This morning, the GF and I went to Levent to meet the young Pakistani worker who promised us a warehouse of excellent quality lights and other housewares. He met us at the metro stop and we stopped for a glass of tea, at which I pressed him a little about his background. I did not get very much, but he did say that when he arrived here he was treated so badly, abused in the streets and not allowed to use the kitchen as though he were an animal, that he decided not to try to go any further – if they treated him so badly here, how would they treat him even further from home?
After tea we walked on to a rather poorer and slightly shady set of streets tucked behind the glass and steel towers. There were men idling on street corners, casually noticing everything, and very dark windows without women leaning out or a general feel of homey-ness. It felt like the houses were mostly workers’ dormitories, perhaps some slightly shadier businesses. Don’t tell anyone, our guide said, and don’t ask the owner directly about the price, I will deal with him myself. We stopped outside an iron door leading into what seemed to be a storeroom slightly below street level. Another man hurried up – I had the feeling that he was not Turkish at, maybe Central Asian. I’m not sure why, and probably I am wrong. He was older and fairly large but had a certain physical weight to him. Our guide seemed both eager and anxious, and I did wonder if the screed against fearfulness I had delivered to the GF that morning had been particularly foolish.
The man unlocked the door and let us in. ‘You see, beautiful things, you will not find such beautiful things anywhere else,’ said our guide as we went in. Inside, well. There were two small dark rooms, piled high with second-hand junk. A dozen or so broken crystal chandeliers hung on one side, on the other were a few boxes of broken picture frames etc. It looked very much like a selection from the junkmen one sees pushing their carts around Istanbul.
We looked around a bit, hoping to find something. I asked our guide if there was more, as he had told me there was a gigantic warehouse that we could look at. No, he said, this was all.
I thanked him and told him as kindly as I could that this was not what we were looking for, but we would tell him if there was anything we wanted, or if we wanted his help when looking for furniture. We left, and decided to walk to the Kanyon mall, for a second attempt at the enamel wares we had been unable to find the previous weekend.
Our environment changed rapidly, from dodgy to a shopping district to a bus station to steel and glass excrescences. We eventually found our way to Kanyon, which it turned out was a rather peculiarly designed high end mall, the sort with a Lanvin store and a branch of the small speciality wine and olive shop in Cihangir. It was mostly an outside mall, so it wasn’t that vast warehousey hellscape of most malls, but it was a strangely enclosed space, with bulbous glass and steel construction lowering overhead, making fear an earthquake.
The shop was as different a shopping experience from the morning’s as one can imagine, though we didn’t buy anything here either. Reasonably high end local design stuff, fairly pricy, nicely displayed. Remembering the plastic gilt image of the Kaaba our guide had picked up to show to me as a sample of the wares, I wondered what he would have made of it. Amused contempt, I suppose, since he had a vulnerable swaggering superiority that you see in many young Pakistani men, especially those from poorer backgrounds.
We took the metro to Taksim square and had menemen for a late lunch. Delicious stuff as usual. Then we returned via Cihangir, collecting groceries and my all-important tarama for breakfast.