Kadikoy Market (Cathy goes to Asia!) -- Istanbul, Turkey

Cathy joined me for breakfast bright and early. I put my laptop away and listened to her dreams about her daughter slacklining between telephone poles, her husband shaving off half his mustache because he lost a bet, and herself having to apologize for a snide remark she made when she was 13. 

I’m going to miss breakfasts with Cathy.

After she'd caught me up on her amusing and mildly disturbing dreams, I caught her up on the day's plans.  

“So, if we leave in half an hour, we can make it to Eminonu by nine o’clock. Then we ride the ferry from Eminonu to Kadikoy and hop on bus 8A for the Tuesday market. This site says it’s a lot of fun and the Asia side of Istanbul is cheaper than the Europe side.  Ummm... 4000 booths, so you’ll have a lot of options. Yes...” I opened my laptop again and took a picture of directions I’d found on a travel forum. I was a little nervous about the day’s excursion because I’d never been to Kadikoy and wasn’t sure how to get from the bus stop to the market. 

I’ve been in Istanbul for two months now. I can do this. I’m comfortable enough with the public transportation system to make it work. 

“This will be your first time in Asia,” I told my friend as we boarded the large, comfortable ferry for Kadikoy. “Extra bragging rights.”

We struggled a bit to communicate with the bus driver about our stop (no one seemed to understand what I meant by “market”, and I was anxiously beginning to think I’d invented the whole thing). However, we finally managed to make our way to the massive, tarp covered space filled with people selling kitchenware, produce, spices, clothes and bedding. As it was still early (and Turkish people are allergic to mornings), we had the market mostly to ourselves and it felt wonderful to browse about without feeling pressed on all sides by other bickering shoppers.

Cathy purchased some Turkish olives, Russian olives, spices, strawberries, cat leggings, a Turkish coffee pot, hazelnuts and some particularly fine looking tomatoes. We traded off hauling the bags about and I enjoyed exploring the zoom of my new lens.

Burdened with bags of goodies, we trudged down the street until we found a bus bound for Kadikoy. I introduced Cathy to iskender kebap and drank the most delicious ayran I’ve had thus far.

In Morocco, they have bowls of cumin and salt. In Turkey, they have bowls of chili and thyme/oregano.

“It’s so creamy... fluffy...salty... oof, this is sublime. Okay, so my goals for this October are to learn to make fluffy ayran, to ferment my own boza and to cook perfect Turkish rice.”

We spent the next half hour walking through Kadikoy’s version of Istiklal Street, and Cathy bought some hazelnut butter and red pepper paste to take home to her family. I looked at the jar of paste warily, wondering whether or not it would fit in her large, but not limitless suitcases.

It’ll probably be fine. You’re just too sensitive to this sort of thing. Because your life has to weigh less than 25 kilos.

Logs stuffed with honeycomb.

French meringues seem very out of place in Istanbul.

We caught the ferry back to Eminonu, dropped the day’s spoils off at the hotel (probably drank a cocktail), and settled into our respective corners to write. Then we took the tram to Tophane station and spent an hour and a half exploring the Museum of Modern Art. There were a few pieces I enjoyed, but we agreed that the majority of the art took itself a tad too seriously for our taste.

“This whole super-serious thing seems to be part of Turkish culture. You should watch the television here. The only time people laugh is when they’ve finished crying and are laughing out of relief. Because his father changed his mind/she’s a virgin so they can get married after all.”

We were kicked out of the museum at closing time (but our brains were full, anyway), and I took us on a trek up tall hills and through narrow alleys to Istiklal street. For hamsi in the fish bazaar and to experience to vibe of the night crowd.

Hamsi was delectable (night crowd was less so). Crunchy, drizzled with lemon and wrapped in rocket, I wish they came in bags so I could eat them like potato chips. The only drawback was that delectable hamsi tends to linger, and the longer it lingers, the fouler it becomes.

Hamsi burps two hours later are decidedly not delectable.   

Epic saga of cold. We went back to the hotel. Because it was simply too cold to do anything else.