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To commemorate the Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves magazine — now on sale online, and at newsstands nationwide — Rick is blogging about the 20 top destinations featured in that issue. One of those destinations is Istanbul.
I first visited Istanbul in the 1970s. Some of my earliest — and most vivid — memories of that trip are of the colorful locals. Scruffy kids sold cherry juice, and old men would grab huge cucumbers from wheeled carts, then peel, quarter, and salt them, and sell them for pennies. Traffic jams seemed to last all day…and drivers seemed to accept them as an excuse not to work.
Holding piping-hot hourglass-shaped glasses of tea tenderly by the cooler rim, I’d sip while Turks told me the wisdom of hot drinks on hot days: It heats up your body in order to make the heat of the day relatively cooler and more bearable. Sipping tea, we’d play backgammon with boards chattering all around with careening little dice — their handmade dots never not lining up.
Tourists would gather awestruck by a sound-and-light show, as the thunderous voice of the sultan, Suleyman the Magnificent, spun yarns of palace intrigue with the floodlit domes of the Blue Mosque towering overhead. (While a few tourist attractions around Europe still cling to the old sound-and-light technology, these days many of those shows seem almost comically antiquated.)
To intensify the Istanbul experience, I’d ride a dolmus (shared minibus taxi) into the suburbs, and wander through neighborhoods that had never encountered an American — places where locals would stare at me as if I couldn’t see them…as if I were an inanimate object. They just studied me like an intricate Brueghel painting. Being stared at like you’re a freak, sometimes you just decide to play the role. I’ll never forget the fun my friend and I had grabbing a football-shaped honeydew mellow, hiking it, and melodramatically going out for a pass and making the catch. Children would practice their English with me. They’d ask, “What is your name?” To confuse them I would say, “Four o’clock.”
I’d hang out in the venerable Pudding Shop, watching the older-than-me hippies gather and plan their across-Asia bus trips to India. Eating my sutlac — rice pudding with cinnamon — I’d dream about someday making that adventure. (Eventually I did.)
I visited Turkey every year through my twenties. It was the unplanned but natural cherry on top of every European adventure. Each year, the political tenor was different, depending upon who was in power there, who was president back home, and the latest propaganda. Politically naive pawns of the Cold War, the Turk on the street would flip-flop — one year, they’d say, “America: imperialist fascist.” The next year, they’d say, “America and Turkey friends” (with index fingers rubbing together in a way that seemed like some kind of sexual sign language).
While the 1970s magic in many places has been plowed under by modern affluence, exploring Istanbul in 2010 is every bit as rich an experience.
