Put A Sheep In Your Pocket - Proverbs In Istanbul
Once in Istanbul I was eating at a cheap restaurant near Sultan Ahmet- the Blue Mosque. It was one of those times when a bomb had gone off or there was a war on somewhere, and despite this being a tourist area there was nobody but me in the place. And then a lady walked in. For some reason I decided she must be Korean. She had a little girl, just about to experiment with walking, but mostly an experienced and very fast crawler. And as soon as the lady tucked into her meal, the little girl was off, under the next table, round the corner, past me and straight for the door on the street. On the threshold one of the waiters whisked her up and carried her back to her mother, who paid her no attention whatsoever. Five minutes later the girl was off again, and again a waiter carried her back. On the girl’s fourth outing it was the cook who came out from the kitchen and grabbed her. He held her in his arms, put his chef’s hat on her head and stood in the window with her and they both waved at passers-by until the mother had finished eating.
The city was full of little poetic gestures like that. Every now and then someone would give you their time or something they owned in a completely unexpected way. I got really used to it, so that one day when I was trying get back to the city from half-way down the Bosporus, I got on a dolmuş bus and as I stood stooped in the small vehicle just behind the driver, I was not really surprised to find that people were handing me money. It took me a few seconds to realize that these were all fares I had to hand over to the driver and that I would then have to sort out all the change.
The only people who ever bothered me were the carpet sellers who would follow you for what seemed forever, turning everything you said into another question. No thank you, would be answered by Why not? and Because I don’t want a carpet by Why don’t you want one? and so on and so on. And if you said nothing it was even worse because they would then go through every nationality in the world in many different languages. Fran