Istanbul .. Day 6

Istanbul is an overwhelming city of 15 million, some 40% of whom live across the Bosporus in Asia. Previously we’ve stayed in the touristic Byzantine/Ottoman Old Town across the Golden Horn (Blue Mosque, Grand Bazaar, Hagia Sophia) but here we are now at the ragged edge of the New Town. Here's a satellite view:

The new quarter centers on the mile-long Art Nouveau main pedestrian street (“Independence Street”) which is said to see three million people a day, 90% locals (and 90% mean-looking dark-haired men). It’s so wall-to-wall crowded, overwhelmingly with men, there’s no room for sidewalk cafes. (They must be against the law because we don't see them anywhere, and most streets are way too narrow anyway.) Some of its French-influenced facades are lovely, however. Behind them are consulates, designer clothing shops, cinemas, bookstores, banks, night clubs and dozens of restaurants good and bad (including multiple McDonalds, Burger Kings and Starbucks). There’s even a glitzy seven-story indoor shopping mall like Water Tower Place in Chicago. Scores of young men wearing the orange and red of the local soccer team rudely parade arm-in-arm down the street, singing lustily. Others, male and female and perhaps university students, with loudspeakers and guitars hand out leaflets and protest some political injustice. 

Since its founding 90 years ago, modern Turkey has been a thoroughly secular state. So most people dress like Westerners, at least on the big pedestrian street. However some women, young and old, cover their hair with lovely headscarves which frame their beautiful faces. A few add long colorful coats. In a group of women, some dress Western and some dress Muslim and everyone seems fine with that. Occasionally a woman wears a black coat or even a long black robe, some of them exquisitely styled. Very rarely we see a woman in a full burka covering all but her eyes. Unless she's alone, she's probably trailing after an imperious-looking husband. It's such a decidedly male-dominated society as to make Elsa uncomfortable. What are those women all thinking? This painting in the Pera Museum seems to ask the same question, suggesting that these properly clad Islamic women (with their beautiful eyes) nonetheless enjoy ice cream and perhaps Western ideas as well:

A historic old streetcar officially named the “nostalgic tram” (decorated last weekend and pulling a festive brass band) quietly takes us to one end of the pedestrian street or the other where we connect to the rest of the transit system -- to the Metro or through two funiculars down to modern streetcars -- and hence to the city. But again we wonder what the people who live in our old-world neighborhood with all its headscarves, who can watch endless raunchy Western (and Turkish) television, think of all that godless modernity a few minutes away? Already we are aware of the very small world we “up-north Minnesotans” live in.