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Published: March 9th 2010
Patsy in Istanbul The last time I wrote was a long time ago, in Shanghai.
Since then, we took an overnight train from Shanghai to Hong Kong, and spent a week there. We flew to Singapore, and spent a week there. And we flew to Bangkok, and spent a couple of days there. We then flew from Bangkok to Cairo to Istanbul.
We’ve been in an apartment in Istanbul almost a month, and we’ve had a lot of fun. Here are some thoughts about Istanbul:
What I liked best. That’s tough. Eating has been one of my favorite things here, but I’ll talk about that under food.
Just strolling the area around our apartment is fun. We have a cute shopping street just up the hill from our apartment. It has cute little cafes and restaurants and lots of shops. On the weekends, it feels very festive. There are people strolling down it, and looking like they’re having fun. The whole street is pedestrian, which means that no cars can go on it, only people. Except for a cute little red tram that goes down the middle of the street.
Going down in the
other direction from our apartment, you get to a bridge. It’s fun to walk across too. There are people fishing all along the edge of the bridge, on both sides. They stand by the railing of the bridge and hang their fishing poles over the side of the bridge.
And the water is pretty. The water is a very deep blue, not clear, but blue. There are also lots and lots and lots of ships in the water.
Every time you look out from the bridge you see five or six ferries and one or two huge ships called tankers. A tanker is a huge ship that carries cargo. The tankers are huger than huge. They have lots and lots of cargo, but the cargo is stacked in crates that can be easily put on trucks and trains. When you see a train at home, what is on them is what is on the tankers. Also, trucks at home carry these big tanker crates.
While we were writing this blog, we looked out our apartment window and saw a submarine moving along the top of the water in among the ferries and tankers. We had never seen
a submarine before. It was very exciting.
What I liked least. Most of the things have been fun, but if you want to go outside the main tourist trail, transportation can be a little tricky.
For example, one day we took a ferry over to the other side of the water. Part of Istanbul is on the continent of Europe, and part is on the continent of Asia. So when we take the ferry across the water, we cross from Europe to Asia.
The ferry crossing made me seasick. Purple cows get seasick very easily. We were looking for a bus to go to a Toy Museum. It was a big bus terminal, with several different areas, and no obvious way to tell which bus went where. We asked at a couple of places which bus went to the Toy Museum. Someone told us a bus, and we found the bus and asked the driver if the bus went to the Toy Museum, and the driver said, “No.” We looked for a while, but never found a bus that went there.
We had already been to this neighborhood once. It’s a good neighborhood, and it was
fun the first time, but when we went back it just wasn’t quite as fun.
We took the ferry back across. We were seasick, we had walked around a big chaotic bus station for a while, and we had sort of wasted a day.
The most fun I have had. The Rami Koç Museum. This was a museum with lots of transportation stuff, and lots of other stuff too. It had a little cute train that you could ride down a little track. There is a picture of the train.
There were also several rooms full of old cars, a room full of carriages, an old plane that you could get in, some old trams that you could get in, a room designed like a ship, and rooms with old boats, motorcycles, tractors, bikes, strollers, and stuff like that.
There was also a place where you could see how things worked. They had a car where you could see the engine, and you could press a button and see the engine go. And a truck where you could press a button and look underneath and see the other side of the wheels and the bottom of
the car in action. You could see how a motorcycle worked and how an electric scooter or moped worked. You could also see the inside workings of stuff like washing machines, fridges, computers, DVD players, VCR players, and things like that.
The most like home. The people here are more like the people at home than anywhere we’ve been. Everywhere we’ve been, the people have all had very dark hair and very dark eyes, and they have been shorter. The first night we got to Istanbul, Ella took me on a walk, and we were both amazed at how much the people here looked like Ella. They don’t look like Purple Cows, I’m glad to say. But they look like Ella.
And the language is more like English, even though it’s very different. First of all, you can read the signs - they use the same letters we do. Also, you can look at a sign or a word and have a pretty good and accurate idea of how to pronounce it.
That has not been the case anywhere else we’ve been (except Singapore, where English is the first language). In other places we’ve been, when the
letters were the same ones we use (instead of some Chinese or Thai script), you would look at something and think, “Hmm, I wonder how you would pronounce that?” And the actual pronunciation would definitely not be what you guessed.
The food is also like home. I could count being familiar enough and not too spicy. In all the other places, the foods were unrecognizable and weird, and I would never try anything without other people trying them first.
Compared to Asia, almost everything we see in Istanbul is like home.
The weirdest thing about Istanbul. Not everything about Istanbul is like home. Turkey is a Muslim country. Five times a day, there is a call to prayer. There are mosques, which are the Muslim equivalents of churches, all over the city. And each mosque has a loudspeaker to broadcast the call to prayer.
The call to prayer is in Arabic, not Turkish. It’s loud, and it sounds sort of like moaning. It echoes off of everything. There will be two or three mosques doing it at once, so it sounds like a loud, moaning conversation, in Arabic.
I don’t how it works, exactly. Muslims
are called to pray five times a day, but they don’t have to go five times a day, everyday. It’s not like the streets empty out when the call to prayer happens, but we can’t go in the mosques to visit them as tourists during prayer times, because they’re in there praying.
The cutest thing I have seen. Frederick. Frederick is a seagull. A seagull with no brain. There’s a picture of Frederick, looking cute and brainless.
Pretty much once a day, he will come to right outside the window of the living room of our apartment. He starts tapping on the window with his beak, and cocking his head at us as if he is very confused. He will tap it very hard, and for a very long time. And we think that he is wondering how the air got so hard.
It’s really confusing, when you’re a seagull, to understand the great questions of life.
The best food I have eaten. There is so much good food here that I’m going to have to lay out the best day of food.
Breakfast. I would eat muesli with honey and this sour Turkish
yogurt drink called ayran. Ayran is plain yogurt, milk, water, and salt. It’s about the consistency of whole milk. Aryan is really sour, so you have to put honey on the muesli for it to be good. I would drink hot tea with milk too.
Mid-morning snack. Simit. A simit is like a bagel, except it’s better for snacking. It’s round with a big hole in the middle, and it has sesame seeds on the outside. It’s crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, sort of like good French bread - except it tastes like a bagel. Every 10 steps in Istanbul there are glass-fronted carts selling simits. Everyone likes them, and a lot of people walk around eating them. There’s a picture of Ella eating a simit on the bridge near our apartment.
Lunch. A delicious Turkish chicken sandwich. This is no ordinary chicken sandwich. It is made with delicious chicken that is roasted on a spit that turns around in front of a fire. We go to a restaurant right near our apartment. They cut the chicken off the spit with a huge knife. They also put lettuce and tomato and these delicious spices
on the sandwich. The bread is good too. It is delicious. It costs one dollar US.
The restaurant we get it from is this little hole-in-the-wall place, with a couple of tables inside and a couple of tables outside. Some other things they serve are lentil soup, rice, beans, chicken wraps, ayran (the yogurt drink describe above), Turkish tea, and borek (which is layered thin filo pastry filled with cheese, eggs, and often spinach), and pides (which are sort of like pizza). Most people get chicken sandwiches like us, and Turkish tea. One of the pictures is of a chicken sandwich.
Dinner. Beans and rice. Another small restaurant right next to the chicken sandwich restaurant specializes in beans and rice. The rice is good. It’s cooked in a lot of chicken broth. The beans are delicious. They’re white beans. They have this orangeish sauce that has a delicious flavor to it. We usually get it take-out, and carry it up to our apartment to eat. It’s very good.
Dessert. Baklava. Baklava is filo pastry soaked in honey. Baklava can have pistachios, walnuts, and chocolate in it, or be plain. It is delicious. We’ve gotten it lots of
The Fortress of Europe
The Fortress of Europe was a fort that the Ottomans used.place, and it has always been good.
The weirdest food I have eaten. The food hasn’t really been weird here. Compared to Asia, it’s very normal. Everywhere else, the question has been “What was the weirdest food” - because all the food was weird. Here I can’t think of any weird food.
The most interesting thing I have done. I has all been interesting.
I really liked a mosque that we went to, called Rustem Pasha Mosque. It had lots of pretty tiles in it. They were all pretty colors, and the mosque was just filled with them. Purple Cows like pretty tiles. We have several pictures of me and Ella (and some of just me) in Rustem Pasha Mosque.
Going in a mosque is interesting too. We didn’t go in mosques in Malaysia, which was also a Muslim country. The mosques aren’t as famous there. We didn’t really see that many mosques there, either. They weren’t as obvious in Malaysia. Here the mosques sort of dominate everything, because they’re so big, and there are so many of them, and they are so beautiful.
You have to take off your shoes to go in a
mosque. Also, ladies (but not Purple Cows) have to cover their head.
All of the mosques worth going in have domes. A lot of them have half-domes around the domes. There are carpets on the floor, with the lines on the carpet where people can pray. The lines make rows, and the rows are all pointing towards Mecca - which is where Mohammed (Muslims’ main prophet) was born.
It’s very cold in the mosques, because you can’t heat them, because they’re so big. They’re huge. They’re wide and long, and extremely tall.
Where we sleep. We have an apartment. It has a kitchen, and a kitchen table, and a living room, and three bedrooms.
It’s been really nice to have our own room. For the first time, me and Ella have a room to ourselves. Always before, we were sharing either with Jordan or with all of us in one room. It’s really fun to have our own room. It’s a cute little room. It has a bed, and some shelves built into the wall, and some hooks to hang things on.
The living room is very nice too. It has a couch that can
fit three of four people, a very comfortable chair, a table to put books and cups on, and a shelf with lots of drawers and a TV.
In our living room, we also have a wonderful wall of windows that looks out over the Bosphorus, which is the water that connects Europe and Asia. We’re on the fifth floor, so we can see really well out the window (but we also have to climb a lot of stairs). From our couch, we can easily see the water, with all of its ferries, tankers, submarines, battleships, and seagulls. Oh yeah, we can see Asia too. Purple Cows like good views. You can see a picture of the view in one of the blog pictures.
Where we eat. We already described where we ate, but most days we eat one meal in and one meal out. But on a perfect eating day, I would eat at the places I described above.
How we get around. We’ve described the buses, which sometimes worked out. And we’ve described some of how fun it is to walk around.
We also take the tram a lot. The tram the I mentioned above,
the one on the cute shopping street just near our apartment, is not the same as the tram I’m talking about now. This tram is very functional. Lots of people use it, and it is the main form of transportation around the touristy part of town. There’s a stop right near our apartment. We take it a lot. It is really more like a slow-moving, above-ground subway that runs down the middle of the street than a tram.
Turkish money. Turkish money is called Turkish lira. 1.5 Turkish lira make one US dollar. A chicken sandwich is 1.50 Turkish lira (one dollar). A simit (the bagel-like thing I described above) is 75 kurus (like cents), or 50 cents US.
I have had a lot of fun in Istanbul.
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Marti Sullivan
non-member comment
Amazing!
Patsy, I am so amazed by all the wonderful places you have been and the experiences you are having. You are doing a wonderful job of describing your adventures. Tell Ella that that she looks much older than when she left. I think she has grown up a lot through her travels. Tell her I miss her and think of her often and that I get updates through her cousin Joy. Thanks so much for sharing with those of us back in the States. I love being able to experience the places you have seen through your writing and pictures. Lots of love, Ms. S :)