After a few days of feeling quite confident and increasingly knowlegable about this whole house buying business, yesterday was a setback which left me feeling, again, as though we might be a pair of babes in the wood, ripe for the taking. First, there was the increasing suspicion of that nice flat with a view, and then we were told by someone who should know, quite airily, ‘oh that one? That building is condemned’. Later investigation showed that it’s a more complicated situation but it’s never nice to be brought to a stop by the thought that your careful savings might end up in a pile of rubble with you beneath it. The GF proposed, morosely, that we buy it, commission a tombstone saying ‘they enjoyed the view while it lasted’ and hang it over the door, ready for the next earthquake.
Then, we happened to have tea with four officials: a billionaire; a piratical gentleman with a bandana and a diamond stud in a very large earlobe (‘he oversees the brothels’); one woman with curly grey hair and suspiciously white teeth freshly polished fangs (with remnants of tobacco stains in the grooves between the teeth); a rather bland looking man of the sort who finds a natural home in local governments the world over (‘we like to say, he has a tower up his arse… it sounds funnier in Turkish’); and one blessedly non-descript middle-aged woman. All in all, I felt quite the ingenue in that crowd. Then the inspectors arrived, seemingly stepping out of a Terry Gilliam film: one steely woman in a crisp suit, shining hair carefully coiffed, dark glasses and a massive bottle of hand disinfectant, and her assistant, a thin man with a fat moustache and a checked shirt, smiley and weak-willed in appearance. So we left.
The final blow to our self-image was cast by the flat we went to view. This turned out to be upstairs in one of a khans, past several shops selling knock-off bags and belts, and was a long, very dark flat with exposed brickwork and windows opening onto the narrow, rockey spaces between other buildings. There were three bedrooms, all furnished with two single beds each, and a reasonably good view of the sea. The price was less than half of many far smaller places. It was all unbearably suspicious, made even more so as we were taken upstairs to the roof terrace, and passed doors with English signs saying ‘welcome to our home’, lists of rules for taking guests to the terrace, and several scantily clad young blondes. Was it a hostel? A brothel? Hard to say, really. In any case, I left feeling that would like to escape from Turkey – a feeling that was only accentuated by my later morose investigation of Istanbul’s earthquake risks and housing stock evaluations. I knew one was high and the other was poor, of course, but I was in a rather different mood this time.