No Hats

Since the weekend is the only time to shop and I was getting tired of having a Swiss Army knife and plastic cup from the bathroom as my only utensils, I decided to devote today to outfitting the apartment. Another teacher who also just arrived went with me. Our first stop was the bazaar in the center of town. We think we found it. It wasn’t all under one roof like I’d expected, but the streets were all were all spanned by cast iron arches with small lights and I seem to remember they were pedestrian only. There were literally hundreds of small shops selling just about anything you could want. So if it wasn’t THE BAZAAR, is was a close approximation. We made some purchases (another story) and headed back to the apartment building.

The second leg of the shopping foray took us in another direction, to the Migros and Carrefour megastores. They looked pretty much as I remember them from their home countries, Switzerland and France, respectively. Anyhow, as we started our hike to the bus stop, I lamented that I hadn’t brought along my straw hat; even a billed cap would have helped as the sun was quite intense. My fellow teacher commented that he’d seem people wearing straw hats and I could probably buy one.

I took the third leg of the journey by myself. By then I remembered I had brought my floppy brimmed birding/hiking had and was wearing it. However, I put “straw hat” on my list and then began looking to see if anyone actually wore such a thing. Actually, I didn’t see anyone wearing any kind of hat or cap. Some of the women wore headscarves, but none of the men sported any kind of head wear, not even the otherwise ubiquitous baseball cap. I was surprised because the sun in Gaziantep is quite intense, and you’d think you’d want something to shade your eyes. But I guess everyone here is used to it.

By the way, people noticed my floppy hat. A young women sitting across from me in the bus and wearing a scarf herself commented through the young student sitting next to her that my hat was nice. She was full of smiles and chatting away like I understood everyone word. The student could translate some of it.