Across the Marmara

We had lunch in Asia today. Took a ferry across the Bosporus and ended up in the Asian part of Istanbul. Even though it's 15 minutes away, there was a different feel to the place. There seemed to be fewer people who spoke English as we wandered through the streets looking for a restaurant that had been featured in a story in the New York Times, and the people looked different physically. The ones we saw seemed more Slavic, more Russian looking They all looked like they could be Chicago Bears fans, but then again, we were only there a couple of hours.

We did find the restaurant, and the food was quite good, though I hesitate to add that it didn't seem any better than most of the other meals that we've had here. They were all quite good, though I think I'll have to spend some time soon in a kebab-free zone. On some menus, that's all they had.

We also found a classic old bookshop, the kind that used to be in every big city, the kind that said out loud, “Yes, we are a major metropolis.” It carried a strong scent of tobacco, though nobody in the place was smoking. The books were in Turkish on the first floor, but downstairs there were a ton of English language books, from Shakespeare to the latest trashy novel, they all seemed to be there. I found one that I couldn't resist. It's called: “I Paid Hitler,” and it's the story of a major German industrialist who bankrolled the Nazis and Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s but who broke with him when he invaded Poland, and who left Germany – and all his possessions, it seems – and went to Switzerland and then to France, where, I think, the Germans finally caught up with him and pitched him into a concentration camp with the usual results expected. The book was written before America got into the war, so it is interesting to read a contemporary account of what Hitler and the Nazis were like, from an insider.

Standing outside the bookstore, I chanced a look across the street and saw a pleasant sight. It was a small shop with a picture of a couple of horses racing to the finish line.

“Ah, a betting shop,” I said as I walked over. Inside were all the familiar sights. An electronic odds board, racing papers pinned to the bulletin boards on the walls and denizens of my world – though a world away – trying to figure out which horse was going to win the next race. I looked around the room and a thought came to me: I can take these guys. Even though I'm 7,000 miles from home, and I can't read the Turkish racing paper, and I've never set foot on a Turkish racetrack, I was confident that if I stayed there, I could walk out a winner. But, alas, I didn't get to prove out that confidence. The first race was more than an hour later, and we had to keep moving.

Another good day in the area of the Golden Horn. One more and then we head back to the UAE.