Day 4 in Istanbul, when we are again inclined to recommend it to friends and family.

We stopped doing the hard-core tourist stuff today, visiting famous sites, etc. Instead, we just rode around the city via the tram … suffered through (I did, at least) a bazaar … killed another bottle of white at a rooftop bar while watching the sun go down … and discovered the Alley of Fine Dining, on our last night in town.

I realized today that I had been a little imprecise in my usage of the terms “exotic” and “Western” as they pertain to Istanbul, and I want to clear that up.

First, exotic. This place is exotic, by the standards of the States or even Western Europe or even Greece, which is the country just next door. Westerners will find the calls to prayer odd. Women with their heads covered, mosques here and there … all that is outside the daily experience of the West. Istanbul has all that, and that is exotic for someone from South Philly or Southampton.

But Istanbul also feels Western — European, in particular — because it has the same cafe culture, the same tiny dwellings and mass transit and little groceries that we in the USA associate with Europe. And the same ready availability of wine and beer, which is not a sure thing in much of the Islamic world.

So, on our last full day here, having done the Hagia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace, and having decided we Just Didn’t Care about the Blue Mosque (above, taken from aforementioned rooftop bar), we started by riding the nearby trams, which is really a ground-level metro/underground, from one end to the other. This was my idea. To see the less famous part of the city up close, and to do it while sitting in an air-conditioned tram environment.

We took the train over to the Galata Bridge to Kerakoy, and then on to the end of the line just a few stations later. We then took the tram back the other way, heading toward the western edge of the conurbation, and lasted about 25 of its 31 stops before realizing that 1) we were weary of the exercise and 2) the suburbs of Istanbul go on forever and are all equally dreary collections of multi-story housing units and the same small shops.

(One item of interest we saw, going and returning, were the ruins of the city walls built by Theodosius in the 4th century. The emperor enclosed himself a very large city.)

So, then, back to the seaside for a date with the Spice Bazaar. I normally resist bazaars of any sort, but I acceded to this one because it’s small-ish and because a lot of it was committed to spices, see … the old end of the Silk Road, and how aggressive can a tout be with paprika?

We ended up buying a lot more tea than we care about from a charming little rogue named Omar, a tout for a tea and spice shop. He got lucky with a guess that we were from California, insisted he had visited San Francisco and said he knew I was an American just from looking at me because I was handsome and looked like his brother. Clearly, a bold liar.

Sure, I will give some of the tea as gifts, but we didn’t need TL26 worth of it. Leah bought a few more knicknacks, and I bought a knockoff Besiktas soccer jersey (black and white colors for one of the Big Three hometown teams) at a nasty little place in the underpass from the tram to the seaside. It cost DL10 ($6.65), and what could go wrong with that?

We returned to the fish houses beneath the bridge, and this time they were busy, so the touts didn’t descend on us, and we got a fish sandwich for about $2.67 each. I hit a few bones (ugh) but the second sandwich was fine. (Leah switched with me.)

A note about language in Turkey. People here speak much more English than I was led to believe. Literally everyone in the service industry, save one aged cabbie, has been conversant in the basics, from waiters to barkeeps to taxi drivers.

Second, Turkish is expressed here in Latin letters, thanks to the modernizations of Ataturk in the 1920s. The letters here may not have quite the same values that they do in English, but at least you have a shot at saying a word correctly, having seen the word — which would never happen while looking at Arabic script.

Also, the Turks seem to have adapted something very similar to European words/spellings across a wide range of topics. A car is an “oto” and a school is an “ecolo” and a machine is a “makina” and a train station is a gar (like the French “gare”). So, even if you can’t pronounce Turkish words, you can recognize more than a few of them on signs or in newspapers. Which is handy, and also makes the place seem more like Paris or Madrid and less like Cairo or Riyadh.

After another siesta, we opted for one more rooftop bar, this one just up the street, catty-corner from the one we had been to twice before. This one charged a bit more for the Turkish white wine, but the view was even better (Galata Bridge as well as the Hagia Sophia), and the long puffy European clouds made for a marvelous sunset.

We then moseyed up toward the historical sites in search of a little doner kebab place with a good reputation (according to Lonely Planet, anyway), but found it was closed up, and went around the corner to a hoppin’ alley with about four restos doing very well, one right after the other. Leah had minced lamb kebab on an eggplant-yogurt-garlic sauce, and I suddenly went all veggie in a meat-heavy country and had couscous with spinach and porcini mushrooms. All nicely done, and the sense of a long, leisurely meal again brought up memories of Western Europe.

The manager/owner of the place chatted up the quartet at the table behind us, and he was talking about the election and the “dictator/president we have”, who would be Erdogan, whose party was returned to power last night, which may not be good for a secular businessman like him who sells a lot of beer and wine and makes lots of money off Western (but not so much American) tourists. Erdogan’s party is popular among conservative Muslims here, and the restaurateur took a shot at translating the famous Marx suggestion that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” and Erdogun is known for pandering to the religious. So we knew what he was getting at.

“At least it was election, and now we have four more years of Erdogan, and then we try again,” he said.

The restaurant reminded me of Rick’s Cafe Americain in “Casablanca” in that everyone was having such a good time doing things that might not quite be legal.

So, another good day. Some Oriental shopping, some Euro-style tippling and dining, some great prices, and a walk through quiet streets in warm but not hot weather, and a pleasant sense of being a lot closer to home than “Turkey” normally would suggest to a couple of Yanks.