Month: October 2007

All of the Turks with whom we spoke reacted with horror when we expressed interest in going to a Turkish Bath (hamam): “You’ll come out dirtier than when you went in”; “They are for poor travelers to the city”; “A 200 lb. hairy Turkish guy will scrub you raw”; “Anyone with money who wants a Turkish bath has one built in his house.” None had been to a public hamam at any time during their lives (ranging from 40 to 80 years old).

While visiting the best carpet shop in Istanbul, the proprietor, Ahmet Sengor, told us about a “hotel hamam” that would be clean and, more importantly, staffed with lithe Russian beauties. “It is out near the airport in the Polat Renaissance Hotel. They also have a nice gym.”

Our day began at an Istanbul Biennial art exhibit featuring a Chinese installation of an expedition that went to saw off the top 1.86 meters of Mt. Everest. Next stop was Nisantasi where the girls looked at $10,000 necklace/earring combos and I photographed the cow sculptures dotting the sidewalks. We fought our way through heavy traffic to Beyti, the kebab restaurant favored by heads of state (obligatory letter from Bill Clinton on wall) and visiting business executives. After Mallory ate delicately, Oya reasonably, and I gluttonously, Oya’s driver delivered us to the hotel. Oya did not wish to break her lifelong trackrecord of hamam-free bathing and wished us well.

Mallory went into the women’s section with a trim middle-aged Turkish woman in a neat uniform with what turned out to be a bikini underneath. I went into the men’s section with a thin white towel around my waist and was soon met by a short hairy 200 lb. Turkish guy, naked from the waist up wearing a similar towel. He would be doing the scrubbing, which necessitates forceful pulling of arms and holding of heads while dousing the customer with water.

The details of the bath itself are best forgotten. For a better idea of what it was like, rent the Borat movie and watch the scene where Borat and his producer fight in their hotel.

Oya told us that to get the maximum benefit from the hamam one must stay for an hour or two afterwards to let the moist heat open up the pores in the skin. Mallory was hot and I was fat so we decided to move on to the exercise portion of our visit to the Polat Renaissance.

The gym is as nice as any gym in the United States, with banks of clean new machines, an indoor pool, three hot tubs, and an outdoor pool with a patio overlooking the Sea of Marmara. Sadly the outdoor pool isn’t heated and we were advised that it was shockingly cold. A girl in the weight room explained why the place was so empty at 6 pm: “People don’t come here until after work. If they leave their office at 6 the traffic is so bad that they might not get here until 8. People therefore usually stay downtown until 7 and make it here by 8:15 or 8:30.” What does it cost to be a member of such a nice gym? $300 per month (Turkish bath plus exercise for a day tourist was $120). What about salaries at her company, a clothing manufacturer downtown? The seamstresses get paid about $550 per month.

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One of my guides in Cappadocia was kind enough to give me some dating advice for Turkey. He is a handsome fellow in his late 20s with a gorgeous girlfriend so he speaks with some authority. “Forget about girls in the eastern portion of Turkey who haven’t been to university,” he started, “the real action begins at age 19 for girls in their first year at the university, especially those girls from western Turkey.”

“There are clubs for elite people along the Bosphorus in Istanbul,” he explained, “that I couldn’t get into by myself and maybe only with my girlfriend. Turks have to telephone ahead for a reservation but you’re an American so they will let you in regardless.” What age of woman would be interested in a 44-year-old guy (my birthday was September 28 🙁 )? “Any age woman, starting at 20, would be interested in an American. They assume that you have money.”

Dress code? He looked at my stainless steel watch. “Get a gold watch. Let them know that you are staying at a top hotel.”

Cautions? “Make sure that they are not there with their boyfriend or brother. You could get punched.”

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I’ve finished three books about exotic cities with a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious population.

The first is Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City. The publisher pushes this as essential reading for tourists who want to learn about Istanbul. About half of the text of the book is devoted to the author’s feelings and memories of childhood. He loves his mother and is fascinated by her makeup and clothing. He loves (male) Turkish writers who are captivated by the beauty and sexuality of teenage boys. He is often melancholy, even after sex (perhaps because his partner wasn’t a teenage boy?). You would be forgiven if you thought that this was a lost work of Marcel Proust. The other half of the book has some interesting information about Istanbul.

Pamuk claims that the entire city suffers from melancholy and despair because of the collapse of the Ottoman empire and subsequent decline in the city’s relative fortunes. He celebrates the contributions of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews to the city’s culture and mourns the departure of these ethnic groups (Pamuk notes that Istanbul was more than half non-Muslims at the beginning of the 20th century and nearly 100 percent Muslim at the end; he says that the Christians and Jews were encouraged to leave after their property was confiscated in the 1940s and by riots in the 1950s that destroyed their homes and shops). Stories of ships colliding in the Bosphorus are captivating (you have to sail through downtown Istanbul to get from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea).

Pamuk’s own family has suffered a decline in their fortunes, but he doesn’t seem to notice the rise of other families. The latest shopping malls are grander than any palace that the Sultans ever built. The bridges spanning the Bosphorus are engineering achievements beyond anything the Ottomans might have dreamed of. The wealth of modern day Turkish businessmen exceeds anything the Ottomans had. It is true that the Ottomans ruled an empire, but it was an empire mostly of illiterate peasants who couldn’t pay much in the way of taxes. Modern day Istanbul is at the center of a powerful growing economy of 70+ million people, nearly all of whom are better educated and better employed than their 19th Century counterparts.

Summary: an interesting book for fans of Pamuk’s other writing, not particularly instructive about Istanbul.

The next book is Justine, the first novel in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The exact time of the novel isn’t specified, but they have cars and don’t have antibiotics, so 1920s or 1930s seems like a good guess. The city has little industry and people don’t work very hard so they spend all of their time having sex with each other, regardless of marital or economic status. Unlike with Pamuk’s book, the sex tends to be heterosexual. There is a lot of mingling among Europeans, Arabs, Copts (descendants of the ancient Egyptians who built the Pyramids), Turks, and Jews. Poverty is a common condition, one that often leads to arrangements of a sexual nature. Love is understood by all concerned to be a transitory phenomenon.

Summary: Too bad these folks did not have access to modern scientific research, such as http://www.theonion.com/content/news/study_casual_sex_only_rewarding

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado is the most educational of the three. She chronicles a century of her family’s history in a way that illuminates the general via the particular. Her family starts off in Syria in the early 20th Century. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire has enabled the local Arabs to indulge their passion for anti-Jewish violence (the Ottomans discouraged violence against taxpayers; they didn’t care what religion someone practiced as long as he or she paid taxes). The family flees to Cairo where her father grows up to enjoy a fantastic social life, mostly enjoyed after dark and with a lot of different women. The city is a paradise of neighborliness and opportunity created by the mixture of well educated and sophisticated foreigners and religious minorities. In his early 40s, Lagnado’s father marries a beautiful 20-year-old and installs her in his mother’s house where she becomes miserable from isolation and his nighttime wanderings and presumed infidelity. As an Arab nationalist government supplants the monarchy, the Arab Cairenes become increasingly hostile towards their Christian, Jewish, and foreign neighbors to the point where most of the non-Arab Muslims have to leave by the early 1960s.

Jews are allowed to leave with no more than $30 in wealth, plus a few suitcases full of clothing. Lagnado’s family of six shows up in Paris with $200 and eventually manages to make its way to the shabbier neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Their relatives end up in Israel where they trade the pleasures of the city for a life of hard labor on a dusty kibbutz farm.

Many of the events in the story are sad. Babies die. Babies are sold because a family doesn’t have enough money to feed them. Italian relatives are shipped off to German death camps, never to be heard from again. The world was a much more consequential place then. Yet Lagnado’s prose is never sad and, as you might expect from a Wall Street Journal journalist, there is little fat that could be trimmed from her language.

The 870,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries between 1940 and 1960 are a statistic (to paraphrase Joseph Stalin); the Lagnado’s family expulsion is a lot more instructive.

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… a lot of the 70+ million Turks may consider emigration.

Sampling of prices… Gasoline: $8.50/gallon. Diet Coke in a cafe: $6. Museum admission: $8-16. Haagen-Daz in the supermarket: $12.50/pint. Crummy Yellow Tail Shiraz from Australia in the supermarket: $32/bottle. Local table wine: $15-20/bottle. Burger (or “McTurco”), fries, Coke at McDonald’s: $6. Dinner for three at a local restaurant on a small island visited only by Turkish tourists: $175, including wine but without dessert.

Income? The per capita GDP is about $5,000 per year, compared to $44,000 in the U.S. and $35,000 in Germany. An office worker in Istanbul might earn $700 per month.

Lingering Third World inconveniences: terrible traffic due to recent rise in automobile ownership, limited and slow highway connections (where “highway” usually = two-lane road), sluggish and/or intermittent Internet (DSL line in rich neighborhood), lack of consensus as to amenities that should be provided in a public restroom (after paying your $8 admission fee to a museum and walking into the men’s room you would be lucky to find 2 out of 3: toilet paper, hand soap, hand towels or drier)

The Turks went to extraordinary lengths in the 20th century to “Turkify” what had been a polyglot country. Prices higher than London and incomes lower than Mexico may, however, cause even the most ardent Turkish nationalist to consider learning an Indo-European language and looking westward for a place to live during his income-earning years.

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