Aya Sofia looks as grand as she always has, the Golden Horn glitters still, and the air smells of rosewater and fried mackerel depending on the wind. The souk vendors are just as agressive as they've always been, men with unknown motives loiter and take eye contact as an invitation to follow you, and the people-watching has never been better.
Not least because amongst the races and creeds from the world over, we also have a full spectrum of coronavirus-driven behaviours, running the gamut from just shy of full hazmat to those who still freely hack (productively, thankfully) and spit as they dodge traffic. Even on the plane I whiled away a good 10 minutes watching a girl with gloves puzzle over picking up her sandwich.
A cat cleans herself on a loom and I stop in to admire shawls of raw silk and cashmere. When I answer where I'm from I'm careful to qualify it with the time I've been away, but the shopkeeper has been following the news and knows several Asian countries have mostly got through the worst of this pandemic. Over chai, we find variations on themes of hospital-bed shortages, bustling-streets turn ghost town and stock-piling tins and toilet paper across the world. My seatmate from Iraq tells me how chilled those who live in the Middle-East have been thus far, they've weathered far worse violence and devestations in the recent past after all.
I dig into a workers lunch of tomato and chickepea soup with fragrant glutinous rice at the behest of a Golden Horn restaurant owner, and between instructing the electricians and making fun of masked customers, he shows me the spots near his village in Anatolia where 3 dump trucks of gold is buried, a chart deciphering Ottoman hieroglyphics carved on rocks above it, and the field scanner (much quicker than the traditional detectorist-sort, which draws attention from prying eyes and a host of many-times removed relatives with various ailments who suddenly come out of the woodwork) that he's going to get for this. بِسْمِ ٱللّٰهِ, I say - and really, bismillah, I should've said before I tried to resume this trip.