Well, we did get out and visit Kadefikale the other day. There are some pictures in our September photo album, including this one, a view out over the city from the ramparts, looking north across the inner harbour to the hills.
It was a lovely sunny day, not too hot and perfect for a bit of exploring. We knew we needed the #33 bus but we weren't sure where it came closest to our home (nearly passes by it, actually) so we went down to Konak, one of the main squares of town, and found it there. Half an hour's tour through the city got us to the top of the highest hill within the town, in the middle of a really, really old area - old enough that the houses are real brick and stucco, not cement block.
We got there around 5, just in time for the evening call to prayer. There was a mosque very close at which it started, but soon a wave of sound seemed to envelop the city. For maybe 5 minutes the sound rose and fell, and so did the hair on the back of our necks. What a sound! There must have been hundreds of mosques calling the faithful to worship, every one of them starting at a different time and many of them using different chants. The words are the same, but there are many different musical modes in which they can be sung. (More about the modes here and the call to prayer here). I enjoy the call to prayer when we hear it at our apartment from the 7 or so mosques nearby, but it's overwhelming when you hear it rising from a city of 3 million souls.
That finished, we explored a bit. There are women in the grounds from a part of southern Turkey that used to belong to Syria (still does, according to Syria), demonstrating the use of their ancient looms and selling their weaving. Some of their work is really nice, and I might pick up some to bring back to Canada.
The castle has a huge (formerly) underground cistern to keep it supplied with water for a good long time, and it looks like there were two aqueducts bringing water from the surrounding mountains. We wanted to investigate what looked like their ruins, but we got swarmed by a pack of little boys saying "Hello! Money!" Bunch of brats and impossible to get rid of (I tried asking them for money and nearly got 5 korush out of the deal, but he changed his mind). We'd never encountered anything like that in Turkey before and we didn't like it. It felt like something the kids may have imported from their homes near Syria - it's certainly nothing a proud Turkish kid would do. They can be pests and brats but they'd never hound you for money.
So we left soon after, not buying anything from the weavers (unfortunately), and made our way back home via bus and Metro. Neat place and I'm glad we went there, but we won't go again soon or often.
Yesterday Ron was out pounding the pavement downtown looking for an English school that needs his talents (possibly finding one, too), so I took off on my own and visited our local weekly bazaar a few blocks away. Our landlady said it's an excellent place to find clothes and has good fruit and vegetables too.
Wow! I've never been in the middle of such crowds. The stalls occupy both sides of an ordinary residential street, and peddlars also spread their wares on patches in the middle. Shoppers squeeze their way past three blocks of this - clothing of all sorts, some of it quite nice, none of it costing more than 5 YTL. The shoppers aren't all little old ladies looking for bargains, too - you can see they're normal to well-dressed. The merchants (all men) stand on top of their tables shouting "Bir milyon" (one million old liras, 1 YTL, about $1 Canadian), "Abla bekliorun" (big sister, come and look) and waving some item of clothing. One guy advertised his wares by wearing them - he looked charming in a flowered dress.
The veggies filled an open space of some sort - a park? couldn't tell for the crowds - about another 3 square blocks. They were beautiful and so cheap: tomatoes for 50 cents/kilo, peaches to die for for the same, nothing more than 1 YTL a kilo. If it had been safe to stop and take a picture I would have, they were so photogenic. You never see such perfectly ripe produce in Canada - picked that morning, still screaming.
I should say something about Turkish currency reform and the confusion it's caused. When we were here two years ago the exchange rate was roughly 1 million lira to the dollar. Everything was priced in millions and it sometimes got confusing counting the zeroes. People took to dropping the last three zeroes and quoting low prices in hundreds, meaning hundred thousands - so a kilo of tomatoes would be "beş yüz" - 500, meaning 500,000 lira. But then the government got smart and revalued the currency so that 1,000,000 old lira = 1 YTL (Yeni Türk Lira - new Turkish lira). Simple, you'd think. But people are still used to prices in hundreds, so a kilo of tomatoes is still "beş yüz". It startled us at first - $500 a kilo for tomatoes? No, it's really 50 cents. The Turks are trying to get used to the idea of two figures after the decimal point after so long thinking in thousands, and you often see prices like 1.250 YTL = 1,250,000 old lira. Actually they use the comma for a decimal point, so it really looks like 1,250 YTL, which startles us even more.
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