Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
One of the sustaining pleasures for Katz in the later stages of the trip was talking candidly in this way to
people who could not understand him, making smiling enquiries of a policeman concerning the celebrated
tininess of his penis or telling a surly waiter, 'Can we have the bill, Boris? We've got to run because your
wife's promised to give us both blow jobs.'
But in this instance it turned out that the waiter had worked in a little place off the Tottenham Court
Road for thirteen years and he understood Katz's question only too well. He directed us to the door with the
aid of a meat cleaver, making wholly justified remarks about the nobility of Turkish cuisine and the insolence
of young tourists.
With this final pleasure denied him on the grounds of prudence and a sincere threat from me that I
would kill him myself if an English-speaking Turk didn't do it first, Katz spent the remainder of our time in
Istanbul in a moody silence, except for growling at touts in the Grand Bazaar to fuck off and leave him alone,
but this I excused on the basis of justified provocation. We had reached the end of the road in every sense.
It was a long week.
I wondered now, as I rode a taxi in from the airport through the hot, airless, teeming streets of Istanbul,
whether my attitude would be more receptive this time.
Things did not start well. I had made a reservation at the Sheraton through the company's internal
reservation system in Sofia, but the hotel turned out to be miles away from the Golden Horn and old town.
The room was clean and passably swank, but the television didn't work, and when I went to the bathroom to
wash my hands and face, the pipes juddered and banged like something from a poltergeist movie and then,
with a series of gasps, issued a steady brown soup. I let the water run for ten minutes, but it never cleared or
even thinned. For this I was paying $150 a night.
I sat on the toilet, watching the water run, thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange
land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a
largely futile effort to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first
place.
Sighing, I smeared a little of the brown water around my face, then went out to see Istanbul. It is the
noisiest, dirtiest, busiest city I've ever seen. Everywhere there is noise - car horns tooting, sirens shrilling,
people shouting, muezzins wailing, ferries on the Bosphorus sounding their booming horns. Everywhere,
too, there is ceaseless activity - people pushing carts, carrying trays of food or coffee, humping huge and
ungainly loads (I saw one guy with a sofa on his back), people every five feet selling something: lottery
tickets, wristwatches, cigarettes, replica perfumes.
Every few paces people come up to you wanting to shine your shoes, sell you postcards or
guidebooks, lead you to their brother's carpet shop or otherwise induce you to part with some trifling sum of
money. Along the Galata Bridge, swarming with pedestrians, beggars and load bearers, amateur fishermen
stood pulling the most poisoned-looking fish I ever hope to see from the oily waters below. At the end of the
bridge two guys were crossing the street to Sirkeci Station, threading their way through the traffic leading
brown bears on leashes. No one gave them a second glance. Istanbul is, in short, one of those great and
exhilarating cities where almost anything seems possible.
The one truly unbearable thing in the city is the Turkish pop music. It is inescapable. It assaults you from
every restaurant doorway, from every lemonade stand, from every passing cab. If you can imagine a man
having a vasectomy without anaesthetic to a background accompaniment of frantic sitar-playing, you will
have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
I wandered around for a couple of hours, impressed by the tumult, amazed that in one place there could
be so much activity. I walked past the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia, peeling postcard salesmen from my
sleeve as I went, and tried to go to Topkapi, but it was closed. I headed instead for what I thought was the
national archaeological museum, but I somehow missed it and found myself presently at the entrance to a
large, inviting and miraculously tranquil park, the Glhane. It was full of cool shade and happy families. There
was a free zoo, evidently much loved by children, and somewhere a caf￩ playing Turkish torture music, but
softly enough to be tolerable.
At the bottom of a gently sloping central avenue, the park ended in a sudden and stunning view of the
Bosphorus, glittery and blue. I took a seat at an open-air taverna, ordered a Coke and gazed across the
