The pazars (markets) in Turkey are an endless source of fascination for me. It really doesn't matter how many times I go, or how many different ones I go to, the pazar has not yet lost its magic.
The people are what make the pazar so special. They're hardworking. They're fast. They're also extremely knowledgeable about what they sell. They're young. They're old. They're mostly male, but sometimes you'll see a woman behind the counter.
Sometimes certain people catch your eye.
See that kid in the top right corner? The one with his lips open and pursed?
He's yelling out to passersby that his fish are the freshest, best, cheapest. That you wouldn't way to buy your fish anywhere else but there. As soon as a customer calls out what he wants -- a kilo of levrek, half a kilo of sardines -- the kid is at work in a flash.
He doesn't bother to remove the cigarette dangling from his lips as he cleans and guts the fish. Inhaling the smoke on one side of his mouth and blowing it out the other, his hands move rapidly, scraping, cutting, jabbing, pulling, turning. I wonder if the ash from his cigarette finds its way into the fish....?
He looks like he's been doing this since he was a kid and will likely keep doing it until he's an old man. He looks as if his skill was learned from watching his father or an uncle do the same thing in the same location year after year. I wonder if the kid has health insurance and paid days off. Somehow I doubt it.
It's repetitive work, selling fish. Eventually, I imagine that all the fish start to look the same. I wonder if the noise of the pazar becomes as comforting as silence. Like laying in bed after spending the day at the beach, watching and listening to the waves crash against the shore, I wonder if, when the kid finally turns in for the night, he can still hear the yelling and the bartering and commotion.
I wonder all these things. How old is he? 16? 19? 23? Probably somewhere around there, I guess. I wonder about silly things, like if he has ever been to the dentist and if his parents speak Kurdish and if he wishes he were doing something else right now. I wonder if he is nice to cats. I wonder if he is a university student studying mechanical engineering and is helping out his family for the week. I wonder if he will do this every day for the rest of his life.
The thing is, in Turkey, you never know with people. All of the assumptions, the baggage, the preconceived notions that you come here with from your home country, they just never match up with what you see the way that they might at home. A lot of times you're left just to wonder.
