Continuing with my fondest memories of Istanbul last summer, but giving the purple prose a rest.
YOGURT AND PRICELESS ANTIQUITIES
My diet in Istanbul wasn’t the healthiest. At least in the beginning of September, I found it a tough town to get any vegetables.
At a fork in the road I passed every day was a charming open-air restaurant, resplendent with dark wood, hanging beadwork, and rug-covered benches. (Okay, maybe just a little purple prose.) But what attracted me most was finding, amidst the usual meat and seafood, a dish that actually included green beans. I picked a lovely table next to the railing and ordered it. I was told they were out of green beans.
Since I passed every day, and there was always someone out front promoting the place, I’d ask, “Any green beans today?” The answer was always no. Eventually, when they saw me approaching from half a block away, they took to calling out, “No green beans.”
In my room I had a kitchenette so I wouldn’t have to pay to eat every meal out. But even after I located all the local supermarkets, some quite big, all I could find was the occasional, weirdly anemic-looking zucchini.
On the other hand, Istanbul was a great place for anyone, like me, who eats plain yogurt, which was sold everywhere. I kept thinking I’d found the biggest tub of it imaginable, when I’d find one even bigger. Plus every time I saw on the streets that someone had reused an even bigger plastic tub…perhaps to catch rainwater, hold the fish caught from the bridges, or as a cement mixer…it turned out to be an even more gargantuan yogurt container that I thought possible. I tried to find a reused plastic tub so big that it couldn’t possibly be a yogurt container…in vain.
Another amazing reuse of things applied to what I, at least, considered priceless antiquities. Like outside the third version of Haggia Sophia, built in 527. The “rubble” of the previous version, built a century before, was left around the garden next to the café for people to sit on while eating and wedge their empty water bottles between the incredible hand-carved details of its cornices and column tops.
I was prepared, at some point, to discover that what I thought was old sheetrock in a huge construction dumpster was actually priceless fifth-century hand-carved stone in the mother of all reused yogurt tubs.
