Part 3: The Real Istanbul April 10, 2008

Saturday morning we started off the day with the great hotel breakfast, a stop at the internet cafe, and then onto the metro towards Dolmabahce Palace. This palace was completed in the mid-1800s and the rulers lived there until the Turkish Republic was formed. This palace was built in the European style and was therefore a bit more exciting for us. Unfortunately you could only go on a guided tour, and by the end of the one and a half hours we were so ready to leave. The fun part was that they made us put on little plastic booties, to walk on the carpets they had put down so that we didn’t walk on the original parquet floors. Outside of the palace they also had a soldier standing guard who was not permitted to move. Of course we took the classic tourist picture with the guard. After we had taken our picture a second guard came up and had to wipe the sweat out of the first guards eyes, it was pretty cool to see.

We then walked back to the metro and took the tram to the old city to the point from which the ferries depart. We were going to catch a ferry to a town up the Golden Horn called Eyup. Of course when we finally figured out which dock it was it turned out we had just missed the ferry and would have to wait another hour. So instead of getting lunch in Eyup we tried to get lunch at the ferry docks. The only places of course, were a traditional Turkish treat which I had previously mocked in my guidebook. Fisherman will catch fish, then fry them up in their boats, and serve them in sandwiches. The sandwich was only 3 lira ($2.25) and it wasn’t too bad. The only problem was that all of this fish juice had somehow gotten on my hands and they smelled like fish for the rest of the day. At this point we also saw a lot of other vendors. Including one for what I can only assume is some sort of Turkish thing: beet juice with pickled cabbage and pickles. I saw a man drink a pickle, it was not appetizing.

We then went over to our ferry dock. The ferries pull up to the dock and don’t even tether in any way, you just walk up these metal steps on the dock and hop onto the ferry. The ferry ride was really nice because it gave us a chance of a different view of Istanbul. When we got off the ferry at Eyup we sort of realized we had wandered off the beaten path. Everyone around us was wearing religious garb (though some women were wearing pants) and there were no non-Turkish there. In addition, no one spoke English. Not even broken English. We really got to practice our pantomiming. On our way to the Eyup mosque, we passed through a real Turkish marketplace where Turks were actually shopping (not just tourists). They were selling religious books and movies, and also silk head scarves. The scarves were only 5 lira each, a real bargain, and we couldn’t help shopping again. The mosque itself was not that exciting. What was kind of cool was that we saw a wedding procession walking into another room of the mosque. The bride was wearing this really out-there polyester-looking wedding dress, which of course fully covered her body and included a head covering.

After we were going to walk to a church which the guidebook said some visitors considered the highlight of their trip to Istanbul. So when we discovered this meant about a 1 mile walk uphill along the side of a major road, we were okay because we figured it was going to be an awesome sight. One problem we faced in getting there was that the maps we had either didn’t have all the streets that existed, or showed street names when we couldn’t find any street signs, so it was sort of hard to navigate. We did finally reach the church, but it was not a highlight of our trip. It had a lot of very detailed mosaics which still remained, but it was not nearly on the same grand scale as say, the Aya Sofya. We then walked back to a ferry stop, through about a mile of twisting neighborhood streets. It was really neat to see the neighborhood and see what Istanbul looks like when it’s not being presented to tourists.

Of course when we arrived at the ferry dock we were told that the ferry was an hour away. The guy did however give us the numbers of several bus lines that would take us to where we wanted to be. So we waited for a bus and one came almost instantly. The lovely part about Istanbul busses is that they will apparently start driving away while you are standing on the steps at the front when the door is still open. Then of course the drive was so uneven we had a hard time holding on. We happened to miss our bus stop, but were eventually able to navigate back to the tram. Then it was back to our hotel for our afternoon naps.

Dinner wasn’t that great. We had looked around for somewhere to eat more towards the central area outside our hotel. Unfortunately we only found all of the really great places after we had eaten dinner. One of the streets near our hotel was this really cool pedestrian walkway shopping area with a lot of great restaurants and cafes. It was really crowded and a definite direction of traffic was established on each side of the walkway. It was kind of an adventure every time we wanted to cross to visit a store. A little personal highlight, I was able to have Starbucks coffee for the first time since being in Israel. Of course the menu was in Turkish so I ordered the only thing that was the same in both languages, a cafe mocha.

We also went to a cafe for dessert. We were very adventurous and each ordered something off the menu blindly. We also ordered Turkish coffee because, even though you can get it in Israel, we wanted to be able to say we’d gotten it in Turkey too. The desserts were absolutely delicious. We then walked around to get our souvenir bottles of Cola Turka, and souvenir metro tokens. We then made our way back to the hotel and went to bed. We had received a fax which told us to be ready the next morning to leave at 7am. Since breakfast normally started at 7 we thought we wouldn’t be able to eat anything. Of course when we got downstairs at 6:45 we found out there was breakfast. So we raced over to eat something, because we were nervous about missing the bus again. But everything went okay, we got to the airport, checked in, boarded the plane, and were back in Israel in no time.