How Bazaar, How Bazaar

Hello wonderful people persons! Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I have been using the weekend to see some local sites and reorganize my life via suite case. So I am going to start off with the bazaar. We took the dolmush Thursday and had quite the time of it. The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul looks like your typical indoor bazaar…on crack. The building itself is beautiful, with large painted arches and a few mosaic tiles; and it seems like every square inch of the floor below is covered with shops and booths and clothing and jewelry and scarves and metal things and beads and…everything. There are a ton of people moving in every which direction and I totally understand how one could easily get pickpocketed here and never know what happened to them. Lucky for me I did not have this particular experience, but I have met a few who have.

The best part of the bazaar are the vendors. Each f them seem to have their own game as to how to get you to come and look at their booth of stuff instead of anyone else. I was traveling with three other girls from my group and the first tactic we encountered was the “spice girl” tactic. This mostly involves yelling out “Hey Spice Girls!” and then going through which spice girls each of us were. The second tactic was outright flirtation. “Beautiful girls! Come and look I will give you discount!” this would occasionally work if they told us what the discount would be before we got too far away. Then there was the random shouting of any English words they knew “Hello, yes, thanks!” “American?” “Hello!!!” we figured out very quickly to not approach these vendors mostly because haggling became a problem when you have a 3 word English vocabulary. Then there was one that I totally brought down on myself. I hoped to avoid crazy people by putting on my Koc shirt, in the hopes people would guess I was a student and therefore have no money. WRONG! EPIC FAIL. Apparently every vendor and their mother, uncle, cousin, sister, brother, best friend or wife went to Koc, or is going to Koc, or will be going to Koc. Not only this but what would be a totally logical thought in the US: students are broke. Does not apply here. If you come to a university in Turkey you have to have money, therefore wearing my Koc shirt caught us more flack from sellers than any other aspect of our physical appearance. Yeah, lesson learned.

All in all it was a fun day and I haggled and bought stuff for people and had fun and broke in my shoes that much more. Most importantly I left the bazaar with all ten finger and all ten toes...though if my wallet had limbs I think the carnage would have been...harsh. I justify this because no one will be getting presents from Belgium and I have been using the grocery store so i don't eat out everyday. Speaking of eating out, I have been taking pictures of every meal I have been eating and everyone should expect a food post at some point. :) Write more later, hope all is well.

~Claire