Istanbul, not Constantinople

This time with apologies to They Might Be Giants.

It seems that not-even-remotely-current chronicles of my life are becoming the New Normal around these parts. While I'd like to apologize (I do) and say it has been unavoidable due to the increasingly hectic and stressful nature of the way my separate endeavors are bearing down on me (I will), let me also, before we go any further, disavow myself of the responsibility to write about my life here more than actually living it (I have). My days have been jam-packed since I returned to Bulgaria, and next entry, I'll spin a yarn that will have excuses jumping right off the erstwhile electronic page. But for now:

It boggles my mind that with as much as I've had to do, I've kept my goal of visiting another country every month in some part of my mind other than the deepest, darkest recesses thereof, let alone intact. But when my friend from LA, Carrie, swung through this part of the world on her way south from Poland, I couldn't resist the chance to come along for the ride, considering the ultimate destination of her travels was Istanbul, a town I've heard so very much about and has been highly recommended by nearly everyone in the universe. So we went.

Carrie got into Sofia one cold, bright Saturday morning (last Saturday morning, in fact), and I belatedly picked her up from the train station. After a few small business items back at my apartment, we set out so I could give her the tour, one I've given numerous times by now, of my city for the nonce. After we returned, chilled and snowed on (but extravagantly culturally enriched!), we took the opportunity to rest up, engage in various frivolities, and prepare to head out to dinner.

Dining out has generally been a genial and pleasant experience here in Sofia, and this would prove to be no exception. The act of getting to the given arena of consumption has likewise typically proven to be of minimal tsuris, but on this fateful night, all sorts of precedents would be broken, this last one first and foremost among them.

We saw the restaurant on the map, got verbal directions, and despite the gnawing pit of uncertainty in my stomach telling me to be extra sure of where we were going--since I had never been in the neighborhood--we left amid much fanfare and hailed a cab. 15 minutes later, it dumped us out on an unmarked street, the two of us having good company in failing to know where the hell we were going. So we walked. And walked. Eventually, I tried asking some passing souls for directions, receiving as many different answers as questions asked. Phone calls to the rest of our party proved to be minimally fruitful. After having a protracted conversation in German with a more-or-less kindly old gentleman, we walked some more, had more conversations with the now-frantic other members of our party, and generally grew colder and hungrier out there in the night wind, nary a sign of civilization about.

To cut an abjectly long remainder of a story short, we ended up finding a second cab, had my friend Alberto tell the driver where the restaurant was three times, and eventually found ourselves in what appeared to be Nebraska, replete with rolling fields, barns, and still no sign of civilization. Assured by our driver that the restaurant we sought lay behind the nearest of said barns, we uncertainly trudged down the long, icy driveway, and an hour after we set out, were greeted by the blast of warmth and noise one typically finds in a restaurant on a Saturday night.

Dinner passed comparatively uneventfully, save for the kitchen forgetting my order, a spate of karaoke as we were all beginning to settle into the thought of leaving, and the heretofore unanticipated charge for same. Carrie and I, exhausted from our day, elected not to join everyone else at the club when the time for leaving truly was upon us, and we instead headed for home.

The next day dawned much too early for either of our tastes, but we weathered it the best we could by concocting an overlarge batch of pancakes that somehow, to our exultant surprise, turned into crèpes in the pan. Aside from taking care of some more business (including the almost-overlooked task of going to the bus station and buying our tickets ahead of time), we spent much of the day at my apartment in preparation for traveling, also venturing out to secure some banitsa, which Carrie had never before encountered. When the appointed hour rolled around, we were ready, and at 9 PM, we set off for Istanbul.

I struggled to sleep on the bus, and when we got to the border crossing, I was awakened from my fitful slumber to the most absurd border crossing I have ever experienced. For those of you who are not familiar with intra-European travel: It is easy, fast, low-key, and, best of all, free for those traveling within the EU and countries friendly thereto. But no matter how hard I set my mind to it, I simply cannot find any way to justify using such adjectives to describe this particular crossing. At 2 AM, we filed out of the bus, showed our passports to the Bulgarian exit officers, and were more or less quickly on our way. To make it as stark as I possibly can, I'll simply state that crossing into Turkey took our busload of 5 people an hour and a half in the middle of the night.

The Turkish government, wise to the value of the desirability of their largest city, have levied a €15 entrance tax, disguised as a visa, on visiting tourists. Before you get the wrong idea, this is not a visa that you go through any trouble (that is, any official trouble) to obtain. Told that we needed such visas to cross the border, Carrie and I walked a tenth of a kilometer in the freezing cold over to what looked like a border post. Told that the office we actually needed was another few meters past this one, we set off again directly for it, all the while afraid that our bus might somehow leave without us. When we got to appropriate office, we were greeted by a large, surly man, demanding our money for what turned out to be a sticker--direct from a ream of hundreds of other such stickers--that he placed on the last page of our passports. Background checks? Nope. Picture ID's? Please. Feeling stranger about the experience with every passing minute, Carrie and I raced back to our bus, which was thankfully right where we had left it, got on, and waited another hour for the geologically slow machinations of Turkish border security to deem us fit to enter their country.

After a few more hours, I was awakened yet again and told that we were in Istanbul. The time was 5:20 AM. Disembarking, we found ourselves in a seemingly-abandoned Central Bus Station and contemplated committing the cardinal tourist sin of waving down a cab, but we decided to stick it out and try our luck with the Istanbul metro.

In attempting to buy metro tokens from a machine that was completely devoid of any English whatsoever, we encountered the first instance of a phenomenon that would prove to be ubiquitous in our stay here: People being insistently friendly and helpful. Not that I've never experienced friendliness from locals before, but over the course of the next two days, we would be treated to myriad displays of kindness from complete strangers on a scale I have never before witnessed.

The destination of this particular anecdote is that we bought our tokens and took the light rail system (akin to Germany's S-bahn) to our changeover. As we stepped out of the station, the sky was just beginning to lighten in the east, and a startling call rang out from the mosque to our immediate left. The muezzins called the city to prayer as we spent the next half hour trying to find out where exactly where we were supposed to catch the tram that would take us to our hostel. We eventually found the station by dint of pure dumb luck, and after walking onto the wrong side of the platform, the security guard indicated that he would look the other way while we crossed the tracks to the correct side.

After a short ride to Sultanahmet Square, we debarked and again tried to find our way with limited knowledge of our surroundings. There was a moment, as the sun rose over the Blue Mosque, when I wondered if I was in a dream. But I was roused from my reverie by yet another friendly, helpful stranger who walked us to our hostel, and making a quick executive decision to try to catch a little bit of sleep while it was still possibly justifiable to be abed, I passed out in our room until 9 AM.

Never has a cold shower been more refreshing than the one I took upon waking up for the last time that day. After venturing upstairs (for this hostel, we were told, featured a rooftop restaurant), I sat--completely and utterly flabbergasted, my utterly delicious complimentary breakfast spread before me--overlooking the Sea of Marmara, wondering for the second time that day if I was in a dream and I would wake up to a life in which I would not be refreshed, fed, warm, and in a place with a sea beneath me, the towers of a mosque to my left, and another continent to my right.

Needless to say, our stay had gotten off on the right foot. From there, it was all just a matter of sightseeing.

Istanbul, straddling two continents, is essentially divided into three halves. Though we didn't get to cross to the Asian side (more on that later), we spent the two days that I was able to stay exploring almost the entirety of the European side, which is bisected into two parts by the Golden Horn. Our first day, we ventured around the Old City, in the southern half of the European side.

Our first stop was the Blue Mosque, which is, in my novice opinion, the second coolest mosque in the city.

It's blue inside.

 In the immediate vicinity thereof are the Hagia Sofia,

Right next door.

the Egyptian obelisk,

That's just the top third of it.

and the Basilica Cistern, a creepy-cool underground cistern that used to be a church.

Seriously.

After drinking in these sights, we headed up the hill to the area of the Grand Bazaar, a massive indoor marketplace (The Ottomans invented malls. Who knew?). It was there that we experienced, in full force, the juggernaut that is a Turkish sales pitch. Yelled at from every angle with "special deals" and greetings that would make the person with the lowest self-esteem in the world feel valued, we made our way through, around, and between a maze of shops selling anything and everything imaginable.

Mall.

Finally making our way out of this delightfully treacherous labyrinth of merchandise, we found ourselves again on the street, and hungry. Stopping for a lunch of the most delicious döner kebab I have ever had (though it is ubiquitous and quite delicious here in Sofia, the döner in Istanbul was just the best thing ever) at a streetside truck, we then made our way to one of my favorite things on this trip, Süleyman's Mosque.

Built for Süleyman the Magnificent and finished in 1558, it was meant to be the grandest thing in the city, and I have a hard time believing it wasn't, if it isn't still. The architecture is ridiculous, ornate on a monumental scale, and the whole thing has been incredibly well-maintained. The grounds house several smaller domes, which serve as mausolea for Süleyman, his wife, and the architect that designed the mosque. Check it:

Just exquisite

And beautiful

From the courtyard

Our last sightseeing stop for the day was the Spice Bazaar back down the hill. While it bore more than a passing resemblance to the Grand Bazaar, it was entirely dedicated to food, and, of course, spices. It smelled delicious.

Really delicious.

When we emerged, it began to flurry, and then to out-and-out snow, so we decided to head back to the hostel to warm up, rest up, clean up, and get some dinner, after which we retired, having been joined in the dorm by a couple of ERASMUS students from France and Romania.

The Blue Mosque in the snow

That night, I slept hard, having pieced together barely more than five hours of sleep the previous night and topped it off with kilometers and kilometers of walking the previous day. When I awoke, awash in sunshine, the dorm was deserted, but I once again ventured upstairs and found Carrie at a table, and we proceeded to repeat the delicious morning festivities.

That taken care of, we planned our day, I checked out of the hostel (for I was to be returning that night), and we ventured out. After securing my ticket home, we decided to spend the day on the European side north of the Golden Horn, the New District. Stopping to appreciate some of the sights we had missed the first day, we made our way to the Galata Bridge and crossed over the water.

Our closest and most trusted companion on this trip was Rick Steves' guide to Istanbul. I had never been exposed to the magic that this series of travel guides represents, but I quickly became a believer. After crossing the water, we decided to travel--backwards--one of the routes he recommends. So to get there, we made our way through narrow alleyways and up tiny streets, past Italian-built (!?) towers, little synagogues nested into the rows of houses, and an inexplicable number of music shops, to Istiklal Caddesi.

Seriously. The Genoans built a tower right in the middle of Istanbul.

The most inconspicuous synagogue ever

We spent the next hour or so moseying on down this shoppers' paradise, swarmed even at the midday hour, pausing only to try some new Turkish food. We eventually emerged, unrelieved of any money save for that we had spent on lunch, and went ahead with what had been our plan all along - to head to the bridge across the Bosphorus and cross into Asia.

Though it was not incredibly far to go, the walk still took us the better part of two hours as we lacked any definite idea on how to get there and what to do, other than to walk towards it and then walk across it.

At least, it didn't look far away

We eventually found ourselves in the shadow of the bridge, but discovered that we would have to climb away from the water for quite a way to catch the beginning of it. So, again haphazardly, we followed small side streets towards what we imagined was the entrance to the bridge. Eventually finding ourselves at the top of a Long and Winding Road with the motorway close to us but no entrance in sight, I browbeat Carrie we decided to climb the steep, snowy hill up to the roadway.

Emerging onto the shoulder of the highway, our goal was in sight, and with about 15 minutes of daylight remaining, we decided to go for it. Alas, 10 seconds into our jaunt onto what turned out to be a maintenance-access walkway--and not, as we had thought, a pedestrian sidewalk--we were halted by frantic whistle blasts issuing from a police car. Our desire for completing our goal being outweighed by our desire not to get thrown into prison in a country whose language we spoke not one word of, we turned back, and settled for some picturesque, though disappointing, photos of the Bridge to the Other Side.

Below the bridge

Looking across

Steeling ourselves for the long return walk, we headed back down into town, stopping for some baklava along the way, and caught a bus back to Istiklal Caddesi. Walking back down the way we came, we found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant where we got a three-course meal for 5 lira (coming out to US $2.50). We then headed back into the Old City, where we finished our day at a hookah restaurant, relaxing and getting a private show from a Turkish folk band who serenaded us until they figured out that we weren't lying when we told them we had literally no money left to tip them.

With that, though Carrie stayed for another few days, my stay in Istanbul was over. I headed back to the bus station, barely making my bus in time, and once we were past the border crossing, I was down for the count, waking up in my seat as the bus crawled through a whited-out Sofia.

What an awesome trip. I have seen some very cool places in my time here so far, but Istanbul is definitely at or near the top. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience in almost every way, and I am going to try to go back one more time before I have to leave this wild continent.

I will get us all caught up next time (finally!), and there is a lot to tell. So until then -