A Syrian kid and three Turkish kids

I took this picture the other day when I missed the company shuttle and was trying to make my way to the office on a late morning, after rush hour. 

I was crossing a footbridge - now a classic for Istanbul - to hop on a metrobus, which has also become an Istanbul classic with its own rituals as a mass transportation system. These include waiting at the correct place across from the imaginary doors of the approaching vehicle, making strategic plans on how to get a seat - a friend dropped her shoe while trying to elbow her way to a seat - with all kinds of people, fights, arguments, with its official discrimination against women not wearing headscarves and last but not the least its peculiar smell - I would not say body odor, or human odor or the incredibly natural aroma of sweat and armpit, but this clean aroma of Istanbul folks who are known to take extreme care of their personal hygiene, the flower-blended sweet metrobus passenger smell - another classic of Istanbul summers now. 

Where were we? Yes, I was on my way to a metrobus stop when I saw this scene. There was a Turkish family, or maybe Kurdish, one cannot know. When I say "Turkish" what I mean is a resident family, who lives in Turkey, a local family (it's interesting where we have landed in terms of Turkish and Kurdish). A mother with three small children stopped in the middle of the footbridge because the mother was fixing the shoelaces of her smallest one. Right across from them was again a small kid sitting on the ground selling Kleenex, what we call "Selpak" here. He could just as well have been offering to weigh people with a digital scale in front of him or could have been just plain begging. 

The three "family" kids were staring at what I am guessing was a Syrian child...