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Published: August 16th 2008
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Today turned out to be museum day. First we went to the Archeological Museum, which Art wanted to see. Silmarien enjoyed the seals (small ceramic cylinders that are rolled in warm wax to provide a "signature" guaranteeing a trade good -- especially used over the opening of a bag or chest as a sort of tamper-proof indicator, which I thought was pretty smart) and the sarcophagi and the reconstuction of the Trojan horse (child size, including ladder and window).
Then we went out to the docks to get a ferry to Princes' Islands, where you can rent bikes to pedal through the pine forest (according to the guide book). After several choppy conversations in Turkish, we established that we were at the wrong docks (so much for the guidebook) and the right docks were a couple of miles away. So we finally decided to take the plunge and learn the metro system. This turned out to be easier than it looked -- there is one token and one price for anyplace you want to go, and the stops are shown on light boards in every car. However, it was very crowded and difficult to
get on and off, which is always worrisome (once we actually did get separated on the metro in Paris...)
We arrived in good condition at the correct dock, which was equally busy, only to discover that the ferry had left 5 minutes earlier and the next was not for 2 hours. Sigh. So we looked at our guidebook map and thought, well, we're only a few miles from the Galata Tower and the Industrial Museum. We can walk that! First about a mile on a boulevard next to a highway, that was OK. Then a half mile on increasing tiny streets up a very steep hill to get to the center of the penninsula (aha, starting to understand why Istanbul has only been conquered twice...) We stopped for Italian ice cream, then headed back down the other side of the hill to what looked on the map to be a boulevard following the seacoast. Unfortunately the narrow coastline has been usurped by the military, and normal people have to walk a quarter mile inland -- up and down the cliffs ! (Another reason Istanbul was so impregnable...) The first half mile took us an a foot-wide sidewalk along a
two-lane highway. Definitely not approved by the Department of Highway Safety. At the first break in the road, Art and I turned to each other and said simultaneously "we need a taxi".
Wow, taxis, why does that never occur to us? The museum was farther than we expected, and everyone agreed we never would have made it there on foot. The museum turned out to be really cool, lots of historical examples of every kind of machine from the early 1800s on. Small scale working models of every kind of steam engine you can imagine, all sorts of clocks (for example, one that worked by a steel ball that rolled along a winding track with one second intervals marked off -- the ball triggered a gear every 15 seconds which flipped the direction of the platform it was rolling on and also changed the time readout). Cameras, typewriters, teleks machines... Model cars, planes, and ships... Jershon said it was "awesome" and Silmarien enjoyed the semaphore flags, model ships, and museum cat. We stayed until they closed (about an hour and a half, since it took us so long to get there).
Then we hailed another taxi (they can
turn on a dime...) and went back to the Galata Tower. Actually about 1 street away, as it turns out someone was filming a commercial where we had asked to be dropped off. The commercial seemed to involve a man in a charcoal gray suit walking along the sidewalk towards a bus stop. We never figured out what the commercial was for, but the guy was pretty easy to spot as he was the only one in sight in a suit.
Galata Tower is another part of the old fortifications of Istanbul (then Constantinople). The tower stands at the mouth of the Golden Horn -- a sort of long bay (the waterway extending from the NW to SE on the map). They attached a massive chain to the tower and stretched it across the bay to a structure on the opposite side, and this kept ships from being able to attack the bay-side of the city (in those days Constantinople was mainly confined to the west of the bay). Later it was used as a fire-sighting tower. For about $8, you can go up to the top and see Istanbul from above. (Silmarien and I went up).
From
there we walked back across the bridge (which has some equally nice views of Istanbul), through a cross section of the old town, got some pastries at the Turkish Delight shop pictured, and arrived home very tired.
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