Are you familiar with guitar acts of stealing?
Well hello there! Would you like some butter with that delicious honey from my own bees, clotted cream from my own cows, fresh eggs from my own chickens, and perfect loaf of soft white bread? You would! How delightful. That will be less than $10, and please don’t expect to eat again for as many hours.
That was Pando, a neighborhood cafe run by an elderly Bulgarian couple with twinkly eyes. Fortified, we hopped the commuter ferry to Kadiköy in Amanda’s first trip to Asia (Minor) and on the way back to Eminönü I struck up a conversation with a too-cute-for-words hijabi who was studying globalization at uni but hadn’t been able to practice her English on Skype because of boys.
I celebrated my own personal Christmas mass at the Hagia Sofia, which still belongs to us LALALALA. I mean, seriously. They didn’t even TRY to plaster over the Maltese crosses on the vaulted ceilings when they converted it to a mosque more than 500 years ago, and the reasoning is a little thin to claim that the fresco of Christ Pantocrator *with his mother Mary* should be up in the narthex because “he is one of our prophets too.” The stone for the minarets doesn’t even *match* and the plaques declaring there is no God but God are clearly post-hoc. Come on. Even the Viking grafitti is still there, runic vandalism scratched into the wall during what I concede to be the ninth century (and thus the interior-redecorating responsibility of the Byzantine Christian owners of the time).
We had lamb and lentils at Paşazade as recommended by Lonely Planet, matched perfectly with a Turkish wine called Öküzgözü-Boğazkere, I swear that is the true name and not just my being snotty about the prevalence of umlauts. Another relatively warm evening allowed another long walk, negotiating the life or death antics of third world traffic physics for pedestrians. Istanbul has more stray cats than I have ever seen in my life, sleek and well-fed and innumerable. Today I was impressed by the modernity of the mundane, from obvious battery recycling bins on the street to compact fluorescent lightbulbs in even the dingiest stained-glass lamp.