So, Easter break. I already talked about Switzerland a little bit two posts ago, and there's not a whole lot more to say. It's obviously a very well-run country - clean, good public transit, nice-looking houses with shutters, people who look orderly and well-dressed. I got a kick out of hearing the German there - when I tried to eavesdrop on people talking amongst themselves, I could pick out a few words here and there, but the rest sounded like a completely different language; Swiss dialects are pretty much incomprehensible to native German speakers as well. But even when the Swiss speak standard, "German" German, they have this great accent that involves a lot of heavily aspirated "ch" sounds and radically elongated vowels. German gets a bad rap as a harsh-sounding language, but in Swiss mouths it sounds kind of homey and quaint. But, like I said, hideously expensive, and also not that exciting.
Istanbul was a lot more interesting, as I discovered right away, when the driver of the shuttle I took from the airport to the hostel spent the journey dodging round other cars and occasionally yelling out the window at pedestrians who were unfortunate enough to get in his way. There are some big public sqares, particularly in front of mosques, but most of the rest of the city center, at least where I was, is made up of a tangle of narrow, winding streets full of little shops - I was lost, on one of many occasions, and found myself wandering down a street that seemed to consist solely of shoe stores. There's a massive part of the city, between the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Bazaar, that was always immensely crowded with people shopping, vendors shouting from their stalls, men carrying baskets or boxes of things to sell on their backs or heads, and other men from nearby cafes weaving through the crowd with trays of little glasses of tea to bring the people who were working. I spent a lot of time walking around and just peering into various shops and cafes.
I visited several mosques during the visit. They really are lovely buildings, with an enclosed courtyard out front with a fountain in the middle for people to wash themselves before praying. When you go into the pryer room itself, you have to take off your shoes, and the women have to cover their hair (I carried a scarf around in my purse for this purpose). Even the mosques that attracted a lot of tourists had a nice quietness to them, and I would sometimes just pop into the nearest one when the noise in the streets got to be too much. My favorite was the New Mosque, down between the Spice Bazaar and the Golden Horn, which was not only well-decorated and situated in a leafy square full of pidgeons, but was actually commissioned by a woman, a mother of one of the sultans. The call to prayer goes out five times a day (the first one woke me up at about 6:40 in the morning), and it always made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
On Friday, I took a boat trip along the Bosphorus. The ferry went for about 90 minutes in one direction, then let us off at a little seaside town for a two-hour lunch break. After a little bit of wandering along the seashore, I spent most of the two hours sitting on a bench next to another tourist, a guy from Japan. We were chatting a bit when a stray cat (there are a lot of them in Turkey, apparently) came up and flopped down on my lap for a doze. It was really a perfect scene: sun, sea, cat. When we got back on the boat and were pulling away to go back to Istanbul, I realized rather anticlimactically that the town had been on the eastern coast of the Bosphorus, and that I'd just been in Asia for the first time in my life.
On Sunday, my last full day there, I went to the Archaeological Museum (where they have the Alexander Sarcophagus and a nice exhibit dedicated to the finds at Troy) and then to a traditional Turkish bath, which was definitely one of the highlights of the trip. There are separate sections for men and woman. You take off your clothes in a little changing cubicle, and the attendant gives you a cloth to wrap around yourself and leads you to the bathing room itself, which in this case was a white marble room with a dome on top that had little windows to let in the sunshine. The center of the room was a few steps lower than the edges, and every few feet along the walls was a basin with running water. You could pay extra to have a large Turkish woman in a bathing suit scrub and pummel you, but I chose the self-service option, so I got a bar of soap and a shallow metal pan, with which I scooped water out of the basin and poured it over myself. The water flowed down the steps and into the gutter at the bottom, and all the hot running water filled the room with steam. I alternated intervals of washing with periods of just sitting in the steam. It was marvelous and relaxing. I spent a little over an hour there, then managed to drag myself out of my wet noodle state, grab a fluffy towel, go put my clothes on, and have a cup of tea in the outdoor cafe. If I lived in Istanbul, I think I would go there every week.
One of the things I appreciated most about the bath, I think, was the absence of men, who dominate the city otherwise. And I don't mean just culturally or politically - you just see a lot more men in public spaces, loitering or drinking tea. If I sat down on one of a series of benches in a little park, for example, I was probably the only woman. Most of the shopkeepers are men (I bought the bowls I mentioned not only because I liked them but because there was a woman selling them, and I was so happy to see her). And the men stared awfully, and would sometimes make comments or try to ask me where I was from or whatever. I felt as if I had a big neon sign above my head: Foreign Woman! Alone and Uncovered! Probably Easy! Why Not Give It A Try? Now, I'm not exactly Helen of Troy, so I'm not at all used to random attention from men, and probably get more rattled by it than most. My hostel was only a block away from Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, which was great in the sense that I was near the central sights of the city and had a terrific view, but bad in that heading back at the end of the day meant running a gauntlet of men trying to pick up foreign women or sell them things or just be obnoxious, just when I was tired from walking around all day and any indulgence I had for stupid male behavior had eroded. On my last night, as I was passing Hagia Sophia, a man saw me and called out, "Hello!" When I ignored him and kept walking, he followed me and said, "You not answer? Am I not allowed to say hello?" and variations on that for about half a block before he gave up. I wanted so much to turn around and tell him that he was allowed to say hello if I was allowed to tell him to go fuck himself. I didn't, of course, but I figured the fact that I was so close to swearing at someone meant that it was probably a good idea that I was leaving the city the next day.
In fairness, I should point out that my hostel was run by an older Turkish man, a sort of mother hen figure, and a group of twenty-something guys who were really nice and polite and gave the place a great atmosphere. The little common room was basically an extension of the reception, and the staff knew everyone's names and would ask people how their day had been and so on. And I met a lot of nice people there, including a few people who I went and had dinner and tea with Sunday night, which was a much nicer farewell to the city.
At any rate, after a day in transit back to Zurich, I spent a day in Strasbourg, which was a nice antidote in that it's such a charmingly European city - cathedral, cafes, a mix of French and German on the streets, a well-tended garden in a public space where I joined a crowd of people who were picnicing (although I'm pretty sure that there was a sign forbidding people to sit on the grass, but no one was paying attention). Then another night in Frankfurt, and then back to Berlin, where the weather is gorgeous and I'm pretty sure no one is looking forward to going back to school tomorrow.
"Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself. " - Desiderius Erasmus