Istanbul

• Fritzandjenny's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Istanbul

Trip Start May 22, 2008 Previous
Entry Trip End Aug 20, 2008

  Istanbul, Turkey
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Well we had a bit of an adventure getting to Istanbul. We boarded our Alitalia plane headed for Rome. The plane taxied out to the runway, then just sat there. Eventually the pilot announced that the plane had lost all hydrolic preasure, and they were waiting for assistance to get back to the terminal. We got towed close to the airport, unloaded onto a bus, and got dropped off at the baggage claim area. All of the announcements were in Italian, by the way, so we were having a little trouble understanding what was going on, except that all the Italians on the plane were very upset. The upset Italians were pretty fun to watch, very animated and expressive. We collected our bags and were ushered upstairs to the ticket desk where we were almost instantly reassigned to a direct flight to Istanbul the next day. Our fellow flight-mates were not so lucky. It took several hours to get all of the passengers taken care of, then we were taken to a hotel in downtown Madrid. We got free meals while we were there, and the room was a definate step up from the hostel we were staying in before. It was a bummer to get a day stolen from us, but we were treated well.

So Wednesday we flew to Istanbul where Koyzat (Sara's husband) picked us up and drove us to their condo in a far suburb of Istanbul. Istanbul, by the way, is ENORMOUS. THere are over 10 million inhabitants, and the city covers about 600 square miles. Its the third largest city in the world. So yeah, huge.

It was so wonderful to see Sara and her little girl Amine. I am going to have to control myself to keep from talking about Amine the whole time as she was our main source of entertainment. She is 15 months old, and busy learning English, Turkish and Kurdish. She is saying alot of words, sometimes two together. She is a very charismatic person, instantly charming everyone she met, including us. Her favorite game right now is opening and closing things (in Turkish open is "ach", which she said ALL THE TIME.) So thats all I'm going to say about Amine, even though I could go on and on. Sara and Koyzat's condo is on the top floor of a 12 story building, and they have a great view of the sea. The condo is very comfortable, with a nice guest room they set up for us. They also have a couple balconies (very common in Europe) which we enjoyed.

Of course, as soon as we arrived in Istanbul we couldn't help comparing everything to Spain. The first difference is that Turkey doesn't have ANY pig products. To go from ham obsessed Spain to pork prohibited Turkey was a pretty drastic.
Another difference we noticed right away was the driving style. Spaniards drive very cautiously, even the bus and taxi drivers slow down as they approach an entrance ramp, waiting for a space large enough to merge into. They stay in their lanes, signal, and are incredibly talented parallel parkers. Turkish drivers have no sense of rules or regulations (at least, not that I could recognize). On busy traffic, the shoulders, the entrance and exit ramps and even gas stations are used as extra lanes. Drivers go the wrong way on one way streets and stop in the middle of traffic to pick people up. They also seem to park anywhere.
The next thing we noticed was the huge variety of women's dress. In Spain, women dress like they are going out, all the time. They are always wearing matching shoes and purses, hair done, makeup on, and often showing A LOT of cleavage. In Istanbul you would see many women in modest dress, with their hair covered by an attractive scarf. Others were all in black with black gloves and only their eyes showing through their head covering. Look the other way and you would see a woman in a string bikini, barely covering anything. The men, on the other hand, all dressed pretty similarly.
In Spain, prices were set and you paid whatever the bill said. In Istanbul, we discovered that foreigners often get charged more then locals, and Sara or Koyzat almost always talked the bill down at least a few dollars. Venders also have a bit more aggressive style in Istanbul, trying to engage us in conversation (in English) before pulling us into their stores, or even handing us a product, then asking us to pay for it. I found their techniques to be pretty amusing, but the best part was always when Sara responded to them in Turkish, and their demenor changed completely. I think they use different strategies with locals.
We mentioned (I think) in a previous blog that Spanish men are very active fathers. Well in Turkey, men LOVE babies. Everywhere we went men were making silly faces at Amine, pinching her cheek, offering candy or cookies, and genereally falling over themselves. People are also a lot more considerate in Turkey. On the public transit there are signs reminding passengers to respect elderly and disabled people, and they do. People give their seats up for Sara or Koyzat when they are carrying Amine. People were just generally more thoughtful.

The main reason that we were in Istanbul, of course, was to visit with Sara and her family, and we did a lot of that. People were often surprised to hear that we were happy to just sit around some days and do nothing. We did see some amazing things though. We went to the blue mosque, which is . . . well beautiful doesn't seem to cover it. The architecture is unlike anything else around, with its domes and towers. The inside in covered in tile work, and big open spaces. When we arrived, the call to prayer had just finished, and we were asked to wait while people went in to pray. We liked that. Several times in Spain we would walk into a cathedral (sightseeing) and there would be a mass in progress. We always felt rude, intruding on people's worship. So it was nice than the mosque officials were sensitive to that. People were also asked to wrap cloth around themselves if their clothing was imodest, so wo saw many people (girls and guys) with blue sarongs or blue shawls wrapped around their shoulders. I liked that tourists were asked to respect a spiritual place that way.

Leaving was very difficult for me. I won't see Sara again for about a year. Amine will be two and a half by then, and won't remember me at all. Who knows what my life will look like at that time.

Istanbul hotels Share

Previous Entry