Istanbul!

Alright, let’s get this out of the way right now, because if we don’t, I know y’all won’t be able to focus.

It’s Istanbul, Not Constantinople

There you go. Are you with me now? Is it out of your system? Or did I just break you for the rest of the day? Well… either way, I’m gonna go ahead and move on now, so, please just sing quietly to yourself and don’t disturb the rest of the class. To be fair though, I’ll probably have that tune stuck in my head all week now, too.

Alright, so… Istanbul was all kinds of cool (poetry not intended). We spent about 10 days in Istanbul, and this city represented the end of our European Vacation. You already know this, but I’ll say it again anyway, because I like feeling smart… Istanbul is the only city in the world that spans two continents. It is divided down the center by the Bosphorus (which means “throat”), and which is a strait of water that connects two seas. Generally speaking, all the tourist stuff is on the European side, though there are some nice things to see on the Asian side as well. Even the waterway itself is a tourist attraction.

We were fortunate enough while we were there to find 2 really awesome hosts with which to split our time. Not only that, but both were on the European side, and both were quite central to all this hip, happening tourist stuff.

Our first night in town, our first hosts, a couple named Angela (from Spain) and Berdan (from Turkey), took us out to a really cool roof-top bar with a very pretty view of the city. It was a pretty place with a lovely view, and we had really great company, and we were VERY happy to unwind after a super long day of travel.

I had read that the aquarium in Istanbul was one of the top 10 biggest in the world, and we got to go! It felt quite small at first with a lot of little tanks in a couple small halls. But then we got to the main tank, and it was pretty massive, and full of giant rays and sharks. It also had a really long tunnel right through the tank, so you could see the stingrays flying right over your head. We even had the best view when the diver came in to feed the sharks! They of course had the obligatory Nemo tank, but it was incredibly FULL of clownfish, more than we’ve ever seen. And the coral tanks were incredible, with one of the coolest fish we’ve ever seen:

We spent our third day having lunch with Angela. She took us on a ferry ride, across the Bosphorus, over to Asia. Yep… we were in Europe… and went to Asia… for lunch. On the ferry ride they even had tea service in fancy glasses!!

When we hit Asia, we walked through some very beautiful markets, with all sorts of fresh vegetables and fish all over the place. Angela took us to a place called Ciya, which specializes in small plates, you order a lot of a bunch of little things. We filled our table! And pretty much every thing we ordered was FANTASTIC! It was one of those lovely lunches with great conversation, that goes on forever. Since Istanbul was the cheapest city so far, we got to feel like millionaires and finally got to order without being stressed about the price. Yay Asia! Not to mention that I had the best cup of coffee in my life.

(tea on a boat)

(pretty markets)

(Jime and Angela)

(Piles of yummy food!)

(AMAZING fucking coffee!)

On a different day we went to the Spice Bazaar, which was very pretty, with its mountains of spices and teas and candies and Turkish Delight. Turkish Delight is basically a semi-soft, chewable candy that gets made in the form of big rolls, and then sometimes cut into squares. It’s usually filled with some mix of fruits (like pomegranate) and/or nuts (like pistachio). Our favorite was the pomegranate. :)

The annoying thing about shopping in Istanbul, though, or even just walking down the street, is that every damned vendor is AGGRESSIVELY trying to get your attention to sell you shit. And they try dirty tricks like asking you questions that gringos in particular usually feel COMPELLED to answer, just out of good manners (“Do you speak English? What’s your name? What country are you from? Excuse me, hello?… ). But if you even make eye contact, they win, and they won’t leave you alone. They will follow you down the block, trying to force you to talk to them. Now, if that’s as bad as it is on the street, imagine what it’s like when you go into a bazaar… and concentrate dozens of them in a very small space. You almost can’t enjoy the place! We wanted to take lots of pictures of what is really a VERY beautiful place, but if you even LOOK at somebody’s store, the harassment starts. In any case, we DID manage to get some very nice photos, and we even bought some very lovely Turkish Delight (from a very popular stand that specialized in candy), and it was DE-FUCKING-LICIOUS.

After getting out of the market in a hurry, we found some great Doner sandwiches to eat on a bench in the shade… under a tree… great idea until a bird managed to shit on BOTH Jimena and I with one poop! Once we managed to get cleaned up, we decided to drown our sorrows with some lovely ice cream cones that everyone was eating. WRONG. The ice cream guy was annoying, overcharged and tricked us, and finally, when we went to soothe our soul with sugar, they tasted AWFUL!! Who ever heard of BAD ice cream? It was so bad that Jimena actually threw it away because she could not eat it. WOW.

(Looks good, right?)

(WRONG!)

On one of our early evenings, we ended up meeting up with another couchsurfer, Ali. He was a guy who I had written to as a potential host, and who had even agreed to host us, but his offer ended up coming RIGHT after Angela had already accepted us, so we didn’t need the space any more. Still, he was a really friendly guy, and he invited us over to a couchsurfing dinner party he was hosting at his place. We went, and made some really yummy food, and had a great time meeting everybody.

On the way home from that though, is when the adventure began. Though we had taken the metro to get there, since it was after midnight when we left, the metro wasn’t running any more. Rather than take a taxi home, which we COULD have afforded there, but would have been somewhat expensive, he recommended something called a Dolmus. A Dolmus is sort of a cross between a taxi and a bus. That is, they are basically just mini vans, but they run on fixed routes. The stops are few and far between though, so they really cover a lot of area. Also, they’re very cheap. More than a bus, less than a taxi. The real adventure, though, is that they DRIVE like the most insane, coked-out taxi drivers you’ve ever seen in any movie. HOLY FUCKIN SHIT, that was a scary ride! This dude swerved left and right around traffic like a race-car driver! He dove in and out of traffic, cut people off left and right, and once even cut in front of a bus with about half an inch of clearance between the front of the bus on one side, and again with the back of the truck he was trying to pass in front of us. Oh, and of course, this was all at around 60 kph.

It took us somewhere between 1.5 and 2 hours to get TO the party with public transit. It took us less than 30 minutes to get within walking distance of home. These are moments when you learn to let go and relax…. practice Zen … nothing to be done about it. In retrospect, though, this ride was just about the best possible preparation we could have had for the driving in India.

Another day, we finally saw the Hagia Sophia. What an incredible place! The building is… SPECTACULAR! Inside and out. On the inside, it’s huge, and you can really get a sense of the architecture of the place. If you look at the history of the Hagia Sophia, one of the things you notice is that it’s mainly a history of construction, destruction, and reconstruction. It’s also partly a history of Earthquake engineering. The chapters of its history are set apart by one earthquake after another knocking it down and when there weren’t any earthquakes, you could count on riots or conquering nations to tear all or part of the building down. Pretty much every time they built it, they made it bigger and better. In fact, the building there now is actually the 3rd building on that spot, the first two having been completely demolished. But even in this building, there’s the one main dome that, after it fell due to an earthquake because it was too flat, the new architect actually made it TALLER, to support the load better. Making it bigger made it stronger. This architect is now considered to have been one of the first earthquake specialists.

The insides of the Hagia Sophia are also filled with an interesting mix of religions. The Hagia Sophia was built as an Eastern Catholic Basilica. It wasn’t until the Turks conquered Istanbul that they converted it immediately into a mosque. Fortunately, when they did that, they didn’t destroy anything. They just added in some stuff, like the little corner that faces Mecca, the big staircase up to the platform where the imams would lead the prayers, and of course all the lovely spires and minarets.

The decorations inside are also a very interesting mix. From its Catholic days, you’ve got all these really incredible gold mosaics of Christ and Mary and apostles. Then from the Muslims, who have a ban on graven images, you’ve got huge plaques with verses of the Koran, done in incredibly beautiful calligraphy from the master calligrapher of the time. And these are all side-by-side under the same roof.

Completely separate from all of that are these really beautiful lamps and chandeliers that hang down from the ceiling. They’re these really massive chandeliers, beautifully-made. But they are hung way down so they’re right over you head. So, they do a wonderful job of taking the massive height under the main dome, and bringing it down to fee like a more intimate space.

Right outside the Hagia Sophia is one of the coolest things we saw in Istanbul. Centuries ago, they built an underground water tank to hold enough water for the palaces and religious sites, and that water tank is still around! It’s a very surreal place… dark, cool and quiet, the complete opposite of the crowds upstairs. The place is a huge dark room, with beautiful columns that hold up the ceiling, and the bottom is filled with water. They built raised platforms for visitors to walk and get a sense of this incredible cavern. It’s not one of the most popular tourist sites, but it was really our favorite.

(In the water, they have Koi and other fish to keep the water clean.  Those are some FAT fish!)

(way in the back, on the base of two random columns, are these medusa heads.  Nobody is sure why.)

Right across the street from the Hagia Sophia is the Sultan Ahmet Mosque. It’s also known as the Blue Mosque because of all the blue tiles on the inside. The Blue Mosque is still an active place of worship, so, while it’s free to visit, tourists can only go in during certain hours. It was a beautiful building, the tiles were wonderful, covering all the walls and all the ceilings. Each one appeared to be made just for this space and the domes of the roof were lovely.  Also, the whole surface of all the walls are filled with some really incredible stained glass windows.  The most BEAUTIFUL light comes through!

Our host, during this later time, Aleks, was a very wonderful man. A much QUIETER man than is our norm, but this turned out to be quite refreshing. Aleks practices Tai Chi, and does Energy Healing and Ayurvedic medicine as his career now. As a result, his house is a tranquil, calm oasis in an otherwise bustling, crowded, loud and pushy city. Also, he taught me how to make Turkish Coffee, which I enjoy very much! I love how thick and rich the flavor gets when you do it that way. I also love that you’re supposed to cook it with sugar, so that a perfect Turkish Coffee (according to that guy on that one video I posted a while back) is “Black as night, sweet as love”. They say you know when Turkish coffee is done right when you can float a horseshoe in it. That’s my kind of coffee!

Oh, and Aleks is also an incredibly generous person, who really enjoys having people around him. He’s a VERY active host on Couchsurfing. While we were there, he got a call for an emergency couch from a German couple who were supposed to have arrived before we did, but who had gotten stuck. They are riding their bikes across the continents, and trying to hit as many countries as they can in between. Good for them! Well, they had finally made it to Istanbul, and needed a place, and he had offered them space earlier, so he told them to come on by. He had one more spare room, and they had sleeping bags, so it was all set.

They were very enjoyable folks, named Oliver and Sonja. On their first night, we all had a blast showing off all of our travel gear, since we were both on VERY long trips. We’re even heading some of the same places (for example, they’re also going to India soon… but since they’re BIKING there, it may take them a bit longer than our jumbo jet trip). They even made Jimena’s life much easier with a great software for sorting through photos, and I has cut many hours of editing for her. We hit it off pretty well, and expect to see them in Costa Rica in short order! Though, the bike path from Europe to America is a bit more complicated, so we’ll see how that works out.

(Jime, Aleks and Oliver)

Speaking of coffee, though, since I liked making Turkish coffee so much, I decided to buy my own Turkish coffee pot, called a Cezve. I’ve talked about it before, so I won’t go into detail here. But what matters is that we were told that the guy to get them from was this old dude in the very center of The Grand Bazaar, in the older part. After the insanity of the Spice Bazaar, we were less than enthusiastic about going to the much bigger Grand Bazaar. But that’s where all the souvenir stuff is. And the place is an experience that you must have, if you visit this city. So finally, the time came to make the trip.

If was every bit as insane as the Spice Bazaar. Fortunately, though, we had a bit better personal armor. We knew how to dodge the pushy sellers, we knew how better how to look at things without getting caught, and we had deadened ourselves inside to the urge to be polite when somebody asks you a question. We learned not to see people we did not WANT to see.

Side note: This actually had an amusing side effect. As we were leaving the Hagia Sophia, we were walking down the street and heard one of the now-familiar cries of “Excuse me, do you speak English?”. My ninja-like reflexes immediately came into action, and I looked away, as if nobody had spoken. Jimena had some sort of a spidey-sense, though, and peeked over. It turned out that the voice that I very specifically chose NOT to hear actually came from another tourist this time, and she was lost. Since Jimena still had the tattered hint of a soul left, she saw this, and we went over to help point her in the right direction.

Anyway… back the Grand Bazaar. This experience was every bit the insane, pushy, shiny, glittery experience we were expecting. Fortunately, maybe it was the off-season, or the time of day, but the place wasn’t QUITE as crowded as it could have been. Also, the hallways were a bit wider than at the last place, so there was more room to move around. But also, this time, we had some specific targets in mind, so we got to move with a bit more purpose. We knew when to look, and what to look at. We talked only to shop owners we wanted to, we got some ideas of the prices we could expect for the things we wanted to buy: little ceramic bowls, a very pretty and elegant line-drawing of Whirling Dervishes, and of course, my cesve. Well, eventually we got to all of the sellers, and I found the old guy I was looking for, and got a good deal on a coffee pot that is supposed to be functional as well as decorative (meaning thicker copper than the usual hammered sheet metal ones they sell to most tourists).

One of our last days there we decided to take a cruise on the Bosphorus. It was cheap, and I’d been wanting to do this ever since I put Istanbul on our travel list. I wanted to take a ride on the water that divided two continents. I thought it would be a lovely way for us to transition from the end of our European trip to the beginning of the Asian part of our trip. Also, I’m a total whore for boats. I just like any excuse to be on the water.

Well, we did it, and even bought the audio guide. The water was beautiful, the sky was perfectly clear, and the sun was shining brightly. And very, very hot. Holy shit, it was hot. But I insisted on being on the top deck (at least for most of the ride, I did let us go down one deck on the way back). Well, the audio guide turned out to be boring as hell, so we turned that off and just looked out. At that point, the ride became just a lazy, 1.5 hour cruise. It was pretty, but with nothing in particular to look at. I just enjoyed being on the water. Also, we saw some dolphins. Seeing dolphins is always cool. Holy shit it was hot, though.

(I’m on a boat!!)

For our final day in Istanbul, we went out to Topkapi Palace… the former home of the sultan. It was very pretty, and had lots of really beautiful tiles as well. But after seeing the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, the place was a bit underwhelming. It was in great condition, but it was mostly empty, and felt a bit like walking through somebody’s house after they’d moved out. Sure, a stupidly RICH person’s house, yes. But… I think they wasted some opportunity here. If they had set up some historic furniture or rugs or paintings or ANY SIGN OF LIFE AT ALL… it would have made the place feel a bit more interesting to us. Perhaps we were just a bit touristed out. Yes, they did have several rooms filled with treasure, including one display of one of the largest diamonds in the world, and many gilded thrones, some religious relics, and even some nice old garments. But, other than the garments, which were cool, and very pretty, we are not people who really appreciate jewels, so that bit was just lost on us.

In any case, it was a quiet day, and we wandered around, and it was a quiet way to spend our last day in town. Still, it was … again… fucking hot. And the place was mostly outdoors. So, we spent about half the day there, then went home to relax and cool off and have dinner with Aleks and Oliver and Sonja. Sonja made us a very lovely vegetarian meal, and it was the perfect send off for us on our way to India, where we’ve been enjoying lovely vegetarian food almost every day.

Well, I guess we’re all caught up now. Next up… India!!