Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad

33. CHAPTER XXXIII. (continued)

When you wish to buy a pair of shoes you have the swing of the whole street--you do not have to walk yourself down hunting stores in different localities. It is the same with silks, antiquities, shawls, etc. The place is crowded with people all the time, and as the gay-colored Eastern fabrics are lavishly displayed before every shop, the great Bazaar of Stamboul is one of the sights that are worth seeing. It is full of life, and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters, dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces --and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great Bazaar, is something which smells good.