DRIPLESS TURKISH BANYOS

When I was writing yesterday about our tiny bathroom and the phantom drip, I couldn’t help thinking back to the very interesting bathrooms we had in our Istanbul apartment. We had two bathrooms and both of them were a surprise to us when we first saw what would be our home away from home.

I need to state first that this blog entry does not intend to be in any way critical of anything Turkish. In fact, we were very careful to keep in mind that while things were different from what we had in the US, we chose not to place a value judgment of “better” or “worse” on anything we saw or experienced. Sometimes we just shook our head at the differences, sometimes laughed at them, but we always knew that we were having the time of our lives.

Our apartment took up the entire sixth floor of an eight-floor apartment in a fairly modern building in an Istanbul suburb named Goztepe. The living room and dining room were side by side at the front of the building. Surrounded by huge windows, we could see the Prince’s Islands off the coast of the Sea of Marmara, a very interesting park directly across the street from our building and further on around, a view of the city. Our flat was modern. We had electricity, phone service, cable TV, western toilets, an elevator to take us up to our flat – and we had no complaints.

But the bathrooms were a surprise.

Directly across from the door that opened into our flat from the landing was bathroom #1. It was comprised of a sink, a commode and a washing machine in a room about the size of our bathroom here. It was an extremely handy bathroom, as you can imagine, but it had no character whatsoever. There was no built-in drain for the washing machine so a long hose attached at the back of the machine had to be hooked over the bowl of the toilet so the water could drain into it. The bathroom was functional; it worked and was certainly better than having to go to a laundromat (if one even existed.). There wasn’t room for a dryer, but there was a back balcony with clotheslines where we hung the clothes to dry. Our Turkish cat Tigger happened to like to sleep in this bathroom’s sink, so for all intents and purposes, this was a bathroom in name only.

The second bathroom, down the hall a ways toward the bedrooms, was our primary bathroom and was spacious enough to accommodate two sinks, two cupboards, and a square dance, if one were so inclined. What was amazing about this bathroom was first, the floor and the countertop around the sinks were of marble. That bespeaks elegance, but it was truly not a very elegant bathroom.

You will see from the picture that there was no unifying element in it that you could kind of decorate around. There was red tile, black and red tile, pink tile, brown tile, white fixtures, except for a black toilet seat. Even the marble was of two colors. The floor marble was a grayish brown and the sink marble of kind of an eggshell and tan. The one thing you could say for sure about this bathroom was that it was really, really cold. In the summer it was wonderful; in the winter it was hard to talk yourself into taking a shower or a bath because all that marble and tile took on the chill of the winter and didn’t give it up, even if the day warmed.

We did try to do a little decorating in the flat. We knew we would be entertaining people while we were there and wanted to have a nice-looking place. But there was just nothing we could do about that main bathroom. It was what it was.

The flat in Goztepe was our home for 19 months. We did have a few minor problems along the way. A new refrigerator we bought upon arrival lasted exactly 2 weeks before it broke down completely and had to be replaced. The first hot summer evening that we experienced made us decide to leave the windows on each side in the living room open all night to get some air circulation (Istanbul is more humid than Palm Beach, Florida and we had neither air conditioner nor screens on the window.) By leaving the windows open we actually experienced a cooler night, but in the morning we were faced with pigeons walking around our living room. And cleaning up after them.

As to water, sometimes we had water full of rust, sometimes we had no hot water, and on several occasions we had no water at all, all of which were problems caused either by the municipality working on the water lines in our section of town, or by the big boiler in the basement tended to by our kapiji (superintendent) who lived in the basement apartment.

But even with all the minor little glitches that we experienced, we never, ever had a drip, phantom or real, in our bathroom plumbing. Hats off to Turkish plumbers and plumbing.