Death Cab for Turkey

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I just came back from a brief business trip to Istanbul, Turkey. And, brother, you can keep your roller coasters and any other adrenaline rides since they just don’t compare to a trip around Istanbul in a Turkish taxi. A ride in an Istanbul death cab is far more exciting, because death or maiming is only an arm’s length away…

How can I describe it? Your rectum puckers up every 30 seconds because your just about to die; your short of breath because the only thing between you and the groaning wheel of that 30 year-old bus a foot away from you is a dinky aluminum door made in South Korea. You only pray that your driver looks up long enough from texting his girlfriend (or boyfriend?) to apply the brakes. In accordance with the fundamental principles of physics, Istanbul drivers fill up any and every available space on the road, and get as close together as possible. Hence, two-lane roads become three; three-lane roads become four, and four-lane mergers become seven, like so:

Views from the terrace of the Mövenpick Hotel. In right hand photo, note how drivers are jumping the median to somehow “get ahead”

When the traffic light turns green, Turkish drivers are leaning on the horn in 0.5 seconds (a respectable 0.25 seconds faster than New Jersey drivers). When competing for a gap, Turkish death cabbies only occasionally look (and even signal) when changing lanes. The loser won’t blink and hit the brakes until the very last instant, even touching the gas just to see if the cabby is serious. More than once I sat in the back of a taxi, contemplating my mortality as I stared at the scarred fender of a fume-belching semi a foot away from my window…

I don’t know how many auto fatalities there are in Istanbul, but I saw two accidents in three days. I saw a taxi wedged in between a flatbed and a passenger car after the flatbed hit the brakes and the taxi driver didn’t. Maybe he was texting his girlfriend (too bad, because his engine was crushed under the flatbed). The other accident was self-inflicted – some schmuck blew his tire trying to parallel park on a very narrow two way street. The lanes were divided by a low concrete barrier that he forgot about. There was a tremendous BANG! And when everyone realized what happened, they all started calling out what I presumed was the Turkish equivalent of “Asssss-hole. Asssss-hole…” Sucks to be him, because the street (in a neighborhood called Bebek) is on the waterfront, lined with cafés and restaurants. You just know he was desperate to look cool.

I managed to see Topkapi the morning before heading to the airport. Pretty amazing.

Above: “Bab-üs Selam” the Gate of Salutation at Topkapi, the “Abode of Bliss”

After three hours, I still only saw probably half of it.

above: matchlock fortress guns in the sultan’s armory. These weapons spanned three centuries and were mostly flintlocks and the above large bore matchlocks although there was one intricately engraved bolt-action rifle.

It’s hard to imagine that generations upon generations of sultans lived, caroused, indulged, and died here. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be surrounded by the smells and sounds of a council in the Hall of the Divan, or during the ceremonial payment of the Janissaries. Well, this proved impossible to envisage, since the grounds were flooded with hordes of Japanese and Spanish tourists. Oh well, as loud as they were, at least they were too sawed-off to obstruct my view of anything.

I tried to visit Hagia Sophia as well, but the line was too long (Spaniards and Japanese again, plus Germans and Americans from cruise ships). I did take one snap of the outside though (yeah, I’m loving my new camera / phone).

All in all, a great place, and I would go back to see everything I missed. Oh, I also ate my weight in kebab. It should come as no surprise that there are about 15 kinds of kebab, including the skewered shish kebab we all know, döner (of course), and then things like adana kebab. I ate them all in one sitting to the shock and mortification of my genteel colleagues. (The Turks loved me though. And apart from a nasty pickled turnip juice they made me drink, I loved them too.)

Also interesting to note that Istanbul is full of women. HOT women. Hot women with long hair, sunglasses, and wearing belly shirts, tight denim, and do-me boots. (Sorry, no photos.) A lot of them apparently natural blondes, too. It’s strange, since in Germany and certainly Amsterdam, you see a lot of “Turkish” Turks – head covering, long coats covering huge fat stores for the Winter, big bushy moustaches (men and women), conservative religious views, plans to blow up Ramstein AFB , etc. – yet in Istanbul, they try so damned hard to be Western. Go figure. Of course, when you leave the (secular, rational, educated, economically and culturally buzzing) big cities in Turkey, you apparently only see the same conservative, religious, tradition-bound, rural types (kind of like George W. Bush’s America). I guess they’re the ones you see in Europe, since there’s little work in the mountains of Anatolia.

This brings me back to my original dilemma of these hot chicks in Istanbul – the same dilemma I experienced on my many adventures in Eastern Europe. These gorgeous gals are walking on the same streets as these 250 lb, waddling Turkish gorgons in head coverings. Are the gorgons now gorgons because life in the mountains was so hard for them, or are the Turkish babes – by some cruel twist of fate – genetically pre-disposed to one day have the shite beaten out of them by the ugly stick? If you married a gorgeous Turkish woman, will you some day suddenly wake up next to a bearded gorgon in a babushka? Oh well, guess I’ll never know …

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