Saturday, October 14, 2017

Monday October 2 in Istanbul, part 4


Spice Market and Galata Bridge

After leaving the neighborhood mosque, We did find the tram again...wow. You take your life in your hands crossing these very busy streets.  You have to watch for cars AND trains AND motorcycles.  This time we got off by the Galata bridge and decided to wander through the Spice Market if we could find it.  Eventually we did.  It is just one L-shaped (large) building. It is very busy. The sellers are very intimidating to us. Neither or us like to haggle about prices, but that's what they expect you to do.  Not everything is marked with a price, so you have to ask. Oh, the Spice Market is NOT just spices.  I think it has become a "Mini" grand-bazaar.  They had a lot of spices, yes. "Chicken Spice."  Hmmm  . How would you even know what you were getting?  "Fish Spice"  and regular stuff, too.  I bought a trivet that I think looks a lot like the Iznick tiles that are very popular and decorative here.

THEN we decided to walk across the Galata Bridge. It is full of shops and restaurants and fishermen, so that was an interesting walk for us.  We caught the tram on the other side of the bridge back to our hotel street...only one stop away. Heck, we could have walked that!  But, we were honestly tired.  I was out of drinking water in our room, so on the uphill hike to our hotel, I hiked two buildings further and stopped in at a tiny corner market to purchase a couple of big jugs of water.
The Spice Market.  Typical wares, just out there in the open, flies crawling across it.

I think those are sponges hanging from the ceiling. An interesting display. I considered buying some, since they wouldn't weigh much of anthing and would squish down to nothing.  But I didn't.

This man is t h i n l y  slicing some pastrami for a customer's order.  Athena had gone into this shop to purchase a honeycomb.  She was always looking for honey to buy.

Those pinkish things hanging there in the glass case are chunks of pastrami that is coated in something. It reminded me of the wax coating on cheese.

(a sneak preview of our dinner that night )

Another few views of the spice market. It had just about everything.


And then sometimes merchandise is not so prettily displayed...

Athena posing in front of a Spice Market Booth.

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