CH 8: The Cherry Man Backstory

The Cherry Man is set in Istanbul and based upon a trip I took there in 1994 with a buddy from Intel named Phil Clark. Paul is a thinly veiled reference to Phil. In fact, Phil is a writer as well, and his alter-ego in his writing is named Paul, so I stole the name as an inside joke. It’s so inside, no one would ever get it on their own. Check out his blog which has lots of cool local color from his perch in Mexico.

Istanbul was great, as was the rest of Turkey. The story chronicles an early morning walk around the city, culminating with lunch near the Grand Bazaar, and a finale of cherry juice from a street vendor. I really wish I had taken a picture of the Cherry Man, but I didn’t. I had to settle for something from Google Images (see below – it was originally from Etsy.com). At the time there were a number of men walking about with juice in cannisters on their backs. This picture does a decent job showing what that looked like, though by my recollection, the cherry men weren’t dressed so grandly as the man in this particular picture.

Throughout the end of the story, McGhee and Paul had Apple Tea in a tea set peculiar to Turkey. The picture below (also not mine, from Google Images) is rather similar to the set described in the story. This is a minor detail, but it does represent the locality of the adventure and manifestation of an alien sensibility.

In the early morning, the minarets of the mosques were silhouetted against the sky. It was beautiful and further cemented the notion we were not at home. The picture below was the actual view from our hotel room:

As noted in the story, we saw fisherman bringing in their catches for display by the Bosporous (the water strait at Istanbul):

One thing I think I forgot to mention in the story was that there were quite a few feral dogs roaming the streets, especially near the water. Here was a pic of them:

They weren’t aggressive, but they were certainly willing to accept food contributions.