I'd like to think I would've been put off by its website, with its cascading stars and rendition of 'New York, New York' by somebody's Uncle Iqbal on his portable organ.
However, the hotel's brochure looks decent enough. It even advertises itself as a venue for business conferences and wedding receptions. Okay, so the woman in the photo at reception doesn't look like she's got anything on under her fur coat.
But there's no mention in the literature of the metal detector on the front door—and there's certainly no indication of what happens in the 'American Bar' at night.
Mehmet and I pay the entrance fee (30 lira with a free drink), and we're escorted through the darkness to a table near the dancefloor.
Naturally, our chairs are black and the column next to us is mirrored, but the lights in the bar have an odd shape.
They're clam shells—the bulbs are pearls—and they're synchronized to flash red, green and blue, changing color with the lights on the dancefloor and the decorations on the wall: backlit images of naked women in me-so-horny poses—gloved, booted, bent over, spread-eagled and in one case even washed up on a beach.
Bizarrely, a couple of these adorn the ceiling—why up there?—but the one I'm staring at shows a glamour girl with her hands tied behind her back, a rope around her ankles and leather straps around her bare breasts.
And I suddenly imagine myself newly arrived in Istanbul, coming down here to breakfast the morning after a late flight, thinking, That would explain all the thumping next door last night.
And as these nudie images wink and blink around us in synch with the clamshell lights, illuminating the Turkish talisman on the far wall that protects against the evil eye, my mind free-associates to what I've read in Sexuality in Islam—'an unshaven vagina is readily compared with an evil eye'—and I can't help but wonder about the girls on the dancefloor.
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