Farewell cats; bye-bye Istanbul
Leaving books and magazines by the Bosporus
Tourists in Istanbul who happen to be photographers spend hours trying to get cats to look at them.
No problem with dogs, but who gives a shit about dogs? Especially these ones. The few we saw all looked bummed out and tired. Most were overweight and showed absolutely no interest in doing what dogs are supposed to do, which is chase cats.
Mexico City by the way, where we’re now hunting for magazines, is no cat town. It’s a little-dog town. No cats on motorcycles
or cars,
just dogs
in prams
But back to Constantinople: there was a load of great eye candy
to consume here at street level, and much striking imagery on display
including graffiti.
And not just on the walls
Posters (including, surprisingly, a lot of these ones promoting a novel by one Adam Fawer, called Mobius):
were
everywhere.
***
We bought four 20kg suitcases worth of magazines while we were here.
I had to add to the flight baggage limit, so I visited this travel agency for help. Spoke with a super-nice young man named Yassin. He was 25 years old and Syrian. Apropos of nothing I started to whine about what a pain in the ass it is to try to move from one country, to live in another. He told me that his uncle - who along with his wife and three of their children - had settled in Calgary (the other two had families of their own, and so weren’t allowed in so easily). His father, he continued, was living in the Netherlands. He, Yassin, was currently waiting to obtain a visa so that he could join him.
What’s wrong with Turkey I asked. Things seem to be thriving.
Apparently not. Steep inflation. Poor pay. The prospects aren’t that great here, he told me. But this wasn’t the main reason for him wanting to leave. It was racism. One or two incidents every month might be tolerable, but ten? Yassin doesn’t want any future children of his to have to deal with this kind of shit on a regular basis.
***
Days before leaving town, I also met this smart (she put my age at 52) Iranian woman at a beauty salon. Facial and pedicure: CDN $ 75, a pretty good deal. Prescription sunglasses?
even better. Next time I’m going for teeth whitening, and maybe a new set of lips.
She said she was glad that Trump got in because he hates the Ayatollah. Hopes that there’s a war because this is the only way things will change in her country. She’d go back home, she said, to fight against the Islamist regime, happy to die if it meant getting rid of these awful women-haters.
***
When I first saw this sign I puzzled over how on earth they could’ve fit that gaping big pool underneath such a slender building.
Then I started to see exactly the same sign in front of many similar, way too narrow spa establishments, all over the city…
***
Say what you will about social media (and I will: my aptitude for long-form reading has been shot to rat-shit thanks to it), it can sometimes facilitate truly lovely real-life encounters. I happened to notice, thanks to his Instagram feed, that Jonathan Hill and his wife Megumi were in Istanbul. We (my partner Linda and the aforementioned) got together for lunch (refreshing tabouli salad: heavy on the parsley, light on the couscous) at the Peninsula Hotel, right on the Bosporus.
Here’s one reason why Jonathan is in better shape than I am:
I interviewed Jonathan several years ago about bookseller catalogues, something he specializes in selling. Listen here. Jonathan has been wonderfully helpful over the years, putting me in touch with many renowned book experts I’ve been keen to interview. Thank you Jonathan!
***
And finally, if you’re a book-lover visiting Istanbul, my advice is to start out by Googling “Sahaf” (Turkish for used bookseller) together with “Istanbul,” then to look for the bookstore passages: two in particular - one in Europe just off the main shopping drag, the other in Asia) - and then to
go to town. Not just once, but multiple times, because, like all good booksellers, the vendors here top up their stocks every day.
