wedding in Istanbul

The wedding in Turkey was lovely. Jean and Vincent, both ancient near east scholars and archaeologists were excavating in Turkey and Syria prior to meeting in Istanbul to prepare for the wedding. I flew in just a few days before - they had already done all the floral research. The flower market is in Taxim square, where i took a taxi on the morning of the wedding, holding a hotel card with return address. It was hot there in the morning and afternoon, so i wanted to get to the market as early as possible before flowers started wilting. There are maybe 7-10 kiosks with men and women sitting behind rows of roses, chrysantemums, lysianthus.... and that is pretty much it. They were yelling 'madam' to me and trying to grab my hands to prevent me from visiting neighboring kiosks.Two of the ladies got into a fight over the flowers i was picking. I had to ask them to write down how much i owed. In the end i shoved back into a taxi with 4 bunches of lyshinathus, at least 150 stems of roses, 25 stems of casa blanca lilies, and an anthurium plant for Jean's bouquet. Jean's bouquet of white lysianthus and red anthurium turned out well, I thought. Certainly the tonn of ribbon I got for any eventuality came in handy.