Merchants in Istanbul

8/18/11
From my blog at http://greenglass2718.tumblr.com/post/9077703465/travel-blog-reflection-2

Merchants and restaurant owners in Istanbul rely heavily on their personality to sell goods. One cannot help but be accosted by numerous such men while walking down a street, within the distance of a block. They are extremely aggressive compared to the sellers at Mexican swap meets I'm used to in Riverside and San Bernardino, or of course normal American stores. Restaurant owners will shout at you, continue to shout at you if you keep walking, and shove a menu in your face. When we say that we just ate, they will ask if we can just sit down for a drink. If you enter a shop, the owner will try to engage you in conversation, as well as asking what you're looking for. Clearly one has to engage people on a personal level in order to be a successful merchant.

Some of them can be quite funny. Last night, on the pretext of my birthday, we went looking for ice cream after dinner. Walking past a stand, the owner made a cone on the end of his scoop and poked Kelli with it, intoning "Ice cream cone, yaaasss?" We ended up coming back to the booth, and he put on quite a show offering us a cone, pulling it back, adding another scoop to it, repeating, and finally pretending to almost drop it before handing it over. In terms of making money, the people matter almost as much as what they're selling.