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Published: March 12th 2005
So I met up with the (in)famous Erik Pugner in a dorm room of a hostel in Istanbul. After having not seen each other for almost a year, his greeting was a simple "hey", followed by a "hey" in response. That's what I love about guy friends - no matter how long you are appart, you can just instantaneously resume.
I loved Istanbul from the get-go. It is a beautiful city, with water everywhere. It is big. Very big, but it doesn't feel like the teeming capital cities that I have visited in the past. Not mentioning cities by name or anything, but it feels nothing liek Cairo, for example.
We stayed in a toursity area of Istanbul called SultanAhmet, which contains such landmarks as the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Safia. Both of which are quite simply amazing. The Hagia Safia is quite possibly the most impressive building that I have ever seen.
Istanbul is cheap, but nowhere near as cheap as I thought it would be. I was sort of spoiled coming out of SE Asia. It is definitely cheap compared to the states, or to Western Europe. The funny thing is that Istanbul is so nice, that you don't really care how much it costs.
Erik happened to know some turkish folk living in Istanbul, so our first night we had fun, local style. Of course local style ended up meaning a trip to Starbucks, followed by a trip to an Irish bar in which we danced to old American songs, but that's neither here nor there. It was quite fun.
We did have an amusing incident with a chap who we thought was giving us directions to the starbucks, but in fact wanted to take us to a night club. In his limited english, he kept saying "Starbucks, yes. This way". He seemed surprised that we wouldn't go into the night club with him when we got there. We were running quite late to meet Erik's friends at this point, and didn't want to mess aorund with his nightclub. He also seemed quite surprised to find out that I am 29 and without a family of my own.
"Are you straight?"
Yes.
"Are you sure you aren't gay?"
Yes. Not gay.
"Why no wife?"
Long story, my friend. Long Story.
The next few days in Istanbul were pretty similar. Get up, play some chess. Or backgammon. Wander about, admiring scenery, finding dinner. Checking out sights. Often times we were greeted by friendly English speakers who wanted to chat with us, and bring us to their shopes.
We went to travel agencies.
We went to rug shops. We even went to the rug shop that Bill Clinton bought a rug from. Though we weren't exactly the sort of clientele that they were looking for... (Erik makes his living as an English teacher in a relatively poor country, and I don't really make a living at all right now.)
The travel agent that we talked to put together quite a nice 7-day package for us for about $350 US. We knew that we could do better than that ourselves.
And we did. In the last 7 days, I think we have spent double that figure, easy. See how much better we did?
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anonymous
non-member comment
You are inifinitely more productive than Erik.
Thanks for your earlier blog entries so I could catch up. While you may not update often, Erik has updated zero times (test entries don't count), so you are the winner. - Rob Meyer