Impressions of Istanbul 2: from cars to carpets and cats

We think locals must be discouraged from bringing vehicles into the old part of the city, as most of those we saw were minibuses or delivery vans. There are some "otoparks" with private cars in them, but you could walk in the side streets for much of the time without danger of being run down. Locals tell you the traffic is mad, but we thought that it was less stressful than (say) Rome or Paris. And they seem to have banned motorbikes and scooters from the city, removing another major hazard for the unwary pedestrian crossing the road looking the wrong way. The only difficulty is getting across major roads, especially if they are multilane. Traffic lights are few and far between, and pedestrian crossings seem to serve no purpose, except perhaps to give your grieving relatives the right to sue after you've been run down on one. Drivers certainly don't stop, even if you are half way across. A driver who did stop for us was honked at by the cars behind. They haven't banned horns here yet so everyone toots every other vehicle that might possibly obstruct them, and they honk continuously in traffic jams to give themselves something to do.
The natives are very friendly and helpful, sometimes almost too much so. You get into a conversation with someone who asks where you are from and then tells you he has a cousin/brother/uncle in Australia, but then you discover that he wants to sell you something, usually a Turkish carpet. There are carpet shops everywhere, and many of the carpets are so beautiful you want to stop and look, especially at the silk ones. But if you do, you then have to deal with very persistent salesmen who want you to come in to the shop and look at more. We found a defence against their persistence - we tell them we live on a boat. Even then they are likely to tell us that they have some very small rugs, but by then it is a bit of a game and we can usually get away without having to be rude. We did get taken in by a very friendly and helpful shoeshine man when we were just off the plane, lugging our bags from the tram stop in search of our hotel, a bit jetlgged and not yet really across the value of the Turkish lira relative to our dollar. We realised later we had the world's most expensively cleaned shoes, having paid about $50. No wonder he insisted on kissing our hands as we went on our way, we probably kept his entire Kurdish village for a month.
As tourists we always walk much more than we would at home, but in Istanbul you are just doing as the Istanbullus do. Not only do they obviously walk a lot (tram, bus and metro stops are a long way apart), but they carry heavy loads, usually in plastic garbage bags, or they push them on handcarts. Streets are very clean: cleaners pull trolleys with huge rubbish bags into which they put the litter they collect. Perhaps as a result of all this walking we've seen very few overweight locals: men in particular are largely slim and good-looking. Having watched a whole service in a mosque, it is not surprising that the men are fit-looking: I couldn't possibly get down on my knees and up again without putting a hand to the ground as they do, and they do it a couple of dozen times each time they go to pray. Another aid to keeping fit is the presence of sets of ruggedised, non-electronic exercise machines in public parks, alongside the kids play area with the usual swings and slides. One image that I wasn't quick enough to capture on camera, but which stays in the mind nevertheless, is of a Muslim woman in headscarf and overcoat working away on the walking machine.
The other natives you see in the streets everywhere are cats. Cats prowl around the outdoor restaurants, sleep on ancient monuments, in pot plants, on carpets outside the carpet shops. Our Ephesus guide told us that the Turks rarely own cats, but like them. So the cats live on the streets, but are fed and and to some extent looked after by people in the area. It seems neither sex is neutered, so mother cats and kittens were a common sight. As we were heading out to look for places to eat on our second evening, we saw a dog being chased by a very aggressive cat, a mother protecting her five kittens, for whom home was a rug in the window of a carpet shop. We immediately decided to eat at the Aloran restaurant next door where we could watch the kittens feed and play and mother make the occasional foray back into the street to see off another dog or cat. She was unusual in that she was owned by the carpet shop man, who told us he had brought her with him from his home town in Van, in the Kurdish far west of Turkey.
Aloran proved to be a good restaurant and very reasonably priced, so we ate there each evening. Menus don't vary much from restaurant to restaurant, but we really enjoyed all the dishes we tried. Turkey would be a vegetarian's paradise because so many of the tastiest dishes are an interesting presentation of vegetables: spinach, peppers, potatoes, seaweed, eggplant, tomatoes, beans, chickpeas, and salads. The last are especially delicious because they put liberal amounts of fresh herbs in, parsley, dill and lots of mint. At the end of our week we were best friends with all the waiters and they gave me a Turkish "eye" charm as a thankyou because I put a favourable report up on TripAdvisor.