Hello again all,

Isabel was here from the 4th through the 13th, which was really great. It's so different to be in a foreign city when you're with someone. We saw some parts of the city I'd seen, some parts I hadn't, took a boat ride up the Bosporus and climbed to a castle from which we could see the Black Sea in the northern haze. I hear that Istanbullus (people from Istanbul) go up to the Black Sea to see the fall colors, but the trees haven't changed here yet. We're starting to get some chillier mornings and evenings - I probably could have worn my leather jacket this morning for the first time - but it's not cold like I hear it is back home.

There's a bit more than a week left in Ramadan. It seems like every time I go over to Sultanahmet (the oldest part of the city) to the park between Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque right before sunset, more and more people are there, just waiting for the evening azan so they can break their fast with their evening meal (iftar). Mostly, or traditionally, iftar is a very simple meal, and it's shared with your family or your work colleagues. Shopkeepers and their assistants stop to eat the meal right in their shops at the evening call to prayer.

In retrospect, this is all very clear. But I made what was probably a major faux pas a few evenings ago. I had introduced Isabel to Abdullah the carpet dealer on Wednesday. (He was quite taken with her and joked about giving me all the carpets in his shop for her hand in marriage. He really turned on the charm. Also told her what a good cook he is, good dancer, and-- Isabel and I waited a beat to see if he was really going to say this in front of me - a good lover, too.) He scolded her for not staying more than a week in Istanbul and asked why would anyone want to do what she's about to do-go to London to study acting, where people are so cold and unexpressive (his opinion). He also invited us to come back "at about 6:30 tomorrow night" and he'd show us what iftar is really like. Sunset is at about 6:45 these days, creeping earlier each day.

Well, I misjudged how long it would take to get from Point A to Point B the next day and we didn't get to his shop until 6:45. The evening call had just sounded a few minutes before, and when we arrived, Abdullah was sharing iftar with the other men and a boy who work in his shop. He sat us on a couch in another part of the room and went back to his meal. In a couple of minutes he brought us some soup and bread and salad. He was gracious about it, but it was clear that we shouldn't have been late. It didn't really matter that I'd tried to reach him on the phone to tell him we were on our way: The sun sets, the azan sounds, and the fast is broken. Religiously, you might say. It also happens that he'd made arrangements for us to go with him to share iftar with some of his friends a short walk away, but when we weren't there at 6:30 or a few minutes later, he'd had to cancel that. I know that I'd made a (perhaps inadvertently superior) assumption that "Turkish time" was more flexible than "American time," but I just didn't take religious customs into account, which I clearly should have.

Anyway, Abdullah had promised to give Isabel a primer on carpets so he took us downstairs, put us in the care of a friend and then disappeared. After a while it became clear that the friend was just killing time. Then Abdullah and friends showed up with a birthday cake. Isabel had mentioned the day before that that day was going to be my birthday. So we felt forgiven. It was very much like an American birthday cake, by the way--candles (and sparklers!) and an iced cake, but with the addition of figs and pears on top.

After the tutorial on carpets, Abdullah took us to a very conservative part of town (Eyüp) which has what people here tell me is the 4th most sacred mosque in Islam (after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem), because it has the tomb of a dear friend of Muhammad (named Eyüp, or Ayoub). People were lined up to file past his tomb, while all around was a brightly-lit street fair. Abdullah said that during Ramazan, the shops there stay open and people gather all night long. It was after 10 and young kids were in abundance with their families.

We also passed some big tents on the way over to that part of town. It turns out that these are the places that anyone can go to for a free iftar meal during Ramazan. The mayors of each municipality put the tents up for the month.

Isabel and I had also happened upon a street market in the old Jewish Quarter of Istanbul a few days before (after visiting an amazing church->mosque->museum called the Kariye Museum or Chora Church, which is worth a whole email entry in itself). The street market in what is no longer the Jewish Quarter was pretty amazing - cabbages the size of sleeping dogs, radishes bigger than baseballs, leeks over 2 feet long, as well as buckets of olives, beautiful pale yellow lemons, mosaics of figs, logjams of cucumbers, you name it. And this is apparently a fairly poor part of town. (Isabel bought 7 shirts for 7 lira, which is less than $5 - total.)

Once last week Isabel and I walked past a gathering protest on a major pedestrian street. All I could understand from one of the posters was "Frans - Dur" ("France--Stop"). Farther up the street, riot police were out in force, maybe a hundred, lined up with their batons and helmets and plexiglass shields and backed up by paddy wagons. Nothing came of it all. But today they were out again, even more of them, lined up shoulder to shoulder in front of the French consulate. There were also tank-like vehicles with padded attachments like cowcatchers in the front, apparently to push through crowds or to push crowds through the street ahead of them. Again, nothing came of it, but I must say it was impressive. Police are generally everywhere here, anyway, and they're usually quite young and friendly - even the ones in their riot gear when they're at ease.

In case you haven't heard, one house of the French government passed a bill on Wednesday making it a crime to deny that there was an Armenian genocide under the Ottomans in 1915. The word here is that it's an election ploy to get the Armenian-French vote in France's upcoming elections, but it's really pissed people off here. Suspicions are also that it may be intended to spur a Turkish reaction that would make it harder for Turkey to make it into the EU, since many Europeans are anxious about admitting a Muslim country anyway. Columnists in the Turkish Daily News have been quick to point out that it's a bit ironic that France (which people here consider to be the cradle of democracy) is moving toward a law that legislates a particular kind of political and historical thinking.

The same day Orhan Pamuk, a Turk, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. There's great pride here about that, but also some sense of reserve because Pamuk was recently brought up on charges of "insulting Turkishness" by admitting that Turkish (and Ottoman) history includes the deaths of 300,000 Kurds and a million Armenians. (The charges were dismissed on a legal technicality.) Some think Pamuk, who describes himself as apolitical, made the statement to gain notoriety in a bid for the Nobel. The law against insulting Turkishness is another burr under the saddle in the EU talks. Again, I could devote an email to the whole EU thing, but I won't.

Well, I really don't intend to be sending you such long missives. Maybe I should write more often. Or simply less!

Take care,