The Second Day

	This is the restaurant on top of my hotel, and seagull was at the window for every breakfast.
	If you need to examine a seagull closely, this is the place to do it.
	A wonderful view of the Bosporus -- the channel separating Europe from Asia.
	By the end of my stay, this was a record-breaking snowfall for Istanbul. It snowed every day I was there.

Tuesday morning I was up early and into the Blue Mosque area for daylight pictures. I ran into the rug seller hustler again, and he helped show me the Blue Mosque. When I had finished with that, he invited me to visit his relative's rug shop, and I said, "OK."

	The Blue Mosque by day. There are twenty something domes in the building, and you get to see them all from the inside. Also special, this mosque has six minarets (towers) rather than the usual up-to-four.
	The courtyard inside. These older buildings have a "dedication board", similar to East Asian buildings.
	The interior, looking straight up. It's magnificent, especially considering it's six hundred years old, and in a highly active earthquake area.
	The Moslem equivalent of a pulpit. This one is a solid block of marble which has been gilded.

It wasn't far, and we had a pleasant talk for a about ten minutes, then I headed back up to look at the Hagia Sophia, adjacent to the Blue Mosque. The Blue Mosque is an old, but still functioning, mosque. The Hagia Sophia is an older Christian Church (dating back to the beginning of Christianity), converted into a mosque, and now being converted into a museum. I could shoot pictures inside, but not take my tripod in. The Hagia Sophia also had x-ray machines and metal detectors, (I felt so safe!), but the Blue Mosque did not. I guess the detectors were too much trouble for a place that had people come in to pray five times a day.

I meet my first carpet seller (on the right). The other gentleman is the person who was so friendly to me the night before, and helped me see the Blue Mosque. He is a student, and a part-time rug seller hustler.

As I walked away from Hagia Sophia, yet another friendly Turk said, "Come see The Cistern. Oh, and I'm not a guide. You don't have to pay me." (I'd run into a guide who wanted to get paid at the Blue Mosque, so I was getting the idea... well, half the idea, anyway.) This gentleman showed me around the Cistern, and then invited me to his rug selling shop. (Ah... now I get the other half of the idea. If someone will help you for free, they are hustling for a rug seller.)

	The Cistern was originally used for the city's water storage. With this full, it could not be defeated by thirst. (it is kept near empty now.) It is now a pleasant place to get out of either frosty cold or blistering heat. Music is piped in, as well.
	Not all the columns look the same. This one has some interesting scroll work on it. Another has a medusa's head for a base.

I went with him. I was tired of walking, and willing to listen, once. I ended up spending about an hour in the shop... drinking apple tea, even eating a Turkish pizza lunch. All this... just so long as I kept looking at carpets. Well, I'd never even looked cross-eyed at a Turkish carpet before, so I went through the whole song and dance. (This is the slowest tourist season in Istanbul, so these sellers were in no hurry, either.)

After an hour, or so, I was much better rested, knew these rugs were hand-crafted and took a year, or so, to make... the small ones, that is. Some were old, say fifty to ninety years, and some were new. The old ones looked just like the new ones to me. I was offered two silk rugs for $11,000, and invited to dicker. Well... if I was in the market at all for rugs, that would have sent me into sticker shock. What it did instead was make me realize that these gentlemen were the "timeshare condo" salesmen of Turkey. They were doing anything and everything to get me into their showroom for a presentation on a medium-to-high ticket item, then going into numerous closing techniques. It was a fine list of closes, too. I've done some selling in my day, and it was impressive to see these gentlemen move effortlessly through six or so different closes.

	My second carpet seller. This man travels often to the US, and has been in nearly as many states as I have. (I've been in all 50.)
	My third carpet seller. He's standing next to a really neat propane-fueled space heater -- something I haven't seen in either Korea or the US.
	It's slow season in Istanbul, so these two had plenty of time to show me carpets, and explain some of the basics. Some of these carpets are wool, and some are silk. The carpet he is holding up took a woman better than a year to make. Many are made for marriage dowries.

I didn't get a carpet, but this long conversation was giving me a feel for what makes Turkey different from Korea. First let me say that they have a lot of similarities: both are developing nations with a lot of young, capable people, and both are developing rapidly. But, Korea seems to be developing a bit faster. The first realization that came out of this was how important capital is. Yeah, I've read a lot about it, but what I saw here put a human face on the problem of not having capital. Everywhere I went in Turkey there were a lot of men standing around. If something needed to be done, there were always at least three hands available to do it. Why? Because these hands didn't have anything else to do. There wasn't another factory or another shop where they could be working because there wasn't enough capital in the country to build that additional shop or factory. This is the importance of capital. Second, I saw very few women working. Almost all the jobs were being done by men. This means the capital problem is even worse than I observed because half the country was underemployed. Third, the Turks I met constantly talked about how they were related to those they worked with. Work and family relation seem to go hand-in-hand here even more than they do in Korea.

That was the end of my second day. I was dead tired, and jet lagged, so I headed back for the hotel. My legs were getting quite a workout because I was doing all this walking. And, my "snow legs" were back in full-force, too. Korea has been almost snowless, so I thought I was going to sneak through a season of not having to deal with it.

back to Familyland