Fish Alley

I would like to begin by stating for the record that they told me we were going to a “fish restaurant.” Now, call me crazy, but I hear “fish restaurant” and I think of, oh, Red Lobster. It’s a restaurant. There are fish. It’s a pretty basic assumption.

I asked Anne if I needed to change before we left. She surveyed me, shrugged, and said “Trousers, maybe.” So I figured, hey, nothing too fancy, and put on a pair of jeans. She and Abi and I piled into the car and headed off across the bridge to pick up Baba from work. I’d been there once before, on the way from the airport on my first day in the city: we’d stopped to drop him off. It’s not part of the Istanbul that they put on postcards; it’s part of the Istanbul that makes you think “Oh, that’s how Triangle Shirtwaist happened.”

In the States, it would have been labeled a “historic industrial park” or some such, but as Istanbul has no discernable zoning system (at least, that I'm aware of), it’s more like a slum with some Byzantine architecture thrown in for good measure (“You know Harlem?” Abi asked. I nodded. “This is like Harlem. Very dangerous”). We picked up Baba, which necessitated driving in reverse for maybe a hundred yards at around twenty miles an hour, thanks to a coyly marked one-way street, and then headed off.

I watched the building recede behind us. “There’s a dog on the roof,” I said, a touch disbelievingly.

Abi shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“And this is normal?”

He shrugged again. You can communicate a lot with a shrug. “Yes.”

“Oh. Okay.”

En route to the “fish restaurant,” Anne provided a running commentary of the sights. “That’s a…how do you say…military school? Yes. And a mosque. Very old. That is the shop where we bought Abi his first bicycle. And that building? Brick? It housed the water supply in the early Ottoman Empire. Do you see that wall?”

It was impossible not to see the wall. It was massive, rows of weather-beaten stone rising in rows of successively smaller arches perpendicular to the thoroughfare. It looked old. “Yes.”

“Is from Byzantine times.”

Old, indeed.

We drove passed a textile market, a fish market, several train stations, and a lot of mosques. People are everywhere in Istanbul. It’s the third-largest city in the world, and it never lets you forget it. In a traffic jam on the Asian side - Istanbul at rush hour is essentially one large gridlock - a street vendor standing on a median tried to sell us simit (a bit like a bagel) through the car window. On the Asian side, a family worked a roundabout, selling bottled water to temporarily stranded commuters. A one-legged woman on crutches hopped gaily through an interchange, causing a fully-loaded bus to come screeching to a halt.

I was shooting pictures from the car’s open windows the whole time. Very few were even close to sharp, but the defendant would like to remind the jury that she was shooting from a moving car in İstanbul’s rush hour traffic, and also that seat belts are not quite en vogue here, such that sudden stops can cause some significant jarring. And there were a lot of sudden stops. For clarification: cars do have seat belts, but they're more for decoration than anything else.

Eventually we parked next to what must have been the third fish market in ten minutes. Baba paid the otopark manager, and we wandered across six lanes of highway traffic towards a decidedly unpromising pedestrian underpass.

“This is very famous,” Abi told me. “Many tourists come here.”

I was somewhat perplexed – after all, the underpass looked more like a road works tunnel than a tourist attraction. But I followed them into the rabbit hole –

- and came out in New Orleans.

Or very nearly. The streets were narrow and wending, the buildings were tall, and it was as if you’d taken Diagon Alley, shaken out the wizardy stuff, and replaced all the storefronts with seafood restaurants. Blocks of them, and up to three stories above street level.

“Fish restaurant”? Try “the Las Vegas of all fish restaurants.”

And of course I hadn’t showered for a day. Of course we’d driven over with the windows down and thus my hair was less “attractively tousled” and more “feral child found in Wisconsin woods.” Of course we were meeting people there. Two families, in fact, and both were the sort of warm, hospitable people Türkiye is known for.

We were seated at a long table with me and the three boys at the end: Abi, my brother; Sam; and Eddie. (Names have been changed for privacy)

The first course was the usual salad stuff – vegetables, cheese, and the best melon I’ve ever had (ornately cut to resemble a boat). The second was some sort of rubbery shrimp (overcooked, sadly) and really excellent fried calamari.

Occasionally the boys and I would head off on a photo expedition, such as when the five year-old belly dancer started dancing on a table a block away. Roving maharishi-style bands serenaded the tables, and vendors wandered up and down the streets, hawking everything from cigars to Cabbage Patch dolls to model boats.

At the next table over, a trio of waiters brought out an enormous flaming platter. I scurried over with my camera and a waiter kindly offered to take my picture with the dish, which turned out to be some sort of fish in a thick clay shell.

Having taken the photo, the waiter handed me a mallet.

“Hit it,” he said.

I did so, and apparently with more force than intended. Once the dust cleared, the table’s patrons looked in horror at the flaming crater the size of Chesapeake Bay that I’d created in their meal. It turned out that I was only supposed to have cracked the shell, which could be removed piece by piece. The waiter, evidently realizing that I wasn’t to be trusted with a hammer, suggested by pantomime that perhaps I’d better sit down before I did any more damage.

I sat, cheeks aflame, and feeling rather mortified about the whole thing - after all, I'd just ruined someone's meal when all I'd wanted was a photo - and that was approximately when the maharishi band found our table.

“They are for you!” Anne announced. “Can you dance?”

What I said – as those of you who have seen me try to dance know – was that no, I really couldn’t.

What she evidently heard was “Why, yes! In fact, I have been mistaken many times for Anna Pavlova in my homeland!”

And that was how I wound up hoisted on a chair, dancing with the band leader.

This is perhaps the time to explain to the uninitiated that traditional Turkish dance is possibly the most hilariously suggestive dancing in the world. And then the entire table was dancing, although I was the only one on a chair – probably eight or ten people, the majority grown adults, bumping and grinding without actually touching (that would be inappropriate). Bear in mind that these are the people who gave the world belly dancing, and that will give you some idea of the sight.

Eventually the song ended and they got me off that chair and I discovered, to my everlasting horror, that Nur had appropriated my camera and captured the whole event on film. Or on memory card, as it were.

This happened twice more throughout the course of the evening; by the second time, the band leader – a large, mustachioed man with, for whatever reason, a tie wrapped around his head – had managed to identify me as an American. As the band plucked out the starting chords, he bellowed “BUSH” before beginning the song. And of course I had to dance again.

(Bear in mind that by “danced,” I don’t actually mean “danced”; I wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression. “Danced” is, in this instance, an inventive sort of euphemism for “twitched erratically and hoped this wouldn’t end up on YouTube,” just so we have our definitions straight.)

We were eating during this, too. So after the shrimp and calamari came some sort of steamed whitefish with tomato – very tasty – followed by assorted fruit in ice water And then in the middle of all this food, the guy with the tie on his head hauled me up on a chair and off we went again, while at the next table over, a herd of waiters armed with tongs and brushes attempted to salvage the clay-baked fish.

At some point after the third song, the boys suggested that we go wander the streets so I could take photos to send home. And Fish Alley, as I’m calling it, is an incredible spot for photography, which is why it’s a shame that I’m so very bad at it. Anyway, we traipsed the streets, dodging hookah vendors (hookah - water pipes for smoking mild tobacco; known here as narghilè, I believe) and crowds of Chinese tourists, before happening on an ice cream stand.

Turkish ice cream is a traditional treat, and in consistency bears a remarkable resemblance to saltwater taffy. We watched the vendor twirl it around and mug for the camera, and Sam bought me an ice cream cone. It was quite delicious.

We went back to the table to find the waiters (who were still giving me dirty looks, presumably because of the thing with the flaming fish) setting trays of baklava down on the table, along with thimbles of Turkish coffee and vials of transparent liquid. I politely declined the coffee, on the grounds (heh) that I wanted to sleep that night. Anne shrugged, and handed me one of the vials of liquid. It looked remarkably like a shot glass, I thought.

“Drink this, then,” she told me. “Is traditional.”

I raised the vial to my lips, and just as it hit my tongue, she laughed and said, “You will sleep well tonight!”

It looked like water, it tasted like banana, and it burned like whiskey. I placed the glass back on the table.

Anne raised an eyebrow. “You do not like it?”

There is an interesting phenomenon in the Turkish language wherein the words for “no” (hayır) and “slimy git” (hıyar) are remarkably similar, and it had been a long night, and I was still a bit jet-lagged…

…And, yes, in the process of trying to explain that I wasn’t a fan of the moonshine, I accidentally called my host mother something rather rude.

At least, as mistakes go, it was too funny to be offensive.

In Turkiye, the evening meal goes on for a long time. We were in Fish Alley until probably one in the morning, and we were by no means the last patrons to leave. And it was a good forty-five minute trek home to the other side of the city, and into the house. I brushed my teeth, put on my pajamas, collapsed into bed like I hadn’t slept in days, and dreamed of zzzzzzzzz...