Istanbul

When I close my eyes, I can still see the lights of the street glowing in hues of yellow and red, hear the currents of voices and laughter, and smell the scent of hookah and beer drifting through the warm air on my last night in Istanbul. I see the lights of the fountain situated between the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque, its waters warbling, laughing in the dimness of evening, surrounded with couples sitting close and children playing with glowing toys that street merchants sell for a handful of liras.

Istanbul is one of those cities that holds on to its history while embracing modernity, that keeps its past in every heartbeat of its present. Its efficient trams bus tourists through site-seeing districts and across the Bosphorus. The Grand Bazaar is as it always was, with merchants calling its wears and trying to persuade customers into its stores, only that the stores are filled with western brands of shirts and shoes right alongside traditional Turkish pants and textiles.

For me, Istanbul’s architecture rises above all else, from the intricate designs of the Hagia Sofia to the steep obelisks of the hippodrome to the minarets that steeple over the city like totems to the religious and historical texture of Istanbul. I think, of all of them, I loved the Blue Mosque best; its lovely domes and towers stand as quiet testaments to the beauty of geometry; the unity of its structure, the regularity of its design, the simplicity of its coloring…, stalwartness with solemnity, unostentatious and unobtrusive and unaffected… majesty with modesty.

The cats in Turkey are, for me, utterly delightful; they have little of the skittishness to which I am accustomed, and I found them lounging about wherever they could find a spot of shade: on carpets being sold just in front of shops, in the middle of sidewalks and beneath chairs and tables in restaurant… even on the footpath half-way up to the old church that lies on Prince’s Island.

Istanbul is certainly an international city; it has that feel, and as a tourist, especially one staying in a hostel, I felt the internationality fairly directly: rooming with people from Spain and Croatia and Korea, touring Galata Tower and Dormabahce with a Pakistani, doing breakfasts with a Canadian, and spending my final evening talking with a couple, one from India and another from Serbia.

It’s one of those cities that I could see myself living in one day, if fortune is kind to me. It’s certainly a place to which I hope to return, one day.

Today, the weather has turned a little chilly. It was raining as I passed from Turkey to Bulgaria. The scenery has changed, and while I am loathed to leave Istanbul and those I have met there, I look with eagerness to what may await me in Bulgaria.