there are official people walking the streets, ready to assist. On the back of the blue shirts it says, “Ask me!” This woman stopped to make sure we knew where we were going and let the boys pet the kitten she was carrying.
We were on our way to the Grand Bazaar. It’s the oldest covered market in the world. It dates back to the 1400s. We weren’t there to do any serious shopping, just to look around.
There were stalls with carpets, lanterns, clothing, jewelry, ceramics — some things were really nice (expensive) and others were the trinkety junk you see in every tourist city.
There were crowds of people and since every third stall seemed to have the same items the browsing became tiresome quickly. On another day we tried to “cut through” the Grand Bazaar on our walk home, but because of the way that it winds around we ended up exiting further away from home than when we started.
We did come away with one treasure: these wooden tops/yo-yos.
Caleb wanted one really badly, but he played it cool while Josh agreed on the appropriate number of Turkish Lira for three of them. They settled on 5TL, about $3. They paid for themselves many times over during the rest of our trip as the boys could pull them out of their pockets and entertain themselves if they got tired of sightseeing. How do they work? You’re supposed to wrap the string around the base of the top and then flick your wrist as you drop it — if you do it correctly the top will spin on the ground attached to the string — it looks like walking a dog on a leash. I never got the hang of it, but the boys were doing tricks and catching the spinning top in their hands, Globetrotter style, by the time we came back from Turkey.