Blogs, Respect, and Hats
At first, I thought a photoblog would be a pretty spiffy way to communicate my Turkey experience. Now, I’m quite glad I didn’t go that way. I would say that most good photoblogs I have seen actually kind of put the text ahead of the images in terms of importance. The Picasa format is nice because it works more like an interactive paging-through of a photo album rather than having the format and pacing of a magazine or travel book. Maybe if you spent five years living amongst the primates in Madagascar or something you might benefit from prioritized text. But not living in a city like Istanbul and travelling around.
Most things speak for themselves. Or, if there is a good story, it’s a demand-pull effect from the impact of the picture. I think if I took more “walking around the city” pictures a photoblog could be interesting. Because then the story would justify the picture rather than the other way around.
In the realm of other random minor things, I was aghast when we went to the Blue Mosque this weekend that so many female tourists were not covering their heads. The only men I saw wearing hats dutifully took theirs off (the ballcap doesn’t exactly hold a popular position in Turkey). The mosque caretakers actually provide you with scarves if you need them, so there’s really no excuse at all. They force you to take off your shoes, so nobody disobeyed that one.
I think it’s really the least you can do. They’re nice enough to not be horsey about the Ayasofya, which still has the majority of the restorable Christian artwork on the walls, as you can see in the pictures. The Blue Mosque is different, though, as it is an active and quite important mosque even at the worldwide scope. The Ayasofya is a museum, so there really aren’t many expectations of visitors.
Pulling on another plot thread, hats are kind of a funny deal here. I’ve seen some fur-lined numbers with ear flaps and everything. Of course, you have various Muslim-/Sikh-type models (the round cap and the knotted turban type thing, I’m not overly culturally literate here). You have a few Yarmulkahs (wow, really didn’t know how to spell that), as Beyoğlu (the India-shaped promontory that pretty much borders our slightly-north area of Şişli) has a historical Jewish population among many others. There is a lot less Christian Orthodox activity going on here than I ever would have thought. It’s apparently dying out quite a bit.