Sunday 19 Mar 2006 fin

Start reading up from the 'artseyish writing' post - these do want to be in order

Heckling of naive tourists overloaded in Sultanahmet, sketching reminds me that tourists heckle too. The natives hear 'toilets where?' and other culturally and common-sensically ignorant questions good for a lagh and a grit of the teeth. Sketching makes you a bit of a native that way, you become part of the scenery, aware of being a part of the show, while you're merely trying to conduit visuals eye to paper, with hopefully a good bit of fact being burnind into your brain. I have not, however, been driven from a place sketching by a boy inching his way closer to me until i have to leave.

more repetitions throughout the day.... carpet boy returned as a fun chat in the bar that evening, and partner in a walk to the park yet again, catching the blue mosque reflected in the still pool as i had in the morning, both outside the normal time of tourist flocking and fountain energy, both beautiful. Moonlight as clear in evening as the rising sun had been on my rediculously early walk around the palace along the walk. I found out a little more about the tricks of the carpet trade hidden from me in my predatory amble with the two of them - the born-again question is valid because there are a large number of missionaries to Istambul, how distasteful, and the salesman often walk away with pamphlets.... and the hapless missionaries with carpets presumably. The older had thoroughly impressed me by pinning me as an engineer's daughter.... the younger told me he had just shook his head, about 30% of males in the US can pin their job as some sort of engineering... just good odds. Weird after-knowledge, weird experience.

cennet, the authentic place seen on the first day, returned to with a native turk, a worker in the hostel who decided he could talk to me once he decided tony and i weren't a couple. interesting conversation on turkish life and systems, and how a degreed guy came to be working in a hostel. more apple tea, of course, and same musicians parading.

A good day - full - and memorable. Talking to real people certainly adds a lot to the experience, pleasant or not.... enough so that i left out the museum i saw, and the food i ate, and any number of things.

Picture is from the wander on saturday

Vermin of many kinds referenced

I was a heckler today in this park. A carpet salesman, to be exact, apprenticed to a true smarmy cajoling master of the trade. He snared me, not to buy carpets, but to talk, with the bait of a boy from the hostel saying hi and his 'we're not trying to sell you anything' henceforth to always be recognized as a lie.
Disarmingly good english in teh salted-hair man, and the hostel boy looking as Vancouver as possible, just happens to be the owner of the hostel, just happens to think I could work well with him for the summer, and not unwillingly I start walking with them. (You're tired of the heckling? You're not doing much right now? Walk around wth us, no one will bother you...) The accent decent, the sentences that little choppy I associate wtih indian speakers. THis friendly man proved to me he could and did spot Americans a mile away by stopping a few girls - they remain just a short example in someone's story here, odd.
He stopped a group of tourists - Americans really do have horribly taste in jackets - with the alarming phrase 'Are you a born-again?" I would die of embarassment to ask, and possibly smack the speaker if asked, but the 50ish science-teacherish evidently didn't mind the approach - although he wasn't. Warm casual but directed conversation, brought around easily to "You should buy rugs while you're here... I could give you a few tips..." but an easy retreat at some percieved Real disinclination to buy. The ability to know when someone is seakening, when you have a chance to push your agenda through, would be a mixed blessing. All knowledge useful, the ability to manipulation others more consciously a bit alarming and distasteful. Crazy idealistic idea of merit speaking for itself....
Cats here are vermin. Enough caption and explanation, maybe more later. 

Interuption

Sketching, non-original and inaccurate a tool as it is, turned out pretty well today. Celebration of sunlight in its high contrasts and looseness, a happy sketch for a happy morning. Whether anyone would be able to guess - who knows. A sketch of a real location in real time, is an obscure place to project feelings - perhaps it shouldn't ever be the medium, but what way to differentiate otherwise?

Evening now, sun as obscured as it has been since noon, buyt a teasing blue sky laughs and promises an unappreciatedly clear night. Sunset a suprisingly lovely thing, clouds broken shards still refusing sunlight through, mayhaps i'll catch some before I retire. The park is much less hectic now, benches around the fountain still full, but the bottlenecks on every path relieved of loudly-clothed tourists, arteries open for the bands of Turkis males parading slowly, impeccably clad. One just sat down here, conversation impossibly, interesting though. Cute boy, maybe well meaning since he certainly can't sell me anything. His denim wardrobe is a welcome break from the black suits, less well dressed. He's still sitting here, I'm listening to his occasional attempts, but the only words we have in common are 'Turkish' 'English' and 'old'. Sun!

My sitting on this bench tonight precipitated by my wish for a view, my lack of hotel key, and hope that the sun may yet peak. Writing can be accomplished anywhere, perhaps my creation vibes from earlier will transfer to this record, incoherent though it be. At least, minus this shivering boy still sitting here, writing curled over has kept me from the hecklers, from males selling things. 

Turk-boys Gawking sketch

The entire exercize a repeat of someone's actions - the angle directly, the building one that has stood and withstood stares for 1500 years, the bench designed to take the imprints from mine and a thousand other weary or befuddled bottoms. Sketching something every architect or artist or hobbyist should do and does in foreign locales. The tourist supplement of a camera, the excuse for eyes, harshly described as a blanket statement that proving where you've been is more then what gets stuck in your mind from it, slipped out of my bag here and lost a little gidget-piece - nothing essential but annoying. Ironic that the efficient modern non-thought was of capturing breaks during that more ancient intensive means of recording. 

Artsyish writing, with pictures

Beautiful weird day, a little burnt out from the week. rather then boring list of things done, i'll tell it like I was trying to in my notebook... kind of stiff i guess, hopefully comprehensible...


Sitting on this bench for the second time today, in this park that i've visited every day here in Istanbul, this park that every western or Asian tourist spends time in, feels part of an inevitable rhythm. If it had not been me, some other sightseer needing rest without settling for a moment without a view would have sat down happily with their bones, maybe thinking these thoughts, maybe not.

This morning's visit was action-oriented - the perfect place to sketch the Hagia Sofia in the sunshine that finally chose to brighten our path after 5 days without. Our placement by no means original, a timid question and the shy sketching Frenchman moved his bag for another unoriginal sketcher. 

A long and lost wander

Caught the ferry from asia to what we hoped would be some art nuevo palaces.... didn't happen so much.... we thought we saw them (but it turns out we were wrong) and then we proceded to spend a good hour or two thinking we were... not where we actually were.

highlights.... huge overgrown wild park, fun in that it was not really maintained at all, just overgrown, apparently the place to make out for prim headscarved girls.... a real market, not touristy, and we were glad to get out alive, no heckling though... passing pianos... gorgeous dead housing blocks old-style.... gradually realizing we were WAY off in where we thought we were. ended up ok though, saw what we wanted to, stopped to sketch another mosque, stopped on the bridge again for a chill supper, a little disappointing in quality.... got in a call to shane and more reading before bed. a wierd day, not a bad one, but not too much to write about when i'm getting impatient to be done writing. 

A-Z-Ah

We crossed continents today! After boys we walked down to the shore and hopped a boat to asia.... wee! wasn't too much different then the european side (indistinguishable) another long walk through neighborhoods, but steeper..... ran into a park that made for fun walking for awhile, i learned the backpacking term "reststep" for when the hill is so steep your back leg can lock and 'rest'? as your front one steps forward.... used it quite a bit. we planned on getting to the top of the hill for a survey to find a particular mosque - but the top was built up, and no view to be found. so we walked down again. hills that disappear like ski slopes disturb me, it was even more disturbing to see an old bent-over lady start to gamely trudge up a hill we could hardly help but run down.... long walk along the shore and that was asia.... 

Turkish Boys!

I was sketching the Hagia Sofia from the south, with huge tour busses pulling up and discharging behind me very minimally in the back of my consciousness. tony walking up and asking 'has he been watching you the whole time?' was startling, some bus driver was indeed staring very intently at my drawing. had just a little left, and sketching must be fascinating to turks, because two other boys came up as i was finishing and started talking. i figured they would probably drift away and ignored them, letting tony interact, but they were persistant and very friendly and we ended up talking to them for a long time. They were overly anxious to be hospitable and talk up their country, it was a little strange - we definatly wouldn't do that for our country. Maybe our immediate area though. They were generous with their chips (dorito-ish) and cookies! whoa best food discovery of the trip was their little bags of cookies.... they were both ahmets, an english teacher and a math major... the english teacher was rather more confident, although not necessarily better in his english. boys, 18, weird to be running into younger people in travels. drank the traditional apple tea in the traditional tea-cups/saucers.... fun and practical combination. they dearly wanted a picture, so here is perhaps the only posed picture you get.... rather a bad one, shrug. wall in the back is of the hagia sofia's gardens. 

SUN! Sat 18 Mar 05

exciting to wake up and see the sun out our (huge) window. morning prep a good deal faster then normal, we grabbed our sketchbooks and headed for the blue mosque to sketch. sitting on the odd field of benches outside the mosque bench, i decided to finally get that shoe polish i'd been bugged so many times for and badly needed after so many days of wandering through questionable paving/not materials (the wet concrete really did need to get taken off my poor leather shoes). so i got to sit and be sketching while some heckler guy polished my shoes.... quite the queen. haggled him down to 1/5 his outrageous original price suggestion, mostly by honestly not having any more money then that in my pockets.... sigh. can't decide if haggling is more stressful then fun - it's both those things, strongly. well, if you haggle decently it's fun. sketch/painting turned out pretty well, a little lopsided. sun kind of disappeared as i was inking it, made it a lot less exciting. 

sunset and castle

last bastion of the wall - odd to use bastion when refering to a litteral one....

had supper about 3/4 into our long walk at a restaurant by the fish market the cabbie had pointed out to us the first night. very good, swordfish much more edible in whole form then sea bream apparently. we were quite wiped out, lots of staring. we wandered a little bit back to the mosques and the hostel, and i took the evening to read my book "Turkish Reflections" I had purchased after the archeological museum the other morning. It was a very good book, I identified strongly with the writing style, lots of little trivia that stuck in my head as well. So much more applicable when you're right there..... so ended the night. 

GOAT STORY!

haha... this is the famed incident of the goat.

yes. i know it's a sheep.

but.... upon eating a fairly sketchy kabab one of the first days here we proclaimed that it was probably goat. therefore; my new coat is goat-skin, there were goat-heads in the butcher windows all over (gross!), and this is a goat.

k that's all. :)

isn't it a cute goat though? 

Gardening at night....

Pretty sure this lady required the use of this field to sustain herself - pretty cool. these neighborhoods were not very well off, at all. many people were gathering sticks in a parking lot and loading them up - more then the normal amount of wrecked buildings, and even some built-up shanties.... invulnerable us. goat story will go with the picture. We approached the end of the wall and saw a gas-balloon structure tony had wanted to see earlier, strolled carelessly into the compound (the fence was pulled down, probably by a car crash... if you can just step over barbed wire, is it really there) and past the guard dogs that started barking but not standing up.... and carelessly started walking out as soon as a police came into view.... hehe. LONG walk back to sultanhamet, almost gave up and grabbed a taxi, but it was along the river/sea so it was nice. 

Old City Walls

Quite a walk out to the walls, horrifying butcher street (goats, everywhere!) must they display skinned heads? worse then the racists.... a rather imprompteou path along the wall traced after that - it apparently isn't thought of as too much of a destination here, there was a little bit of a park with trails, for a bit... then just mud tracks.... we had to switch sides fairly often to have walking surface. One brief diversion for apple tea after awhile, but we ran out as soon as the late-afternoon sun showed itself, cutting the savoring short (apple tea is excellent, and kept getting better. was served everywhere, drank at least 3 cups of it a day there, the heat of it was very appreciated).

wall got a lot more fun when we started to be able to walk up on top of it in the sun. Many short sections, and overgrown places, and ancient rooms, and broken bottles, and unhealthily steep stairs (less fun then those in amsterdam), and cool overlooks into emptier places then we found otherwise in the city. The wall wasn't singular in many parts, there was a couple sets of walls spanning over 50 feet, and within the walls were urban gardens. It looked like people got some serious usage out of the land, very cool to see. Full on agriculture, see the horse? 

Fatih does not equal faith, beth does equal dyslexic

I actually don't remember where this picture was from - it's very hard to communicate the inside of mosques without a super-wide angle camera (that i don't have). the way the domes connect and fall down is quite unique, and the huge chandeliers making a plane about 8 feet high is an interesting difference to christian churches. I had to decide on this picture showing the elaborate decoration of the dome rather then one that despairingly tried to show more... shrug. looking at a collection of pictures together gives a little bit better of a picture....

fatih mosque, sehzade mosque also this day, i believe this is the sehzade but i won't promise and i don't really remember the difference. repression when i was asked to cover my hair in one... was good obviously about taking off my shoes, but man.... definate repression. a rather foolish-looking arrangement of my scarf (tony was giggling anyway) was enough to let me get a few more pictures and we scurried out. 

Mosque walk

we were to make the blue mosque the second stop, but it was closed for an hour for prayer. we headed back to the mainstreet cafe, then started out on a journey to the city walls without going back. was a long long walk. through the prayer-bead wholesale market to the mosque (beyazit camii) by the university... hit the aquaduct, initially just a fabulously historical backing for houses, we picked it up again in a more dramatically high location with several lanes of traffic running through it. less thrilling then it could have been, just really old and quite intact. 

ooOOOooooo wavy....

the large disks of calligraphy show themselves to be dissapointingly flimsy, but delightfully tacked-on. odd to think this was almost incidentally a church when islam took it over... they didn't care that it had been christian, it may of well had been a stadium (not literally, but the feeling was there). more early mosaics, amazingly expressive while remaining obviously tiles of colored glass (unlike the popehaus in rome). some partially restored, others still preserved under plaster. 

Hagia Sofia Funhouse

some beautiful work - fun false capitols (basket capitols) that looked unusually detailed carving, even more impressive up close and you realize the carvings are freestanding, not attatched to the stone at all. useless, but beautiful. somehow the ages have melted down the church a bit though,and walking around the second floor arcades the arches wave dangerously close to eachother... the painting just emphasizes it... unless it was downplayed and it was even worse. wierd detail of a vault underneathe the dome - double dome? but with more original paintings... they seemed so loosely put down, they didn't care that the lines weren't straight. maybe because they're weavers not quilters? 

hagia sofia finally! fri 17 mar 06

friday was a walking day.... and walk and walk and walking day. slow morning start again, nice. same breakfast. interesting to see the same people at breakfast all the time, and never be able to talk to them, although they are cute boys and respond charmingly to smiles, inducing more all around.... see, happy cycle. our first stop was the hagia sofia finally, we gave up waiting for the sun. was impressive, beautiful mosaics just in the east entrance, then the main space huge. and quite destroyed by scaffolding unfortunately, at least as a flow of space, very unfortunate. we got to see the pantheon without scaffolding, guess this was our commupence... but the pantheon was restored to un-original austerity, and this was being put back to brilliant mosaics... not quite fair. hard to comprehend huge indoor spaces sometimes, stadiums are so large they're scaleless, and this was approaching that. so startling to see a large class of children pass and not fully inhabit the side aisle. so much color! and quite different schemes then the rest of the mosques, yellow with bright detailing. it wasn't properly a mosque, a museum with no exhibits and harsh entrance fee instead... you can do that with famous buildings. (sketch from sunday) 

Coat!

just getting this up there....