Istanbul, the Most Beautiful Ugly City in the World

I’ve been talking about Istanbul often lately, in my art history survey: the Hagia Sofia, the Topkapi Palace, the Byzantines and the Ottomans…
My friend just wrote an amazing description of her city, you have to read it. Her blog, Alpha.Auer, is mainly about Second Life, a digital game/social site (please forgive if I offend by that definition). She recognizes how problematic it is to live with 16 million people, many desperately poor, but also how exciting. An international art/design scene has developed—maybe Istanbul is back on course as the center of the world once again, after centuries of neglect???
Elif:

Istanbul was dead during the years that I grew up here: It was a provincial city of a million people or so. And yes - no doubt architecturally speaking it was far more beautiful then than it is today. The hills of the Bosphorus were still largely forested and most of the old gingerbread houses were still struggling to stand in their big pine tree gardens on the Asian side. And yes, people were far more polite and well mannered - the famous old guard Istanbul bourgeoisie was alive and well, daintily sipping their tea with crooked little fingers, sitting in the “Cercle D’Orient” or the “Grand Club”, or indeed all the refined drawing rooms of well bred Istanbul ladies. Faded and pathetic grandeur… Turkish is a language with a formal “you”, as well as an informal “thou” - and boy, was the “you” much in evidence back then… My my… Yeah… yeah…

Today I was out and about all day. Various chores and errands that then turned themselves into an absurd sort of a shopping day where I ended up buying my 5th black backpack. And then came back to Besiktas, my ‘hood, quite late and sat in a small Lahmacun (sort of an eastern anatolian pizza with ground beef on top) place and wolved down two of those while watching the “other” members of the backpack brigade saunter by in the rain. And eavesdropping onto this completely absurd and very funny conversation between the two lahmacun guys in their little red paper hats concerning soccer results and predictions, waving around rolling pins and little balls of dough to emphasize their points. I very badly wanted to take a photo to put in with this post (which I sort of began writing there I guess) but there was this heavily necking couple sitting directly dead center in my FOV and I figured they would not really appreciate all the attention, so I left it…