Istanbul .. Day 2

Sunny warm morning. Taxi couldn’t find our apartment in a gritty neighborhood, the shock of which will only slowly wear off. Even the few once-grand facades here are peeling and crumbling. 

But the street directly under our windows is too small for traffic, so it’s blissfully quiet except when kids come home from school and play soccer down below. We're also lucky that it's flat between here and the center, though Istanbul, like Rome, is built on seven hills. We're at the broad top of one. To get up here from the Bosporus or Golden Horn, the city in 1875 built two short underground funicular railways, the second subways in the world.

Here, chubby women with scarves gossip in groups and old men smoke on doorsteps. We've seen street vendors pushing carts of onions and potatoes and yelling to old ladies who lean out of their windows and lower a basket to haul up their purchases. 

In walking the two blocks out of the neighborhood we pass a bakery, two barber shops, a tiny kebap cafe with only two tables, a meat market half the size of our bedroom, a spice/nut shop and three corner groceries where we buy water, cereal, milk, bread, fruit and veggies. No coffee shops. Nobody speaks English. Then we come to a four-star hotel and cross a major street into the center of town, another world. 

The apartment itself is spotless and newly (though cheaply) renovated. Cleaning ladies appear every day and leave big clean towels. The bed is good and we sleep well. Three modern windows in the bedroom face a sunny rear courtyard with trees, three others overlook the street. All appliances are new, including a half-size dishwasher and a clothes washer. There’s plenty of hot water in the shower (and all over the bathroom floor) and heat when we need it, but the internet is balky. Only a dozen of the zillion TV channels speak English, and half of them are sweaty Gospel preachers, Americans and Africans. Turkish TV ranges from call to prayer to call girls. Lots of Imams. The best news in English is from BBC, Al Jazeera, France, China and Japan. No CNN. The Arabic news "crawls" scroll from left to right. German TV is also in English, offering not news but informative cultural programs that we should see in US. Wonder what the Turks are watching?