MikePadgett.com

Istanbul

— A crazy city of 13m people where East meets West, Istanbul has always been a vast, confusing metropolis. Some things never change!”

I’m only here for one day before flying out to Nevşehir, so the airline neatly adds my bag to the infinite loop limbo of transit luggage. Right now, I haven’t yet learned this little fact of Turkish logic.

Folks who clearly packed the kitchen sink slide away smugly with all their bags until the arrivals hall is temporarily empty. I’m all alone with a silent carousel and a Baghdad flight unloading here soon.

When my bags have disappeared in the past, it has always taken a while to get them back. Here in Istanbul, I don’t have a while. So I talk to a sullen face. The sullen face directs me to another sullen face. I whisper the right words at Turkish Airlines’ very own Sublime Porte and twenty minutes later my bag miraculously appears. I’m pretty ecstatic, but I don’t show it out of respect for a more unfortunate Canadian mother and daughter duo. The last drop of their luck seems to have run out.

I take the metro which inexplicably ends at the outskirts of the city. I transfer to the Kabataş line and wait on a tram. One appears in the opposite direction and a larger-than-life American asks me which way to go. He’s from Orange County, California. He has that special manner that all older Americans have, the one that renders international borders and languages absolutely irrelevant.

A tram comes by and it’s packed. We let it pass but he predicts the next one will be the same and he’s right. So we pile in. By now I know he’s retired, he’s on a cruise and his wife has skipped coming ashore here. His thick arms as red as traffic cones, he explains that he makes things out of used plastic bottles and he likes to travel around handing them out. We get separated for a time and he somehow finds a Turk who once visited Chicago. Before we part at Sultanahmet he gives me the sawn-off neck of a green soda bottle and suggests I wear it as a sort of chunky ring. And I do, for the whole trip.

I get lost trying to find my little hotel in this old district of hot, narrow streets and crumbling houses. I thread through the pickup trucks and the stationary taxis and the defeated-looking men. When I find the place, there are kids playing with a ball in the dust and yellowish clothes drying on a forgotten washing line. But my little hotel is immaculate, with an incongruously new painted sign.

The sun’s just beginning to set by the time I’m done visiting Hagia Sophia. It took two trips to finally see it: I got halfway down the enormous queue at the entrance the first time before realising I’d brought no cash for the ticket. The second time, there was no queue at all and I strolled right in.

Down by the former site of the Hippodrome, the ezan is called from the Sultanahmet (Blue) Mosque (1616) and a reclining dog howls along at a similar pitch. The long square is now almost devoid of hawkers and the battered gardens between Hagia Sophia and the Sultanahmet are slightly cooler.

The courtyard at Sultanahmet is all geometry with its central fountain for ablutions (Şadırvan) and its view on the main prayer hall. This is a very active mosque, but non-muslims can still enter shoeless on the far right side, so that’s what I do. Inside the carpeting muffles footfalls and voices alike. The walls and ceiling are covered in the famous, beautiful İznik tiles for which this mosque is famous and from which it earns the “blue” epithet.

It gets dark rapidly in the streets below. Picking their way between solitary white lights, everyone is anonymous. Groups of women come out onto their front steps to chat. Cats sneak about in the shadows, reclaiming their territories from the omnipotent sun.

Night shops, cafés and the sweet smell of nargile. That ubiquitous chugging Turkish music, now electrified and over-produced and delivered by truculent, unshaven men and girls in absurdly thick make-up.

Too early but without undue difficulty, I get up the next morning, ahead of the next stage of my little Turkish journey.

Outside I hear already the plaintive, old vinyl calls of the muezzin and I wonder how people around here sleep. Not so much because of the hours of the ezan but rather the endless, tortured grind of vehicles in the steep, narrow streets. Who knows where they’re all going?

While I stand in the foyer, one such elaborate ballet of forward and reverse plays out before me. Crunching gears and headlights filling every window of every house. My driver has that haphazard disregard for his vehicle that can only come from time-worn experience. His paintwork is surprisingly pristine however. Soon we reach the wider boulevards beside the Bosphorus. Yellowish dots twinkle from the Asian side whilst over here it’s all kitchen showrooms and discount brand stores.

In the domestic terminal, I’ve no idea which desk to use for my check-in. I waste time I don’t really have coming to the conclusion that any desk will do. Turkish logic is much too simple for an Englishman used to numbered queues.