Oh, the Bazaars
Monday 11/16/2009 6:11 AM
After the Pudding Shop we headed to the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Bazaar. They were both more than a little overwhelming, but we had to go to at least see them. And see them is about all we did ... we bought a couple of small things at each, but we didn't spend nearly as much money as I thought we might be tempted to. First, the Grand Bazaar.
It's truly impossible to see it all in one day (or even a weekend), but then I'm not sure why one would feel compelled to see it all since a lot of the stands are so similar. There is a mode of organization here: there were leather sections and textile sections and jewelry sections of the Bazaar, and we spotted some signs marking them as such, but without a map of some sort, it was hard to get a sense of how many different sections there were in the whole thing. Instead, we'd suddenly end up surrounded by the smell of tanned hides and realize that all the shops were selling wallets and jackets and boots. And though I didn't see them marked, I think there were several souvenir sections with all sorts of things at each stand:
Though they thinned out at times, the crowds made navigating through with a specific sense of purpose nearly impossible, and luckily we didn't have much sense of purpose at the time, so we mosty just wandered, often backtracking on the same aisles (even though according to Wikipedia, there are nearly 60 different aisles/streets in the Bazaar):
More than shopping (which requires haggling, which is hugely uncomfortable for me) I just took in how pretty most of the stalls were:
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The Spice Bazaar was the same sort of scene, but on a smaller scale and most of the shops were, as one would expect, selling food or spices of some sort. While the Grand Bazaar just felt like consumer overload with whole aisles of gleaming metal or painted pottery or shiny fabric, though, I thought the Spice Bazaar was much more aesthetically pleasing, for the most part ... so many pretty piles of flavors:
At one point while we were deep in the Bazaar, the electricity went out, and what sounded like a great cheer rose from the crowd. The darkness made it a little harder to see for a minute or two until some of the bigger shops started up generators to power lights, but no one seemed alarmed so I figured it was a pretty regular occurence. And being in aisles lit only by the occasional light or, eventually, by the sun beaming in one of the entrances made our wandering even more enjoyable:
After an hour or so, though, we'd had enough: we weren't really in the market for much of what was selling there, and the crowds started to get too thick for us to enjoy moving through them.
It was a good experience overall, but I think if we were to someday ... oh, I don't know ... LIVE in Istanbul for an extended period of time, we probably wouldn't visit the bazaars very often at all. My sense, though it could obviously be utterly wrong, is that the Grand Bazaar especially is of more interest to tourists these days than it is to the people who actually live here.
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