A Tale of Four Cities, Part 1

Istanbul, Not Constantinople (September 4-8)

After about 24 hours of airports, flying, and schlepping suitcases and backpacks, we landed in Istanbul's Ataturka Airport late Thursday night. Our flight from London was only about half full. We purchased a visa before passport control (love the stamps!) and knowing absolutely NO Turkish, managed to find a "taksi" and get to our hostel. We wrote everything down in huge capital letters and even had a map with the location of our hostel, but our cab driver had to ask at least 2 other people. Definitely didn't make us feel confident about the trip, but we ended up making it there fine (probably paying about $10 more than we should have, but we're Americans, right?).

"Chillout Hostel," chosen by Andy, was in a great location of Istanbul. The neighborhood is Beyoglu - where all of the restaurants, shopping, and nightlife are. Most of the other hostels are in the historical areas so we definitely lucked out! We checked in, paid in full (which later turned out to be a big problem -- we forgot that we had put a 10% deposit down with hostelworld.com, and once we had paid, they refused to give that 10% back to us a couple of days later. Learned our lesson, I suppose). Chillout Hostel had no locks on the bedroom doors, no lockers in the room, and our room was probably 9'x13' with two bunk beds. Very cozy. It was dimly lit with lots of red paint, spraypainted/graffiti motif signs, and the tiniest bathrooms and showers I have ever seen. The showers were literally closets. You opened the door from the hallway and there was the shower! It was a little icky feeling so I'm glad I had flipflops.

Thursday night we were starving after travelling all day, but it was about 12:30 am (or 0:30 if you prefer...) by then. The hostel guys directed us around the corner to a Turkish restaurant with outdoor tables and a menu with photos of the food - good enough for us. Sitting in front of the restaurant was an older Turkish man who was SO excited to see us and seat us. He spoke about four words of English: "My name is," and "Pizza." We learned that his name was Ahzmeed (sp?) and managed to order iki (2) pizza. He loved saying the words "Turkish pizza" and giggled like crazy whenever we would try to use Turkish. Our guidebook had a meager phrasebook that helped us somewhat -- we would not have survived without at least trying to speak some Turkish. It's not like French, Spanish, or Italian, though -- at least with those, you can try to guess how to pronounce the words, or figure out what they mean based on whatever language you know. This is a whole new language family with different sounds and pronunciations, and no words even resemble those in other familiar languages. Plus, the only people who really spoke English well were at fancy restaurants or museums. That said, we definitely managed to learn numbers 1-29, please, thank you, how much, yes, no, chicken, please, and bye. If you would like a Turkish lesson sometime, I'd be happy to provide.

We also wanted to have a drink at this little restaurant, but in Turkish, the number one is "bir." You could imagine how this might present a problem. When we finally communicated our request, the look on Ahzmeed's face told us this was no easy feat. He seemed to be considering his options and finally motioned for us to move inside (speaking Turkish to us the entire time!). He moved us to a table behind another wall, away from the doorway so that we were not visible from outside! We weren't sure if he didn't have a liquor license, or maybe he couldn't sell alcohol during Ramadan (which was going on while we were in Istanbul). Then Ahzmeed left the restaurant, walked across the street, and bought 4 beers from a store! He brought them back in plastic bags and served them to us right there. Soooo sketchy but hilarious at the same time.

Our Turkish pizza finally came, and had some unidentifiable meats on it. We were hungry. Ahzmeed sat at our table the entire time and we somehow had a conversation without knowing a word in the other's language. I don't think I had laughed that hard in a long time... he guessed our ages (I was only 19, but Michael was 23, and Sami was 21 -- he stared at her chest while he was thinking of how old she is. whattt???), and taught us what the color of our eyes were in Turkish.

Let me pause to introduce the cast of this adventure:
Andy.

(eating a Kilbasa in Prague's Old Town Square in this photo) -- Wharton student, from Chicago, always willing to take a taxi and much less willing to walk, enjoys new foods and dark beer, and the common thread between the four of us... so he's what made the magic happen.

Sami.


(looking out onto the city of Prague from the Letna Park metronome, where a giant size statue of Stalin once stood) -- Econ/Math/Fine Arts, from Pittsburgh, my other half when it came to navigating, shopping, and ganging up on the boys, always willing to find something to eat as long as it wasn't pork (problematic when it came time for kilbasa and wurst), and my current next door neighbor at UCL. love her!

Michael.

(rubbing a statue in the Prague Jewish cemetery that is supposed to help women get pregnant) -- another Whartonite from CinnCinn, or da Natti, if you prefer; the resident gentile, the most easygoing one on the trip, eats only meat - no vegetables, and went on to his semester in Madrid at the end of the trip.


Anyway, back to Istanbul.

The first full day we did a ton of sightseeing - we saw Topkapi Palace, the Basilica Cistern, the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia, and even managed to take public transportation. The palace was just that - a humongous palace with crazy rooms and fountains and gardens. There was even a circumcision room! Nothing exciting going on there. The Basilica Cistern is this huge underground room -- think Luray Caverns meets Versailles. It was dark and wet, and had tons of old cement columns throughout. There was this weird column with a bunch of holes in it, and all of these Spanish people were sticking their fingers in and twisting them around and taking photos. We had no idea what the significance was but decided we should take photos too. Then Michael overheard their convo (in Spanish), and they said, "I don't know what that means, do you?" to each other. Ha!

Basilica Cistern (blurry....)

Hagia Sofia

sami and I covering up for the Blue Mosque

There were so many Spanish speaking tourists in Istanbul. We felt like we stuck out like a sore thumb as Americans there! We were very excited to hear English speakers, let alone Americans. It was kind of nice and felt a lot less touristy than many of the other places. The mosques were beautiful and huge, and architecturally impressive too (thanks to Sami, we had a mini architecture lesson at several sights). We had Turkish food for pretty much every meal - kebabs both lunch and dinner that day. The water there was very cheap, even in a restaurant. Food was pretty cheap out, too.... like $6 or $7 for a kebab at a restaurant, and like $2 or even less on the street! I could go for some "tavuk doner" (chicken on the spit....) right about now.

The public transportation there was very clean -- getting a ticket was confusing but we managed. There were just two surface tram lines for the whole city, and one funicular that just had stops at the top and bottom. Istiklal Cad is the main street through Beyoglu that was packed anytime of day or night. There were clothing stores and restaurants lining both sides, lots of little ice cream shops, and side streets filled with restaurants and little Cay (tea, pronounced Chai) and Nargileh (hookah) cafes. That night we went to two bars in Beyoglu -- one was on the fourth floor of a building, was very dark, and filled with pillows and low chairs, and Turkish people dancing. The second was a rooftop bar called Balkon, where again we were the ONLY non-Turks.

Having an Efes at Balkon

The view was amazing and the drinks were cheap, so it was a great night overall. The atmosphere seemed so relaxed and genuine the whole time -- a little different from what we're used to. Everyone was focused on their own friends and tables, and seemed to be having a great time with their friends. We got back pretty late to our hostel but weren't very tired, and played GHOST in our bunkbeds with the lights off. Thus began our game-playing habits.... from GHOST to Guess Who, to card games ALL the time, to guessing what time we would be somewhere... we kept ourselves entertained.

outside Chillout Hostel

More sightseeing the next day -- the Spice Bazaar and the Grand Bazaar! The Spice Bazaar was really cool - so many different delicious smells, and huge piles of bright colored powders. You could just come up to the basket and scoop some into a bag for yourself. They were also selling this Turkish Delight, or Turkish Viagra, as they called it, and we even sampled some. Nothing too exciting, but the boys seemed to like the sign next to it. When they say Bazaar here, they actually mean a covered marketplace.... like maybe the first malls? It's basically an outdoor market with very high vaulted ceilings, decorated with tiny little mosaic tiles. It's beautiful and airy, while still being sort of indoors. We went to the Sulimanye mosque afterwards, where we all had to put on skirts and scarves to cover our legs and shoulders (even the guys!).

It was beautiful and impressive, just like the other two. On our way out, we noticed a cafe with bean bag chairs in the shade, that served Cay and Nargileh. It was a beautiful day - what could be better? We relaxed for what seemed like all day. While we sat there, we heard the Muslim prayers over the loudspeaker - the mosque was right next door. That was one very different part of being in Istanbul - even though the government is secular officially, almost everyone is Muslim. There are mosques everywhere with big speakers outside, and sure enough, five times a day, we could hear the sing-song of the prayer leader and the low chants of the men inside. It was so loud, it consumed you while you were nearby. Kind of creepy, but it made for an awesome afternoon that day.

We made our way to the Grand Bazaar -- a HUGE indoor marketplace with antiques, rugs, food, jewelry, t-shirts... and tons of bargaining. The books all said to make sure you never pay more than 50% of the asking price, and we did try our best to follow through with that! We even learned our Turkish numbers, hoping they would take us more seriously that way.

That night we went to Reina, this fancy, chic, beautiful nightclub/restaurant on the Bosphorous. It was like 5 restaurants in one - we ate at the Turkish one. Serra, David's Turkish cousin, made dinner reservations for us so we got right in! We stayed as long as we could and it really started to fill up with beautiful people. We didn't know where all of the attractive Turkish people were until Reina. The bottle service was flowing and everyone was dancing under the sky... it reminded me of something in Miami but without the transvestite table dancers.

Our last full day we took a ferry up the Bosphorous river, which divides Istanbul in half (on the West, Europe, and on the East, Asia). The views were great - really cute little towns built on cliffs, palaces and mansions, and Asia! The ferry docked in Asia for about 2 hours at a complete tourist trap, but it actually wasn't that bad. We had seafood for lunch (whole fish!) and relaxed. In Asia! We couldn't get over that. We got back and the boys headed to the Turkish baths to be massaged and scrubbed... Sami and I explored Istiklal a little more and realized why we hadn't felt uncomfortable or hit on the whole trip. Now that we were on our own, it was more like what you would expect. Gross.

We went to bed early because our flight left so early the next morning.

It takes a reallllly long time to upload pictures onto blogspot so from now on, I'll give a link. The rest of the Istanbul pictures are uploading onto my Picasa site so stay tuned!