...we pay the guy up front and flee, stumbling to the curb hastily as he pulls away in a huff...
Gathered on the pavement in front of the Grand Bazaar, we take a moment to collect ourselves. Chris's eyes are glazed over.
"I haven't had a cab experience in this country that's been right," he says. Nicolas nods agreement. I can only shake my head in disbelief at the winding, circuitous hell ride our cabbie had just led us on to get to the Grand Bazaar. It takes real balls to start reversing in stagnant traffic on a one-way street, beset with pedestrians, motor bikes, buses, and lawless renegade cabbies in a hurry to get twenty feet further...
Chris is still a bit shell-shocked. "Every five minutes it seems like you're about to die." He's right, of course. Numerous imminent collisions had peppered our eventful ride from the hotel.
Nicolas speaks, in his gloriously refined francophile English. "Did you see the bus yesterday? It got hit twice on the way to the museum yesterday, and the one left a huge black mark on the side."
I had seen the mark, and had felt the brakes jerk, and had heard the crunch of impact. In the driver's defense, it was an impossible route up a steep alley-width cobblestone road, filled with other vehicles. But Nicolas was right. I grew up in Bangladesh, amidst rickshaws and tempos, and Chris Chiu has spent countless years in Bangkok dealing with doped up Thai tuk tuk drivers...but neither one of us was really prepared for cabbies in this city. I hereby concede that Istanbul's cabbies rank right up there with the world's best when it comes to endangering their own lives, committing blatant acts of disregard for the flow of traffic, and scaring the living snot out of their passengers. props, folks... a dubious distinction, to be sure...
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