A funny book about Turks and Armenians

Two of my stereotypes were destroyed in the last couple of days - Turks can write funny books (my main knowledge is Orhan Pamuk, though he grows on me more and more), and they can write sympathetic and funny books at the same time about the Armenian question.

Just as well though, that Elif Shafak's book 'The Bastard of Istanbul' is a fast read; as I was flying to Istanbul I began to realise that it might not be the best book to read in public here. I guess the suggestive photo of the pomegranate on the front of the German version should have given me a clue.....Ms Shafak herself grew up in Spain and only returned to Turkey when she was 20, but by now she will be well steeped in all the controversy, what with having had to face a court case on this book.

The book ultimately connects two nineteen-year-old girls, both from large families. One grew up partly in a large Armenian family in the US (though her mother divorced her Armenian father early on and married a Turk out of spite), and the other, totally fatherless (she only finds out about him aged 19 - I know how it feels, though in her case the situation is terrible) grows up in a family of women in Turkey, where the men have always had a habit of dying early. Then the semi-Armenian girl decides she needs to find her identity and can only do that by going to Turkey, secretly, though with the help of the Turkish stepfather (who is an escapee from that all-female household). And so it goes on.

The book covers a huge number of topics - not just the Armenian/Turkish issue, but also the situation of illegitimate children, there's a rape-scene, the story of the Armenian tragedy is movingly told and well-reacted to by the Turkish listeners to the tales (though the characters in the book don't see themselves as having a feeling of guilt, unlike, say, my generation of Germans who still feel guilty for something their parents did).

What's so funny about it, then? It's the characterizations of people - less of the Armenians, but in particular of the Turkish end, where each of the women in that house full of women has her own idiosyncracies, and where a group of characters meeting in a cafe are all failures in their own way, like the 'Secretely Gay Columnist', or the 'Particularly Untalented Poet', spelt in a way that I have not seen since reading my friend Pat's book involving a dancer who was 'Not A Nijinksy'.

At the same time the book has some challenging moments, what with the two 19-year-olds both being intellectual heavyweights in their own ways, one as a nihilist (an existential one?) and the other a serious bookworm, and we get quotes from Jean Jacques Rousseau and others.

My main criticism is weight for value for reading time. I bought the hardback version, which is a huge and heavy book. But the print is well spaced out, and so I read the 450 pages in no time at all, including about 70 pages on the tram from the airport into the town. Try doing that with an Orhan Pamuk book (though I've read 100 pages of one of those by 2 pm this afternoon.....). I'm worried about a serious reading material crisis.....

Otherwise it's a brilliant book!

Live music - at last.... schleppend

Two concerts in one day in the Kemal Atatuerk Cultural complex in Taksim, Istanbul.

This morning, an offering of Beethoven by the Istanbul Municipal Orchestra, a pianist who shall rename nameless, and a conductor called Jurjen Hempel (Juergen Hempel). Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.

The moment the pianist stepped on the stage, my heart sank. It was the schleppender way she went over to the piano. Beethoven 4 is a hard one what with the pianist having to start all alone. But it gives her to set the tempo. Right. Schleppend. The orchestra started more or less together. The fiddles were playing sotto voce whether the pianist was playing or not. The winds were sometimes inaudible (there are some fine wind lines), and occasionally rough (the horns). Emoting there was none - most of the emoting took place on my eyebrows along the lines of 'what happened there'? It was a far from inspired performance.

However, the hall was full, and she seemed to have her claque; so we got two encores. The first was something romantic, I thought, until - wait a moment - isn't that Bach? Sounds like a bit of a Bach partita or something, like a gigue/bourree/gigue kind of arrangement (I'm not so good on the piano partitas). But every single chord was arpeggiated (do you call it that, when the notes are played like on a harp -teedleleedlelee, rather than on a piano - bang). Dreadful. Off she went, and then launched into a Hungarian Dance. I am sure Jessica's book of the same name will be light years above the quality of this little effort. Not sure whose Hungarian dance it was, a Brahms transcribed by Liszt, and in this case transcribed by someone else for people like me who cannot play all the notes? I could not believe this would be played in a public concert, like this. Notes fell out all over the place; if she played 85% of the notes she did well. She did give it energy, though.

The second half of this concert was a symphony. Without a programme I was confused; I thought it was going to be all Beethoven, but this was so classical - could it be Haydn? Turned out to be Beethoven 1; practice makes perfect, eh, Mr Beethoven. The orchestra and conductor finally got themselves together well in the final movement. In other movements it sometimes seemed as if the first fiddle leader was the only fiddler who was playing - you could hear him very clearly.

In the afternoon, the opera orchestra and chorus put on a concert performance of Carmina Burana, in the same venue. What a difference! It was a huge band (to be fair, Beethoven does not always need a huge band), huge choir (with one or two unfortunate soprano warblers), big percussion section (necessarily), led by a conductor, seemingly an ageing rocker, whose hair had slipped down to around his neck, through from that he had produced an impressive curly ponytail. This orchestra played so well - the concert master (mistress) lead her heart out, the brass section was the best I have heard for a long time, and the others did well, too. Orff does ask something of his soloists, though, no? Particularly in terms of range of voice - one of the guys, who had only one solo, was fairly seriously challenged by the highness of his part. But overall it was a vastly better performance than this morning's effort.

In passing I wondered what else Orff had written? I know his operas 'Die Kluge' and 'Der Mond', both of which are on my Ipod, and of course the 'Schulwerk', an educational system involving many xylophones etc - I was involved in that as a child. From Alex Ross' book 'The rest is noise' I seem to remember that he was not a total Nazi as I had always assumed seeing he stayed in Germany during the war. But symphonies, string quartets - did he write any?

Hüzün

Hüzün is a peculiar kind of melancholy which affects Istanbullus (people who live in Istanbul). So says Orhan Pamuk in his book 'Istanbul'. It's in the sense of spiritual loss, where for example if someone has spent too much time amassing worldly goods, he may feel hüzün because he may not qualify for paradise so well. In the case of Istanbullus, Pamuk suggests that it also reflects the loss of glory that the city had during the Ottoman empire. The reader of the book feels, though, that Pamuk himself has quite an intimate acquaintance with hüzün.

The air of hüzün is promulgated in the book through the use of black-and-white photographs only, of which they are very many. None were taken later than about 1972, I suspect, and these may be the ones of Pamuk himself. It's strange how small black-and-white photos don't actually tell you that much.

If you are looking for a tourist guide to Istanbul, do not buy this book. It does not tell you where to go and what to look at. If on the other hand, you are like me, and enjoy wandering around the streets, expensive ones and poor back streets, looking at what people do and how they live, and you have time to sit and contemplate Istanbul, buy it. I was reading it on sunny and very grey November days in small cafes in Istanbul, having spent much time crawling all over the back streets of the old town and of Beyoglu, and I could well relate to what he is talking about in the book.

In a sense, it's a memoir of his childhood and youth (in a large but not necessarily happy family) where Pamuk seems to have got his own way rather a lot; for example bunking off school with not too much disapproval of his family (so why does he wonder, in another part of the book, that his results were not as good as his older brother's?). It reflects his childhood in a family where mother and father are often at war, his internal adolescent struggles, and his search for identity - what or who will he be?

At the same time he looks at Istanbul through western eyes, which have very long since closed - they are mostly 19th century painters and authors; he also uses the eyes of 4 melancholic Turkish authors. He describes the old wooden houses and palaces which in the past were frequently cause for major conflagration (whilst wandering round Sultanhamet last week I saw quite a few rickety wooden houses where I thought about fire risks), the poverty of these areas (which I saw looking into some of the houses with dirt grimed walls and lightbulbs hanging any which way, or rows and rows of windows with lots of pairs of jeans drying outside them, suggesting the residence of many labouring men), and at the same time the contrast of his fairly privileged young life. At one stage in his teens he takes up painting with a passion, though it seems he often paints in the style of someone - often impressionists? Does his painterly eye explain the very detailed descriptions in his other books?

This books is great for lists of things: 'To savour the back streets of Istanbul, you must first and foremost, be a stranger to them. A crumbling wall, a wooden tekke - condemned, abandoned, and now fallen into neglect - a fountain from whose faucets no water pours, a workshop in which nothing has been produced for eighty years, a collapsing building, a row of homes abandoned by Greeks, Armenians and Jews as a nationalist state bore down on minorities, a house leaning to one side in a way that defies perspective, two houses leaning against each other in the way that cartoonists so love to depict, a cascade of domes and rooftops, a row of houses with crooked window casings - these things don't look beautiful to the people who live among them; they speak instead of squalor, helpless hopeless neglect'. Something like this picture taken last Sunday, but imagine it on a grey day and in black and white. The pictures in Pamuk's book do not include satellite dishes....

(This little extract brings up the eternal conflict in the tourist's soul [or which should be in the tourist's soul]: picturesque poverty is interesting to look at - but is that not also exploiting the poor? People talk about going to Cuba before it changes [if the Americans, especially their Cubans, ever get in there again] - but what's interesting is the way the buildings are, the transport system is, the people live. But who asks the people who live in such constant grinding poverty, where for example a house may not be a shelter when the rain comes in, or when the doors are so poor that anyone can go and steal things? On the other hand, things that rich people do are often activities that they do anywhere in the world. So maybe this means that the rich have globalised, whereas the poor maintain the traditional cultures? But then, what or whose is 'the traditional culture'?) Topic for another debate.

Of all Pamuk's books, this is the one I like the most. I love the atmosphere of gentle melancholy of the book, of a sense of mourning of what had been (though I suspect the present is not as bad for Istanbul as Pamuk describes it - but I don't know enough about it yet - next time I should do what he did at some stage of his life and hop on a bus just to anywhere). It's also a relatively shorter book, with the text broken up by pictures, so it's not so quite hard work to read (in one cafe I spotted a young Turkish woman, with not many words in English, who was reading his book 'Snow' - the only other book of his I have read beginning to End - and she thought she had not chosen well. She should try some of his yet longer, and more fantastic, ones...)

I am not sure though how much it means to people who have never been to Istanbul, and should they travel to Istanbul following their reading, they might get a bit of a surprise.

Villa Zurich

Villa Zurich is a beautiful hotel in Beyoglu, Istanbul. Down from Taksim Square, past the German Hospital, turn left at the little mosque (leaving, regretfully, the cafe with the wonderful chocolate smell on your right), past a fruitshop, a little cafe with the most amazing mix of tiles at its entrance, a high class deli, and before you know it, there it is in front of you.

Looks like it has recently been renovated, everything spotless. The restaurant on top of the hotel, which serves as a fish restaurant at night, and the breakfast room in the morning, is enclosed by glass and has a stunning view across the water to the old town (which is quite well enjoyed from the distance).

My room, 604, just below the restaurant, also had a wonderful view across roof-tops, little roof verandas, into flats (though I was too high to really observe....) The beds were wonderful, clean white cotton, and everything was spotless.

Shame, then, about the smell from the bathroom. I've met this before in places, but usually running some water through the drains has fixed it. It's not offensive, just unpleasant (and I suppose I could have asked for another room). As a result, the window is often wide open after the cleaner has been, on these November days in Istanbul. Bit of a shame, then, that the heating (the airconditioning), which appears to be older, sounds like a plane ready for take-off after a few minutes of gathering its strength. But luckily there is a spare duvet in the cupboard.

After a night in the room underneath the restaurant you get used to the noise of people walking above you (strangely, the evening I was in the restaurant, I listened out for their footsteps but could not hear them), and the moving of the tables at 3 in the morning, to prepare for breakfast, you only hear in your first night.

The restaurant has the slightly unfortunate habit of not appearing to have a menu, and of whisking you past the price list by the entrance when you enter, as well as assuming you want to drink quite a lot of wine, and water, so the bill can be a bit higher than you might anticipate.

But it's a great location, and I am sure if you have another room, you'll be fine.

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Those Istanbul cats

I'd noticed all those cats in Istanbul, way back in January....it seems in the summer Istanbul is smitten by a smell of cat pee, much like Prague's residential areas have an aura of dog pee.

Read all about cat/dog interactions in Istanbul here.

Shopping in Istanbul

Not that I did that much of it...no carpets....

Interestinly a contact suggested that you can buy a carpet there and get the shop to ship it home for you (after you have taken a photo of the shop, the salesman and the carpet); other sources suggest that you might not unwrap the same carpet at home... much like suppliers to EU projects when heavy-duty lino is ordered for a project office floor, and you end up with paper-thin stuff....

In Istanbul there are whole streets specialising in certain types of goods, eg gold, silver, clothes, lights, musical instruments, electric cabling, and so on and so on. Many of the goods are sold in wholesale quantities, even in the town centre - eg a bag of 100 silver bracelets, or, at the side of the road, waist high bags all containing the same wolly hats. There are also many informal little street stalls - I even spotted a microscopic stall selling 'Viagra' and 'Cialis' - no doubt the size of the stall was in inverse relationship with the hoped-for effect of the drugs concerned.

I saw some strange contraptions whose use I could not work out, until I spotted them on the backs of men bent down under loads bigger than themselves. These contraptions kind of extend the back so that the guy can carry a really gynormous load - saves using donkeys and getting in trouble with soft-hearted tourists complaining about animal welfare.

Picked up some spices, some Turkish Delights, lots of dried figs (had a bad do with dried figs as a child, when, in order to keep me regular, I had to eat soaked dried figs for breakfast every morning - yuk!, but unsoaked they are nice), some prezzies but no carpets, harem outfits or fezes!

Harems

lio

Sunday in Istanbul, and another wonderfully sunny day. A culture day (many shops are shut!). Off to the Hagia Sofia (or Agya Sofya) which was made a museum by Ataturk in 1935, probably a good move at the time (at the same time Stalin was blowing up Christian cathedrals in Moscow). The Hagia Sofia, as we will all remember from our school days, is one of the oldest churches in the world, particularly noteworthy for its original architecture (it promptly burned down). The current version, which has been standing for a good 10 or 15 centuries, has had both Christian and Muslim tenants, and you find a mosaic of the Mother of God next to a Muslim shield. The mosaics, consisting of thousands of stones, have been plastered over and opened up on a regular basis in the last 100 or 200 years. (Pure coincidence that on the photo the Mother of God is floating on a sunbeam!). A very impressive building indeed.

After that off to the Topkapi which I mostly know thanks to that film with David Niven, the only sleek cat in Turkey in his black poloneck playing a cat burglar. When I went into the treasury all I could think of was, where is the diamond, and which window did he climb in through. Funny how the big big diamonds, of some 80+ carats, looked so much plainer than the million-faceted reflection of the geegaws, gadgets, bowls, vessels, caskets, sword handles, medals, studded with little precious stones. Interesting also the tulip symbols on many of the gowns. Tulips come from Turkey (and associated countries) of course, not from Amsterdam, despite what the song says.

Had a look round the harem - it was only accessible via guided tour, where the young tourleader giggled a lot and lost herself in a confusion of translation. Apparently this is the place which Mozart's 'Seraglio' is based on (how did he know?). It was very stony, virtually no soft furnishings, some open fires in some rooms, no access to a blade of grass, the concubines were kept separate from the wives, for good reasons no doubt. It seemed that the Sultan slept on a platform bed (or was that another translation issue?). In front of his bedroom were a couple of rooms with padded benches and I wondered if at night all his wives/concubines would assemble there and he would say...'hmmm, it's you tonight'.
Tried to get some of the Seraglio tunes into my head, but succeeded only with the Magic Flute.

In the afternoon wandered down to the ferry port to have one of the legendary fish sandwiches (quite good) and then popped onto a ferry to a place called Kadikoy (there should be an umlaut 'o'). Sunk deeply into my book and got of at Kadikoy - another very busy place. Found a lovely cafe above a bookshop just by the harbour. A building that looked like a former market hall seemed to be part of the Istanbul Conservatoire of Music. Very small, I thought. As I was leaving the place on the return ferry I suddenly thought - this looks like the Asian shore (I was convinced I had just popped round the corner at Beyoglu), and some hasty rifling through my guide book confirmed that I had been in Asian Istanbul, complete with the railway station donated to Istanbul by Kaiser Bill. If only I had realised sooner!

Some more sunset photos

Turkish politics

Got back to the hotel from dinner on the Friday night, switched on the telly and found a CNN report of the murder of Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish journalist, in Istanbul. Eh? Not so I had noticed. CNN showed a huge demonstration involving, it seemed, thousands, in protest of his murder (which surprised me a little bit). Apparently he was killed by some stupid boy aged 17 or so. Boys should really be locked away between the ages of 14 and 20! Someone had probably wound him up. It must be really hard to govern a country like Turkey which has such huge differences in outlook between different parts of the country.

I had heard nothing at my end of the town. Where was all this happening? So I changed my plans for Saturday and went over to Beyoglu - the big Ataturk cultural centre is there, and I thought that's where the demos might have been, too. My Lonely Planet guide had a walking tour for that neighbourhood, and maybe I could do it in reverse, arriving at Taksim, the nerve centre of that side of Istanbul.

This line of people (read men!), on Galata Bridge, was busy fishing for tiddlers - the tiniest fish, no longer than an index finder, and half the width. There were hundreds of them. Not sure of the point of it all.

Well, I did not even find the starting point (or the end point). Partly this was because in Istanbul roadsigns are a little scarce; also I did not have quite the right understanding of the scale of the map. So what was supposed to be a day-long enterprise had me standing, after quite a lengthy detour (I worked out afterwards), on Taksim Square by 10 am...and for the rest of the day?

Luckily creeping up the very steep hills I had clocked a poster for a concert, by the Istanbul Devlet Senfoni Orkestrasi (Devlet might be a word for a type of institution, like 'municipal' or 'national'). And it was to be at 11 am, in the Atatuerk cultural centre. Perfect, or what?

That gave me just enough time to dip into the lovely cafe nextdoor and partake of not one, but two dainty custard/fruit tarts (see picture - they are on a saucer!) - they were so small that even a dieter could try out both tastes.

The Atatuerk cultural centre is, to be frank, a monstrosity. Built probably in the late 60s or 70s, it is a smoked glass cube, with lots of lights hanging down, darkly teak pannelled walls, red chairs, lights in the ceiling of which random ones work, and a shell for the orchestra. The hall is used both for orchestras and concerts, but the shell suggests that the acoustics for orchestras is not so great.

Anyway - the hall was full mostly of older folk, though also a school class or two. The programme was Rodrigo's 'Concerto Madrigal' for two guitars and orchestra, and Mendelssohn's 3rd symphony. I'm not a great guitar friend, but ah well. The problem with them, apart from the plink plonk, is that they always need to be amplified when playing with an orchestra. Here we had the two guitarists Liat Cohen and Ricardo Moyano. Liat, female, was very much the dominant partner in this. She got all the good tunes...the way they were sitting, her hair hung down so that she could not see her partner (but in some ensembles that does not matter). She also moved her microphone with the result that she sounded as if she was sitting beside you, and he - well, we could see him play. The orchestra seemed to have been told that they had to play quietly for the guitars, and this they followed to the letter, to the point of inaudibility at times. At other times, in any case, the orchestration did not seem that great, and much hanging about took place on stage. I feel no need to hear this piece again in a hurry. For their encore, the two guitarists dropped their music stands and their hair and suddenly came to live with some typically guitarish kind of piece.

The Mendelssohn was nice enough, though I do wonder why it was called the 'Scottish' symphony. Did he write it when he was there, bobbing about in the sea outside 'Fingal's Cave'? Anyway, a perfectly pleasant morning in Istanbul. Interestingly, the orchestra had 28 women out of a total of 67 players - the highest participation of women I have seen anywhere in Istanbul!

Then I wandered back across the square to start the walking tour the right way round... except I could not be bothered to bob up here and duck down there, to peek around a corner or slip down a lane.... The main street, the Istiklal Caddesi, was heaving with people streaming up and down in both directions. The busloads of riot police were loitering at the top of the street, going shopping for their lunches, chatting to their friends, all very relaxed. This seems to be the main shopping street, with many brand name shops, but also many bookshops, quite a lot of whom have English books....

And then there were lots of cafes, self-service restaurants, posher restaurants - a street full of bookshops and restaurants cannot be bad, no? Had a gorgeous lunch in the lokantasi 'Aga', full of slightly ageing men (in the side street by the mosque Agua Camii) - this is a restaurant where you look and point at the food, and it is brought to you at the table (about 5 seconds later). I am not sure that you get alcohol in some of this locantas. Picked something covered in strips of aubergine which turned out to have the tenderest, pinkest meat under it I could imagine? Rabbit? Once I got to the bone I realised it would have been a wer-rabbit. No idea what kind of meat it was. But soo goood!

(In the evening I ate in another locantasi, almost next door, the Haci Abdullah, with a melt in the mouth chicken on a puree of aubergines, a kind of slippery, shiny puree perhaps also with potatoes, but what a taste!! Total bliss - and much cheaper than some other restaurants I had been to).

Tootled on down the street; found a tiny demo about Hrant Dink taking place (about 40 people), with some riot police chatting quietly nearby. The Turkish Daily News said that yesterday's demo had contained 60 people, and yet CNN had shown thousands all facing the same way (unlike a shopping crowd where they go in both directions). Strange - whose news were right?

Crossing the bridge again to Sultanahmet I passed the ferry terminal, and wasn't there a wee boat just ready to leave for a round trip? It was to last 1 hour 15 minutes, or maybe 1 hour 50? Popped up on deck, where, on a January afternoon, it was none too hot....

We sailed over back to the Beyoglu side, then pottered along the coast under the large Bridge joining the Asian and the European side - it took so long that I began to worry whether I had got on a ferry and might have to find my own way back, but as darkness sank, eventually the boat went over to the Asian shore, and returned to the harbour with a very few and rather frozen set of deck passengers. Brrr. - And then the hotel had no water, so no chance to warm up!

A Plump Purr of Pussies

Cats with old men,

cats with young kittens,

cats on rooftops and

cats climbing mesh fencing,

cats sitting serenely

and watching the world.






Cats sleek and chubby,

cats rough ...and tubby,

cats at the butcher's and

cats in the fish shop,

cats taking their share

without fear or alert.




Cats posing for tourists (I swear it miaowed 'where you from?')

cats strolling through parks,

cats sleeping in bookshops and

cats munching from pink dishes

...in the street - that's Istanbul!

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Istanbul!!

I love Istanbul airport - it's where I have done some of my best writing in one or more 6-hour waits between planes from Tajikistan and planes to Vilnius. Getting in there this morning, when it was empty, shooting through the visa and passport queues (what queues?), getting my Turkish Liras from an ATM and being picked up was a matter of minutes.

I love Istanbul. Got to my hotel, the Sari Konak, at about 7 am (room booked from today, normal check-in time 14.00) I had my room available immediately and breakfast thrown in. Wasn' that nice of them? It would probably have been more difficult during a more touristy time of the year. And it's a lovely hotel, recently done up, nice clean bright rooms, everything working in the bathroom (not everyone may appreciate that this is a bonus!) and just very relaxing. The walls seem to be a little thin, but most people are out most of the time.

It is situated in between the Blue Mosque and the Bosporus, which (old town?) though this and all the hotels around it look relatively newly built. Many of the other hotels are wooden buildings - one hopes the fire regulations are strictly enforced! Got in just before sunrise, with a pink sky to the East, and the ships on the Bosporus silently sailing by, all lit up. Very romantic!

Off I went this morning, swithering whether I should do Culture or Shopping. Persuaded myself to do shopping, on account that it is Friday and Mosque Day, but then noticed people (tourists) coming out of the Blue Mosque, so I went and had a look anyway. A very stunnning building, with a huge floorspace covered in a carpet (which did not seem to have joins...that would have been some size of loom!). Despite the carpet I could feel the cold creeping into my stockinged feet. The lighting of the Mosque was hanging very low - a basket ball player might have had trouble with it - I wondered if it was meant to add heat as well?

As I exited, the guard was in some hysterics - some Central Asian looking ladies (black leather jacket, headscarf tied in a Central Asian way) were just slipping back into their high boots on the spot where it was written in English not to put your shoes on. Ah well.

Later in the day the Friday prayers took place, and the pavements outside every Mosque were covered a prostration of men. Quite a number of businesses were shut as well for the duration of the prayers. I't strange that the bazaars are closed on a Sunday and not a Friday.

With some Istanbul men it would not hurt if they spent more time in prostration. I learnt after the first day to keep my eyes firmly on the ground and avoid eye contact if I did not want to be hassled by less desirable types, especially those, who were not attached to a shop. One guy took it really quite badly when I said I did not really want to speak to him - he became very offensive. (So much for the simple 'anti-rape' rule of 'just say no'. Research has shown that this is very difficult to do because we have been taught not to offend people, and 'just saying no' can do just that. So that is not really the answer).

In the morning I wandered round the Grand Bazaar for a while. It's rather embarassing when there are not so many other visitors, and all those salesMEN can focus on you. Did not find anything that I desperately needed, neither belly-dancing outfits, carpets, leather jackets, pottery (quite nice), cymbals, scarves (everyone around me has hundreds of scarves), lamps, jewelry etc. There was a pale beige carpet runner I quite fancied - until I remembered that the only place suitable for it is the place where I park my bike! That made life quite easy....

...but later on in the spice bazaar I literally 'paid' for it. This is a much smaller bazaar which sells spices, but also a limited range of goods similar to the Grand Bazaar, bar carpets and leather clothes. Many of the goods here are labelled with the price, which takes a lot of pressure off. You also then notice that the stalls immediately surrounding this bazaar sell some of the goods at half-price! Picked up some stuff there, including presents for people. Not sure how much they will be appreciated...bought a lot of Turkish Delights which the young guy chucked into a number of boxes, I expected him then to arrange them neatly - but his rather severe-looking mate just closed the boxes and then vacuumsealed them. So how squashed the contents are, goodness knows. I had also looked for the same olive oil soap that I had bought at the airport last time I was here...here I got it loose. He gave me the 'best-looking pieces' (which look as if they have been in a flood)...can I really give them to people? As for spices, I am now sorted for cooking in Georgia until the end of the year!

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