, Mark and Nedret Butler, Martha Johnson (Learning Abroad Center, UMN) and Tom Fisher (Dean of the College of Design, UMN)

Basket Commerce

Life on our little street in Cihangir is really quite fascinating for the girls and me. It's much more engaged with the neighbourhood than life in Canada or America. The first thing I noticed about our apartment was the huge windows, and that they (shockingly!) open right up - practically opening up a whole wall to the outside world (even though we are on the third floor). And that's exactly what happens - windows open and close all day long around here. Children call up to each other when it's time to leave for school. Grandmas lean out their windows and inspect the goings-on of the street. People hang their laundry out. People selling simit (like a bagel with sesame seeds) wander down our street, calling out "Simit! Simit!" and you just shout out your window if you want one. Two days ago there was a busker playing the accordion, looking hopefully up at the windows for flying change...

I am still trying to get a video of my favourite phenomenon - buying things directly from your home. Presumably, an order is placed via telephone or internet. A man will come along from the local bakery/convenience/grocery store, with the requested item(s). He calls up, and a window opens. A person waves and then lowers down a basket or cloth bag on a rope. The seller collects the money, and places the merchandise inside. The basket or bag is then pulled up to the window. Transaction complete! I even saw a woman pay BY CREDIT CARD the other day, as the seller had a swipey thing on his iPhone. Of course this tradition probably dates back to a time when women could not leave the home very easily without the accompaniment of a man, but now it's firmly part of the culture and it's interesting quirks.

Check out this street near the spice bazaar (photo below). The building structure and windows are fashioned so that not only could the people inside see out, but they could see UP the street to see the sellers coming.

Window Washing

3 floors up, in case you are wondering.

They take cleaning very seriously here apparently.

Hanging out at ACCENT

After our Turkish lesson this morning (Merhaba!) we decided to stay at the center and hang out for a bit! We brought our art supplies and the girls are adding their own art work to the studio walls :-)

The Weaver's Han

In other adventures around the city yesterday, I had a "top ten" moment as the students would say. My friend Waverley took us to the old weaver's han, near the spice bazaar. A han is kind of like a square, bordered on all sides by sometimes up to four stories of rooms and workshop spaces. It is generally enclosed with one gate or entrance that can be locked up at night. You can be walking down the street and walk through one door or gateway, and walk into one of these little compounds, though you had no idea it was there and its vastness was not visible from the street. In the olden days, these were the center of trade for a particular industry. Just like shops are clustered together according to their wares, each han was the center of commerce for a particular merchandise. Traders would come along the Silk Road and bring their spices or cloth or whatever they were selling and come to the appropriate han, where they would find all that they needed there, included rooms to stay in, a fountain for washing up and water for their horses, generally a little mosque as well. Inside the han, the center of the square would perhaps be used for production or storage of their wares, and the rooms and hallways along the edge for shops and selling.  This blog has a good picture of a han closer to Ankara, just to give you an idea of the layout, though it has been converted into a restaurant.

Today in particular hans, you can still find some of the great artisan trades of old. We visited the biggest han in Istanbul, that had three squares in it and a vast number of rooms. Of course, it doesn't look like it would have, hundreds of years ago, but it was still impressive. The weavers and their looms were moved out in recent years because the vibrations due to the equipment. There was one leftover loom however, and I really thought it was a thing of beauty. It reminded me of the quote I posted earlier in the blog about the grandeur of time's decay...

We met a lovely little old man, who unlocked a door for us and we were climbing up and up until we came out on the roof of the han itself - so old that there are trees growing on it.

The view... was breathtaking. It really blew me away. You could see the Galata Bridge down in front of us, and the Yeni Cami Mosque (translated as the "New Mosque" because it's only 500 years old). You could see the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. You could see a vast amount of the city itself.

And then the call to prayer began. It began with one, then another chimed in, then another... That was my "top ten" moment right there, listening to the "adhan" from every single mosque in the city... almost as if they were calling back and forth to each other. It was beautiful.

My kids sat with Waverley's daughter Addy and drank iced tea and just "chilled" on the rooftop watching a butterfly float by. I was struck again how this experience is so enriching for them, though they don't even realize it. I am very grateful to be here.

Shopping

One of the cool things about Istanbul is the shopping. Not even the actual spending/attaining part of it, but the walking and the browsing and the looking. There are malls here, but it is far more fun to venture into the backstreets and bazaars and see what they have there. Shops tend to be very specific (like a tiny shop that sells just scissors or googly eyes as we found last year) and they are grouped together based on what they are selling. So you might stumble upon the bedspread street, where every shop sells bedding and quilts and bedspreads. There is a scarf street, a baking/cooking wares street and a musical instrument street. Last year we found 6 stores in a row selling wedding dresses. That was quite a scene. There is even rumored to be a men's underwear street, but I have not seen it :-)

Today we met friends and took our daughters to the area where you can buy beads, charms, and jewelry making supplies. We could have stayed for HOURS pouring over probably hundreds of different charms and beads. The girls finally picked their favourites out and we made the dreaded march to the cash register... The total cost of what they picked was... 4TL. That's the equivalent of two and a half dollars. So needless to say, we all left happy.

Boats and Birds

We have been settling in to our accommodations in Istanbul and finding our way around the city once more. We were here last year, but rarely traveled without Ozayr (our resident expert) and so the girls and I are just getting re-acquainted with the public transportation system. Actually, in contrast to the United States, public transport is one of the many delights of this city. One swipe-able card can be used on the metro, tram, bus, ferries or funicular, and Turks here pop on and off each one in rapid succession to get where they are going. It's sometimes crowded, but the buses and metro and trams are frequent (every few minutes) and the routes are simple and easy to understand. Our favourite addition to our daily meanderings are the ferries. Especially on a beautiful day like today, where we took a 25 minute ferry ride to Kadikoy, just to go for lunch. Scores of birds follow the ferries about the Bosphorus, as the boat churns up lots of fish in its wake. Sometimes dolphins follow too, for similar reason. The students have seen dolphins several times so far, but we are still on the lookout for our first sighting. Fingers crossed as we are heading over to Cengelkoy on Monday where we've had lots of luck in the past.

Slow day on Sungu Sokagi

Every morning a man comes down our street shouting something unintelligible like "EEEERRP!" He is pushing a flat bed wheelbarrow type thing, with his wares on it. Presumably we can all look out our windows and see if we want what he's selling. The first day we saw him he had a vacuum cleaner and some wood. Yesterday he had an iron and a pair of gloves. Today he had a piece of rope and two pieces of metal.

SEVEN

Arrived!

My apologies for the silence on the blog! Our last few days in Rome the girls and I spent walking around, re-visiting all our favourite things. Over the course of the last three days there we managed to see the Colosseum, Circus Maximus, Castel and Pont Sant'Angelo, Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, Largo Argentina, Piazza Navona and St Peters Basilica and Cupola. We also frequented our favourite restaurants and gelato places, said goodbye to our local coffee shop staff and doorman.

We arrived in Istanbul on Saturday night and immediately dropped our bags and went out to eat. We showed the students Istiklal Caddesi and took them to Durumzade for chorba (soup) and sandwiches. It was easily 1 a.m. by the time we all hit the sack that night. We have just been adjusting to the city since then, wandering around and seeing our favourite places again.

Perhaps the most exciting thing to happen since we arrived has been seeing the ACCENT center and seeing students IN IT. As some of you may know, this has been a dream of Ozayr and Mark and Nedret Butler's for many years now, and it's been a lot of work to get to this point.

AND HERE WE ARE.

We are very grateful that we are on this trip, that students came and this program is officially up and running and the center is inhabited and ready to be loved and learned in by students in this fantastic city - the goal all along. Check out Ozayr's post and pictures on the MSP blog, here.

Goodbye Roma!

Our time in Italy has flown by, and I am writing this post on our Rome-Istanbul flight. Italy was so great, a dream really, somewhere I had always wanted to visit. While it was all the Big Sights I was anxious to see 5 weeks ago, it is all the little things that I will miss now that we're gone. I will miss pizza, pasta, cappuccino, cornetto, and cars so tiny they can be parked perpendicular to the street. I will miss our doorman, our bakery, gelato in the sun or rain, in the afternoon or after dark (under any circumstances, always say yes to gelato). The statues that line Pont Sant'Angelo, and trees that are skinny the whole way up until there is a great explosion of green at the top. I will miss wandering down an unpresuming street, only to turn a corner and be stunned by something breathtakingly beautiful - a building, a piazza, a scultpture, a garden - and knowing its story is centuries old. I will miss those Big Sights as they became just apart of our daily routine, like walking through St Peters to get to Ozayr's work or the grocery store. Ahhh...

Gracie Roma...

Gladiators!!

The girls went to gladiator school this past week, a fun sort of day camp offered here for kids. It was something we heard about in the States before leaving (thanks to the ciao bambino blog) and the girls were highly anticipating it. We left it for the last week as a goodbye send off to Roma.

It sure didn't disappoint. All four of us got to explore their little gladiator museum filled with gladiator related objects and learn a lot about the history of gladiator fighting in Italy. Then the girls went out into the ring with their "lanista" and learned a few key "moves." We got a great demonstration of how they used the net - he holds it in such a way that it fans out when he swings it and then he can cast it over his opponent. It was really quite impressive - they have really worked to hone their craft. Sometimes I thought, wow, these guys really think they are gladiators!!

The girls then "battled" each other with the instructor acting as referee. This part was a little difficult for me... It is a strange thing to watch your kids sort of go after each other, even if you know no real harm will come to either of them... I had constant mixed feelings and felt quite tense, though the children seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. I actually teared up at one point, when the instructor stopped and looked at Maymuna and said in astonishment: "you have no anger in you." Anyone who knows her knows that this is true. We stopped on the walk home because they wanted to pick daisies in a field, and I sighed, quite happy to see all traces of the afternoon gone...

Maymuna posted on the University of Minnesota blog about her experience, and I'll add a few extra pictures for you here: