A Few Snapshots

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I sat down to write today because today I managed to see a few very picturesque snapshots of life here in İstanbul today and I wanted to put them on paper before I forgot their beauty. So this is a compilation of normal life for several different types of people I run into walking around town every day:

On my way to Tarlabaşı today I saw a very familiar, although continuously perplexing sight. One one particular back corner just between the Harbiye and Pangaltı neighborhoods there sits a seeminly self-replenishing, lone, simit cart. Now simit is a unique type of pastry in Turkey - only bread baked in the shape of a ring and covered with sesame seeds. Normally they are sold from street carts in various standards of shabbiness to working Turks for breakfast or as a snack during a busy day. This particular simit cart which appears never to move from its corner is one of the worst looking carts around with no protective glass to keep the simit fresh and only a thin cloth between the simits and the wood of the cart. The cart is always angled so as not to roll down the steep hill it is perched on and as everyone passes it, they give it the same look that I do: one of of both pleasant familiarity and perplexity. What was odd was that for the first time today I saw a woman taking a simit from the cart. I walked slower to see if the owner would pop out from between the two buildings currently in various states of construction and ask for money, but no one came. I guess I will continue to walk by the cart without understanding where it came from, whose it is, and where the simit come from.

My next encounter was with a man literally popping out of a hole right in front of me. He pushed himself up with such great force that I jumped back in shock. As he was apologising to me I asked what on earth he was doing down there and he gave me a ten minute explanation of his work making sure the electricity normal while two new buildings were going up in the neighborhood. Although I only caught every third word because his accent was so thick, it was really interesting.

Wandering out of the backstreets onto the main, noisy, traffic ridden, main road, I had to weave my way through the literally hundreds of excited children and their overstressed mothers as the kids clambered onto their buses for school. Although it is a daily affair at around 11 o’clock, I always seem to forget and wind up struggling through them all - just barely managing to keep my balance as I dodge stray footballs, mothers’ shopping bags, and kids so small they get lost in the colorful, cheerful, madness.

Walking from Tarlabaşı to İHD I watched a woman hunched over carrying a bag the size of a school garbage bin on wheels behind her back. The iron framed bag was full of cardboard and other recyclables whıch had been scavenged throughout the morning. This is an extremely common sight here in İstanbul but there were two very strikingly unique things about this woman. The first was that I have never seen one of these carts come down İstiklal Cad. Usually they confine themselves to the back roads and stay in the neighborhoods instead of boldly travelling down the busiest shopping and pedestrian street in İstanbul. The second was the apparent age of the woman. She was perhaps only sixty or so, but she looked to be at least eighty-five, with her tanned wrinkled skin; gnarled fingers and knuckles; and her painfully humped back reminding me briefly of the humpback of Nortre Dame.

I am sure actual pictures of these scenes would be much more descriptive, but on this particular day I left my camera at home so I will just have to make do with a written reminder and my own memory.

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