Thursday in Istanbul

thursday started off with a good breakfast for me in the hotel. They offer olives, lots of dried fruits, cheeses, cold cut, cereal, hard boiled eggs, different breads (and a TOASTER), jam, and Turkish tea and coffee. It’s a good way for me to start the day. We slowly got ready, gathered our stuff and headed out.
It was cloudy, nasty and cold, but our plan was to take a short trip up one side of the Bosporus and down the other. It’s one of those typical tourist cruises for 1.5 hours.  But first we stopped at the tourist office to get more questions answered. Now we know how to go our respective airports using public transit. Sonia and I are headed back to Kazan but Fouad is headed out to Lebanon to visit family so we have to use two different airports.
We left the tourist office and got on the tram to go to the harbor. We bought our boat tickets but we still had 45 minutes, so we headed up into the spice bazaar. You can find everything here. Candy, cheese, pillows, kitchen utensils. It is an amazing sensory experience. The smells are wonderful, the sounds are exciting and confusing, and the crowds are overwhelming. I didn’t want to buy too much then because I didn’t want to drag a lot of stuff on the boat. But we did find a birthday present for Mathew, the head of the international department at school. He loved coffee, so we bought him the typical little canister that they cook Turkish coffee in.
It was spinning and cold when we got on the boat so I decided to sit in the enclosed part and Sonia and Fouad braved the elements. They lasted out there for about half the trip before they came in too. It wa foggy, so the trip was not extremely I,pressinve from the sightseeing point of few, but we did pass a fortress with a cemetery on a slope in front of it. This slope was steeper than anything you’ll ever see at Mt. Hope Cemetery!
After the boat ride, we took the tram and then the funicular up the hill to meet Sonia’s friend Serhat at the Taksim metro station. He loaded us in his car and drove us to the Asian portion of Istanbul. This was particularly exciting for Sonia, because it was her first time in Asia. It’s intersting that, although Kazan is hundreds of miles east of Istanbul, it is still considered part of European Russia because the city lies west of the Ural Mountains. But here, if you cross the Bosporus, you are in Asia.
Our first stop was a restaurant that served Kurdish food. Serhat ordered for us. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was so spicy and delicious and there was no porridge involved at all! There were all sorts of different meat dishes and salads, and the ever present bread. And everything was washed down with buttermilk. It is a very common beverage here and really does taste good after something spicy.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, unlike Russia where there is a playground for kids every 20 feet, you rarely see a playground in Turkey. Serhat confirmed this and also said that there are not green spaces in Istanbul. We walked around another area looking in store windows and eating pastries until we went into a cafe and had tea. We went back to the car and drove to Baghdad Street. This is THE exclusive shopping district in Istanbul. After walking, we stopped again for tea then sat there for two hours trying to download the IDs we needed to get into the soccer game on Saturday. It’s a complicated system because of politics. You must belong to the fan club before you can get tickets. You must submit a photo for the ID. You may only sit in the seat you have a ticket for.  Lots of very strict rules. After we joined the fan club, Serhat could transfer his tickets to us since he is going to be out of town for that day.  It finally worked and we finished just in time to walk to the Mexican restaurant for dinner. It wasn’t Tex-Mex and it wasn’t very spicy. It was the Turkish version of Mexican. Thecturkish food we had earlier in the day was much spicier.
We finish up our meal and our conversation and Sherhat starts to drive us home. We have to stop for a car which is stopped in front of us and, wouldn’t you know it, someone rear ended us. It wasn’t too bad. Not much damage to the car and my muscles were just a little stiff. Bu5 it took so long to do the paperwork so we got home really late again. Bed felt so good!