While we were walking home from the park, I saw this scene and grabbed my phone from my bag to take a picture. It encapsulates so much about our daily life here, apart from the fact that when there's a car or lorry blocking the road, the queue of vehicles is usually quite a bit longer and involves multiple drivers beeping their horns repeatedly. Also I was a minute too late in capturing the water delivery guy on a motorbike who got around the lorry by riding his motorbike onto the pavement.
The streets in our part of Istanbul are mostly narrow, one way streets like this, with apartment buildings rising sharply up on each side. I think each apartment building is meant to be self supporting. However, whenever I see a building that has been knocked down to rebuild in its place, there are almost always wooden beams stretching across the space that the apartment used to fill, bracing the apartment buildings either side. You can see straight into your neighbour across the road's flat if neither of you have net curtains drawn.
The narrowness of the roads and lack of parking means that if there are any deliveries to be made to an office or house on the street, the van will just stop outside for as long as it takes to load/unload and any cars behind will just have to wait (or reverse).
The roads are technically one way, as in there is a 'no entry' sign at one end. In practice, the no entry sign seems to mean 'no entry unless you are (a) on a motorbike; (b) reversing up the street; or (c) driving fast to make it to the other end before a car comes down the road the right way'. Although I did just look at this photo and see that the van blocking the road is facing the wrong way and doesn't seem to fulfil any of the exceptions, but there's always an exception to the exceptions.
And then there's a man with a horse and cart selling melons. The horse and cart isn't a really common feature of life in our part of Istanbul (this is the only one we regularly see) but people pushing hand carts down the street to sell filled-bread-type-things or the rag and bone man shouting "esskiiiiciiiii" (which translates as 'rag and bone man') is a pretty common sight. Incidentally the horse and cart remind me of Bradford, where rag and bone men on a horse and cart can still be seen (at least, they could 18 months ago).
Our life in Istanbul :-)
