Getting Lost in Shopping

   We tried to take a short cut to cut home one day, but instead spent 3 hours wandering around miles of shops and winding alleyways marveling at the sheer amount and variety of products Istanbul had to offer.  Let’s start with the Grand Bazaar, a beautiful old building housing a bazaar that is hundreds of years old.  It housed the usual fair: carpets, scarves, luggage, jewelry, etc.  Then there were the clothes dealers outside, again fairly mundane…just a lot of knockoff name brand products.  Ah, but then we entered the streets and were dazzled with an array of products.  We walked through the four blocks of kitchen supplies, rounded the corner and walked through the battery and cell phone two blocks.  Cell phones are boring, so we turned right (after it took us 45 minutes to locate our tour office when we were only 1 block away, we started to use Michelle’s compass that she got free in Hong Kong with her backpack to guide us) and walked up an alleyway to a store.  Inside the store, we saw an array of cheap crap that would put even a Walmart-sized Dollar Tree to shame. 

From plastic Sponge Bob square pants toys to Chinese children cartoon pinups, junk spilled into every hallway of the seven floor complex.  Feeling overwhelmed with so much useless stuff, we ventured through the building assuming that surely there would be another way out…either for fire code purposes or just out of the logic that no one would willingly take the route we took just to look at this stuff.  But alas, the hallways just got smokier and smokier (if there had been a canary, it would have already died and been added to the piles of toys with no one noticing) and we were forced to backtrack.  Back through the cell phones we got to the Viagra and Cialis section.  Seriously.  Multiple people selling nothing but sex-life enhancing drugs on the street for about a block.  Then came guns; handguns, rifles, shotguns, and hunting supplies followed by suitcases.  As if to protect you from the Viagra popping, handgun wielding, angry man who bought a suitcase to hold all of the useless crap he bought while trying to find his way out of the junk store, the next block had AT LEAST ten stores that sold ONLY evil eye charms.  Nothing else.  These weren’t jewelry stores and they weren’t religious items stores.  They sold only evil eye pendants (not even fancy ones).  

We finally saw our way out of the labyrinth of markets through the blocks of toy stores and a block of clothing button sellers.  

It took us hours to navigate the streets of Istanbul, but two pieces of baklava and a bowl of bean soup later, we would have done it all again.  This time, though, perhaps we might have found the holy grail…or at least a block of stores specializing in them.