Three Nights of Turkish Delights (Part One)

Trying to be more locally authentic, I have booked a boutique, no-name hotel instead of the usual corporate, vanilla franchises.  I decide not to take public transport from the airport because I want the convenience of being dropped right outside the door of the hotel.  My taxi driver has other ideas. He eventually gets tangled up in some narrow side streets and abruptly dumps me in the middle of the old city tourist area, so I end up with the public transport experience anyway.  He gestures as if the road ahead is blocked, but I now think he couldn’t be bothered to keep searching for my obscure hotel. He points left and says my hotel is five minutes’ walk away across a plaza. I peer out of the taxi.

“Straight?” I say.
“Mmm, straight” he says.

I oblige and start making my way in a straight line for this “five minute” journey, my wheeled case clacking over cobblestones, trumpeting the arrival of a tourist. I think that this walk might actually make an interesting opening to my trip report.

Half an hour later, having asked directions from just about anybody who looks like they don’t have a criminal record, and having been sent up and down the same streets (Istanbul old town is hilly), and with the rain starting to spatter, my enthusiasm for this anecdote has dampened.

Asking people where my hotel is seems to be no different to conducting a public street survey in England about the merits of Brexit: opinions diverge.

I’m getting peckish so it could be that I’m not really listening to the street vendor when he’s gesturing directions but rather just staring at his roasted chestnuts (not a euphemism, he is selling roasted chestnuts), and wondering how I’d get those out of my teeth later on (I’ve got a thing about flossing these days).

Eventually, after the unscheduled workout, I discover my lodgings in a quiet and unassuming side street.  I’m taken to my room and realize that “boutique” is code for selling me the smallest room I have ever paid to stay in. And I’ve stayed in average hotels in Singapore, so that’s saying something.

I have no plans to stage a private Broadway-style musical in my room and so compact is fine. But this room really is the epitome of squeezing the last drop of revenue from your real estate. It looks like they spotted a storeroom the exact size of a double bed and got cracking with refurbishing it.

Given there is no room to even walk around the bed I wonder how they got it in there. It must’ve been assembled from several thousand pieces brought into the room in trinkets. And the one head-high window, replete with three vertical metal bars on the outside, makes it feel less like I’m in a box of the Turks’ delight as in a cell at her Majesty’s pleasure.

The walls of the bedroom look unfinished: plastered but unpainted. On closer inspection, I realise this is deliberate, trendy “distressed” look.  So the look mirrors mine, except for the trendy bit.

Fortunately there is an excellent rainfall shower in the bathroom which, though not quite like standing under the Angel Falls, compared to my two-minute smash and grab showers in drought-stricken Cape Town last Christmas, seems like the height of water profligacy.

With the lack of floor space, I realise that 99% of my physical positioning in this room will be either (a) on the bed or (b) in the shower cubicle. There is of course a potential option (c), depending on how spicy the food is.

I wonder where I can possibly stand the ironing board I intend to borrow from housekeeping. I needn’t have worried, the hotel doesn’t provide one.  I guess my appearance about town will reflect my lodgings – “shabby chic” is the term I believe.

I ask at reception if I can be transferred to something less likely to induce a claustrophobic panic attack. I’m told there’s nothing available because I booked last minute. At least they’re not pretending that it’s their Presidential suite (unless we’re talking about a President who was recently deposed in a people’s coup d’état).

True to the spirit of a solo adventurer, I decide to try out a local tradition of being scrubbed down in a Turkish hammam (bath): an exfoliator’s paradise.

My hotel receptionist recommends the spa at the local Hilton hotel.  I scoff (in my head): I’m not about to be fobbed off by this touristy, sanitised version. I want something authentic, where mostly locals go, so I seek out a traditional no-frills hammam. Google duly delivers.

When I arrive, the entrance is a narrow doorway on the street, easily missed. I descend down some stone steps and speak to a young lady behind a counter. She takes my payment in exchange for a personal exfoliating pad.  An older man then brusquely instructs me towards my changing room.  I climb some stairs to one of several small changing rooms lining the square perimeter of the first floor, all looking down on the central inner courtyard.  The whole place is pleasingly similar to the Bathhouse as imagined in the Japanese animated film Spirited Away. I feel I have hit the authenticity jackpot.

Stripped down to a small waist towel, I make my way to the hammam (a large, high-domed sauna room, uniformly lit in a yellow haze) and gingerly lie down on a huge circular stone slab with a whole in the middle, like a sliced pineapple ring.  I have joined half a dozen men all laid out there in common, soapy purpose.

After a few minutes of sweating it out, and wondering whether I need to make myself known to someone, a burly and hirsute man in his late 50s enters and starts ordering me to move this way and that. Given everyone is wearing the same towels, I can’t tell who is meant to be scrubbing and who is meant to be scrubbed (there are no name labels saying “Hi, I’m Mehmet, how can I scrub you today?”). For all I know, this guy could just be another punter who’s taken a liking to me and decided to give me a scrub down (to this day, I wonder if the real attendant wondered in five minutes after I left and stood there, puzzled, soap in hand).

My attendant is the strong, silent type. A man of action. I doubt he reads poetry.  Without a word of introduction, he gets to work on me with matter-of-fact efficiency.  His vocabulary is limited to “sit” and “move” accompanied by impatient hand gestures like I should be able to read his mind. This guy does what he wants and how he wants. There’s no question of a dialogue, no “ooh, could you focus a little more on the lower back?…”.

At one point, he starts grunting, not in unison with his movements, just generally.  He seems to be communicating with another attendant at work and so they grunt back-and-forth (a sort of hi, ho, hi, ho, it’s off to work we go thing, but actually closer to “we are men! doing man things! we grunt!”). I easily resist any temptation to join in.

I’m sure that I only paid for a general scrub down and bath but my new-found friend seems to be also practising some amateur chiropractor skills on me. He folds my arms over my chest and pushes down on my rib cage like he’s performing CPR.  There are cracking sounds and not the good kind.  I consider grunting a little to indicate my discomfort, but worry he’ll assume I’m joining his caveman a capella duet, and be further emboldened.

At one point there is a surprise eruption of post-Neolithic dialogue between us:

“Good?” he asks.

 “Too much”, I say, and grimace for good measure.

 “Good” he replies.

I have no idea whether he assumes “too much” means “yes, that’s absolutely lovely, do continue sir” or he knows exactly what I mean and is a sadist for whom my tense reply has brought untold excitement.  Either way, I realise that communicating with him, verbally or non-verbally, is pointless and the only way to end this is to spring up and sprint out (or more likely waddle out, one hand wiping the foam from my face, the other clutching the child-sized towel to prevent a slip of dignity).

I decide to stick it out because I can’t bear the ignominy of anyone knowing (or just me knowing) that I can’t hack a traditional Turkish bath. I need to man up. Later, he sits me up and gives me a head scrub, pressing my eyeball sockets with his thumbs such that I fear my contact lenses will be permanently relocated to the back of my skull.

After rinsing me off he goes to get a dry towel and then summons me, holding up the towel outstretched as I approach, dripping. His gaze fixed upon me, I realise this is the moment of truth and he expects me to dispense with my wet towel and take the dry offering. I decide not to be squeamish, after all, we are all men here who understand the solemnity and tradition of the ritual. So I disrobe, deliberately turning as I do so to place the dripping towel on the side, so he only gets an eyeful of my backside – ha!  Little do I know that behind me are three other men standing there (punters? attendants? who knows?) who get the full frontal treatment.

My guy orders me back to my room to change (“up! change!”) and then to return to him forthwith with a tip (“down! tip!”). I oblige, and afterwards I hand him 20 lira (if not for the physical endurance test, then perhaps in grudging admiration of the undeniably effective economy of his vocabulary).  He seems pleased, shakes my hand, and a look passes between us as can only pass between two men have seen certain things together. Well, he’s seen more of me, more than any man will ever see (discounting any doctors performing a colonoscopy).

I emerge from the building into the night thinking that next time the Hilton version will do just fine.  Moments before, I see a nerdy young American man arriving and being ordered to his changing room. He carefully ascends the stairs with wide eyes darting about, obviously starting to regret his search for authenticity.  I feel for him.  The attendant definitely will.