Today we walked through faceless Istanbul, through wide streets lined with blocky mid or late-century commercial buildings that, in Pakistan, are called plazas. There are streets like this in virtually every city, and if the signs had not been in Turkish it could have been in any of a number of countries I’ve been to, with varying levels of safety in the electrical wiring.
I was a little under the weather, and the weather was certainly the most oppressive it’s been since we arrived: cold and grey and damp, a London summer. Good to see the city at (hopefully) its worst.
Our errand was also a failure, though we ended up in Nişantaşı for coffee and a much-too-late lunch. So that was Sunday, rather tiresome and not as restful or interesting as one would like.