Team HU is recently returned from a two-week jaunt to Europe, taking in the sights of Tuscany, Rome, and Istanbul. I had been looking forward to this trip for a looooooong time - a decent spell out of the office was much overdue in any event, but specifically there was something I was longing, with the fervour of a medieval pilgrim, to see. Was it the two-millennia old majesty of the Coliseum? No. The breathtaking beauty of the hilltop city of Montalcino, in the heart of Brunello country? Nah (though the wine was very much appreciated, naturally). The Blue Mosque? Nope. The sun setting over the Bosphorus, bathing Istanbul's hundreds of minarets in a rose gold glow? Er, no.
It was, of course, Kürkçü Han, the fabled Istanbul yarn bazaar. Some dedicated Googling in the months leading up to our departure had suggested that, although fiendishly difficult to locate, once discovered it would prove to be a treasure trove of bargainacious yarny delights. And boy, it didn't disappoint (on either count).
So, first things first: finding the place. I pride myself on having an exceptional sense of direction, and my childhood years spent completing brutal 'character-building' treks in the soggy windswept Welsh mountains (everyone loves an English private school education!) have instilled in me, among other things (primarily pathological aversions to camping, cattle, and pot noodles), the ability to read pretty much any map. But man, this place was a pig to find, even with the magic of an iPhone. I tramped the insanely populated streets around the Grand Bazaar for what seemed like hours, watching my little blue blob circle the pin that purported to be my destination and feeling like I might as well have been trying to find Kubla Khan, or Atlantis, or the hanging gardens of Babylon.
Fortunately I am not one to give up, particularly when there is yarn at stake, so for any of you who follow in my footsteps here is a picture of the map with a pin stuck in it when I was standing in the middle of my destination...
..and here is a picture of the entrance from Mahmutpaşa, one of the main drags leading down from the Grand Bazaar (out of sight in the above map but immediately to the north of the pin) to the Eminönü ferry terminal. The green neon sign with the arrows on it is pointing to the passageway entrance to the bazaar, but you then need to take the stairs up one flight (unless of course you are interested in 1950s style polyester nightdresses, of which there are an innumerable quantity on the ground floor in an epitomising example of one of the very many moments of "Who the hell actually buys this stuff?!?!" that a shopper in Istanbul will inevitably encounter).
Once inside, it's a completely overwhelming experience, with shelves and shelves and shelves of yarn from floor to ceiling throughout three quarters of the first floor of the building.
Turkey is the seventh largest producer of raw cotton in the world, as well as being responsible for the development of cutting-edge technology in the manufacture of synthetic yarns, and consequently a lot of the stock is either cotton or acrylic. Amazingly though there does seem to be only limited overlap between what the different shops each carry so you do actually have to go into each one to make sure you've not missed anything! That may not seem like a hardship at first, but after an hour of it, dealing with the total sensory overload of the choice available and the crazy haphazardness of many of the displays, being talked at in Turkish (not a soul in Kürkçü Han speaks any English, but everyone does assiduously take what I had previously thought of as being a quintessentially English approach of talking VERY LOUDLY AND SLOWLY IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE as if treating their audience like a small, slow, child would somehow remove the language barrier), and in baking heat, even I, a three-star general in the Shopaholic Army, was beginning to flag.
That said, boy oh boy it was good...
...and cheap, with unbranded yarns being priced by weight at the princely sum of 10 Turkish lire a kilo (about USD 3.50 for 2.2 pounds, for those who only speak imperial).
Needless to say, I bought as much as I could carry. Rather more than I could carry, in fact - when I got back to the hotel I had very sore arms and so many bags I had to get the valet to bring them up to our room!!!
At this point I have a small confession to make. After I bought everything in the picture above, I went back - ostensibly to take more pictures of Yarn Heaven - and bought more. "Oops!". What can I say, it's an illness. I can't be held responsible for my actions.
Somehow I managed to get it all back to Singapore (helped by some more forward planning in the form of the purchase of two giant plastic laundry bags in Chinatown before we left, not to mention my frequent flyer extra baggage allowance), only for the realisation to dawn that I had nowhere to put it, and as a consequence a substantial part of Sunday was spent acquiring, constructing, and filling new storage units.
So there we have it. 15.5kg of yarn (plus a little pre-existing stash that was in need of a home), all neatly shelved. I have literally zero idea of when I will ever find the time to use any of it, let alone all of it (particularly bearing in mind my recent slight deviation from the One True Path of Existing WIP Completion, rationalised (completely justifiably of course) by the 'I'm on holiday so it doesn't count' school of thinking), but that's hardly the point, right? It looks pretty, and that's enough for me.
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