ISTANBUL

Istanbul, Turkey

Taksim square

Feeding pigeons seems to be a universal pleasure.

One of the birdseed sellers in the park. For 1 Turkish lira you get a little cup of seeds. She told me she was originally from Italy. I asked to take her photo. She had an interesting face and would make a nice painting.

And I know Nancy will be asking me about my sketch journal..........

More flowers. I know, I know. Enough with the flowers.

 

And what have we here? Many, many treats and all totally unrecognizeable.

Turkish

Turkish delight, of course. Ah, Narnia.........

Fresh bread being prepared.

We were interested in lunch but Paul did not think he would fit at these tables.

Fish with unfortunate complexion. Must have been caught during it's teenage years.

Kind of like a "Where's Waldo" of the country. Wearing the red beacon. At least I can find him in a crowd.

We only have a day here in Istanbul so we wanted to walk around and see what we could see while waiting for our tour group to arrive from the states. While walking, a store with beautiful scarves and hand painted silks caught my eye. We went in watched shoppers and engaged in conversation with the clerks. Everyone is always surprised....that Paul is always surprised when he is greeted in every country in English. Once he was told it was because he walks in looking like John Wayne. Apparently, I am not as easy to decipher. This time I was asked if I was of eastern European decent and then later asked if I was of Jewish heritage. That was a new one for me. As we were talking it was revealed that this is a store run and owned by Jewish people. They said there are only 10,000 Jews living in Turkey and if it was known that those running and owning the store were Jewish the Muslims would not shop in this store. At that point our clerk was hushed. Head scarves are most of their business. The nice ones that they were looking at were about $120.00 each. We asked the clerk if he had any idea of how many people were Christians in the city and he looked at us as if we just asked, "how many people here walked on the moon?" He just shrugged his shoulders and shook his head implying, "no clue."