The past few weeks have, as per usual, been a bit of a whirlwind, as I pop in and out of Ankara like the most seasoned business traveller. Luckily, not all of my travel is for business. Easter weekend, I headed out to Istanbul on an overnight bus to catch a way-too-early flight to Rome for the holiday. I flew in Friday, arriving midmorning and catching the train (somewhat whimsically named the Leonardo Express, after Leonardo da Vinci) into central Rome. I had booked a hostel for my first night, and was meeting up with Kevin and his sister the next day and joining them at a bed and breakfast for the next two days (or so we thought, story below on how that didn't quite work). Luckily the hostel was 4 blocks from the train station, so I was able to find it quickly; not-so-luckily, my room wasn't quite ready yet. So I dropped off my bag and went out to wander the area.
I ended up walking down a high-end shopping street before finding the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiano, which was immense and overdecorated and beautiful. The most striking thing about though, to me, was the confessionals lining both sides of the church: they all had small signs indicating which languages the priest inside spoke, and I think they must have had almost every language spoken in Europe (not Turkish though, I checked). I spent the rest of the day wandering around in shock over Italian prices: I paid 4.5 Euro for a cappuccino and just tried not to convert anything to lira.
The next day I got up bright and early to check out of my hostel and check in to the B&B; good thing I gave myself extra time, as it took a decent amount of time to find the place--people in the neighborhood had never heard of the street name. I fortuitously ran into Kevin, and we headed up to check in...only to be told that they had no record of our reservation. After a brief internal panic (after all, it was Holy Saturday and we were right outside the Vatican), we were able to get a room for one night, use their internet to get another hotel for the next night, and negotiate extra bedding. The hotel guy's English was a little less than spectacular, but he was Peruvian, so I got to bust out my painfully rusty Spanish to get on the same page. Good times. We then headed over to the Vatican to pick up our tickets for Easter Mass and meet up with Kevin's sister, who'd been travelling through the region. Easter Sunday was great: we got up to see warm weather but overcast skies, which was perfect for sitting outside for a few hours. We walked over to St. Peters and waited in a mob-like line before getting in to the Square, finding the seating area, and looking for seats. We were lucky and got some of the last chairs. Mass was quite nice, the music was beautiful, and the service sounded beautiful as well although it was in Italian of course so I didn't understand all of it. The readings were in various languages, as were the intentions. Apparently our section of the crowd appeared on Swiss television twice. After Communion, Pope Benedict ended Mass and went up to his balcony to give his Easter blessing. This part was really cool, as he went through blessings in dozens of different languages. As the crowd heard their language, they'd cheer and hold up flags from their home countries. I was again listening for Turkish, but to no avail, maalesef. I did hear Arabic, Tagalog, and Esperanto though. We left after that, and decided to try and get far away from Vatican City for lunch, to try and avoid the masses of people also looking for lunch. After a nice stroll across the Tiber, we ended up at a very cute side-street cafe, where I had gnocchi and the waiter looked horrified at the prospect of serving spaghetti carbonara with a cappuccino. Ah tourists, we are so gauche.
The rest of the trip was predominantly spent meandering from one historic site to the next, with frequent stops for gelato and cappuccinos. On Monday we took a rather circuitous route through the center of the city and ended up on an island in the Tiber, reclining on cement pilings and watching the world go by. It was wonderful, a tranquil center in the hive of activity that is Tourist Rome. That evening I caught a flight back to Istanbul, but not before missing the train to the airport by literally 2 seconds (it was so painful watching it pull away in front of me), catching a cab, ascertaining that I had caught a gypsy cab, and finding another cab for the expensive privilege of a ride to the airport. Ah, travel... I got back to Istanbul at an inconvenient hour, took another cab to the otogar (after midnight, so the Metro was closed and the cabs were night rate, harika), and boarded a bus to Ankara, where I had less than 48 hours before heading out again for another flight out of Istanbul.
Great weekend, all in all, and after my first Easter in Turkey (ended up celebrating with fish and chips in the ODTU student center and listening to Chinese engineering students) I'm quite glad I spent this one in Rome. Maybe if I'm here next year I'll try for Jerusalem...
kib,
-R
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Aleppo, etc.
Time's been slipping away from me, but I'm going to try to get this as up-to-date as possible, because there's so much to update on/anticipate. My last entry left off on the outskirts of Antakya, which Danaijo and I left via bus. We took the bus to the Syrian border, where we had to get off and apply for visas. Ostensibly, Americans are supposed to apply for Syrian visas well in advance from the Syrian Embassy in DC, but that takes a long time and costs somewhere in the vicinity of $130. Plus, I've not been Stateside since last June, so it'd be difficult for me to get my passport to DC. So we decided to chance it at the border. We grabbed our luggage and waited in the border authorities' building for about 2 hours or so while the Syrian officials called Damascus to check whether or not we were allowed in the country. After getting approval, we paid $16 apiece for 2-week visas and were good to go. Unfortunately, our bus hadn't waited around, so we took a taxi the rest of the way to Aleppo.
Our taxi driver was really nice, stopping along the way for food for us, trying to find the hotel we wanted to stay at, and giving us a decent discount on the taxi price when I asked. Unfortunately, he didn't speak and Turkish (or English, or French). This was a little surprising to me, as I'd figured that people around the border would tend to speak a little bit of Turkish. Many people in Antakya speak some Arabic, but apparently the inverse is not true in Aleppo. Maalesef. We couldn't get to the hotel we'd intended to stay at, as it was full, so our taxi driver dropped us off at one that was apparently 'cheap'. We walked inside and quickly did an about-face: it was over $100/night. Luckily, the concierge was able to direct us to the central hotel area, where we found a pretty awesome room for substantially cheaper. That settled, we set out to explore a little bit and find dinner.
Aleppo was like a different world compared to Turkey. It was noticeably more desertlike, the shops were all smaller and independent (compared to Turkey's mix of independent shops and Turkish chains), and perhaps most glaringly, women were veiled. In some cases, fully veiled--we saw women walking around in not just the chador, but also a sort of small black scarf draped over their entire head, made of thin material through which they peered at the streets. I've never seen a woman in Turkey wear that, and I've seen quite a few women in Turkey.
Anyway, that night we had a delicious dinner of street-side falafel, walked through a pedestrianized shopping street, bought scarves, and retired for coffee and bed. In the morning, we headed out for fresh juice and the Grand Mosque, which is one of the older mosques in Islam. As another sign that we weren't in Turkey anymore, we of course had headscarves with us, but weren't allowed inside even the mosque courtyard til we'd donned large, shapeless, button-front robes over our clothing. The mosque was beautiful, and immense. It also was on the edge of the bazaar district, which we happily plunged in to after turning in our shapeless robes. We spent quite a bit of time ambling down aisles, bargaining, and avoiding the English-speaking touts, and managed to make it out with a respectable number of purchases at pretty decent prices. We were really amused when we found out that the name of the shop we'd bought pashminas at was "Oscar Wilde"; we had a great conversation with the owner, who was really interested in America, as his boyfriend was at Princeton. I think Danaijo came closest to buying a carpet in Aleppo; the prices there were the best I've seen, and they had some gorgeous ones. The ones we saw were predominantly Iranian, so the designs were very different than the Turkish/Kurdish/Armenian designs I'm familiar with. They use an entirely different color palette as well.
After wandering some more through the bazaars, and getting wonderfully lost trying to find a fabled amazing restaurant, we ended up having falafel again before heading to the bus station to hop a bus for Turkey again. We got there to find that the busses had all left for the day, so we had to take a cab. Luckily, the cab drivers at the station spoke a fair amount of Turkish, so I was able to bargain the cost down and get a cab to Gaziantep instead of Antakya. The border crossing this time was a breeze; I don't think many tourists come through the Gaziantep road's border, so the Turkish border official made us take as many Turkish tourism brochures as we could carry, even though half of them were in German. We got to Gaziantep in the late evening, and met up with my friend Alex, who's teaching English at the local university, after a brief adventure on the Gaziantep city busses.
We pretty much just made dinner and crashed at Alex's place, before getting up to explore the city the next day. We ended up at the very edge of an industrial part of town after taking a city bus, and finally made it downtown in time for lunch and shopping and baklava. Gaziantep's bazaar district is pretty adorable, and there are really good deals to be had; it's much more relaxed than the Istanbul bazaars, and the local handicrafts are better quality. We spent a lot of time chatting with shopkeepers and learning about handicrafts, with me translating between the shopkeepers' Turkish and D's English. It was a great linguistic exercise. After shopping, we stopped at a cave cafe for a narghile and baklava, which were both delicious. I'd wanted to stop by Gaziantep's museum, which is probably my favorite museum in Turkey, but when we got there, at about 4:35, the exhibit halls were closed, even though the museum closed at 5. Ah well, that's Turkey.
We met up with Alex for dinner, after she finished her teaching for the day, at the best restaurant in town. As I've mentioned in earlier entries, Gaziantep food is unique in Turkey, and unlike traditional Turkish cuisine. We had a great bulgur and lamb dish (D's was lambless of course), and for dessert the waiter brought us something I'd never even heard of before: Gaziantep coffee. It was fabulous, even if it wasn't strictly coffee. Gaziantep coffee is made of pistachios, roasted like coffee beans and brewed in milk. It smelled of chocolate and tasted of deliciousness. We then all headed back to Alex's place to grab our bags before D and I headed to the otogar to grab our overnight bus to Ankara. With my previous Gaziantep-Ankara bus experience (see October 2008 entries) still fresh in my mind, we'd purchased tickets in advance, and had verified that we had seats and a reputable company. We boarded the bus, and settled in to sleep. Sadly, that was easier said than done as the bus proceeded to stop hourly between midnight and 4am. Oh boy. We did make it back to Ankara just fine though, and nobody had to sleep on the floor, so that was a success in my book.
In Ankara, we headed to my place first to drop a few things and collapse before heading to my friend's apartment, where we were staying as I was catsitting starting that day (Saturday). We dropped more stuff, took stock of our exhaustion, and headed out for Ulus and Ankara's citadel, which we climbed and explored for a bit before heading to Kizilay. In Kizilay, we walked throught the subway and a few streets before meeting up with a group of expats at a bar to watch a football match. I'd never met those particular expats, but the football match meetups are part and parcel of the Round Ball in Ankara blog (ankarafootball.blogspot.com), whose co-author I've known for quite some time.
I'd never been to a football match besides my younger siblings' games before, so I was quite excited. We met up at a bar in Kizilay before the match with a Scottish teacher who's been in Turkey off and on for a few decades and a few Bilkent folks, generally here for a year as Communications Skills Instructors at Bilkent's English language preparatory program. After a quick lunch for D and I, and a beer all around, we headed en masse to 19 Mayis Stadyum, where both Ankaragucu and Genclerbirligi play their home matches. The match we saw was Ankaragucu, who were playing Sivasspor; I'm sure this doesn't mean much to most of my readers. For perspective, Ankaragucu is fighting relegation and is I think 4th from the bottom in the league, while Sivasspor is the top-ranked team in the league. Clearly it was not going to be a knock-out win. The stadium had 2 different security checks, where we were patted down and had to surrender any coins or bottle caps we had so we wouldn't throw them on the field later. At each checkpoint, there were maybe a dozen male police officers, and one female police officer to check the few women attending the match. It was a bit interesting to see how few women were actually at the match; there were 4 in our group, but maybe 10 others total.
We found decent seats and settled in to watch the match. I don't think D or I really followed which player was doing what, but the first half was pretty closely-fought, and ended scoreless. Much more interesting than the match (to us) was the crowd: Ankaragucu supporters tend to be young, male, and energetic, and the area behind the goal was full of guys on their feet and chanting the entire game, their section undulating as they waved their scarves and gestured in unison. It was really cool to see. I tried to figure out what the crowd was shouting, but aside from one ridiculously easy cheer ("La-la, la-laaaa, Ankaragucu!"), couldn't distinguish many words. In the second half, Sivasspor showed why they were top-ranked, and outplayed Gucu quite a bit. The game ended with Sivasspor winning by 2 or 3, and the Ankaragucu supporters showed their displeasure by turning their backs for the last few minutes.
After the game, we all headed back to Kizilay to discuss the game, and after a bit D and I headed back up the hill to have dinner at one of my more-favorite restaurants in Ankara, Spice. It's an Indian place, and we both had delicious dishes, and D tried raki for the first time. It wasn't her favorite beverage, but then there's a time and a place for raki, and it's not all-the-time and everywhere. It's traditionally eaten with fish, but as D doesn't eat fish, it went decently with her Indian food.
After dinner, we were so exhausted. We headed back to the apartment and D packed before we grabbed a few hours of sleep. The next morning I got up at 5-something to get Danaijo to the airport bus. I looked outside to see...a snowstorm, with a few inches of snow already on the ground and driving winds of heavy snows. We headed out early, but still just barely made it to the Havas bus before it left for the airport. I took the same taxi back up the hill, and the roads were so bad the taxi couldn't make it up the last bit and the driver and I had to abandon the cab. The entire time I was a bit terrified that I'd get a call from D saying that her Ankara-Istanbul flight had been cancelled, but luckily the flight got out fine and I spent the rest of the day watching the storm from my fantastic hilltop vantage point.
And that was Danaijo's and my epic Turkish-Syrian adventure, briefly.
kib,
-R
Our taxi driver was really nice, stopping along the way for food for us, trying to find the hotel we wanted to stay at, and giving us a decent discount on the taxi price when I asked. Unfortunately, he didn't speak and Turkish (or English, or French). This was a little surprising to me, as I'd figured that people around the border would tend to speak a little bit of Turkish. Many people in Antakya speak some Arabic, but apparently the inverse is not true in Aleppo. Maalesef. We couldn't get to the hotel we'd intended to stay at, as it was full, so our taxi driver dropped us off at one that was apparently 'cheap'. We walked inside and quickly did an about-face: it was over $100/night. Luckily, the concierge was able to direct us to the central hotel area, where we found a pretty awesome room for substantially cheaper. That settled, we set out to explore a little bit and find dinner.
Aleppo was like a different world compared to Turkey. It was noticeably more desertlike, the shops were all smaller and independent (compared to Turkey's mix of independent shops and Turkish chains), and perhaps most glaringly, women were veiled. In some cases, fully veiled--we saw women walking around in not just the chador, but also a sort of small black scarf draped over their entire head, made of thin material through which they peered at the streets. I've never seen a woman in Turkey wear that, and I've seen quite a few women in Turkey.
Anyway, that night we had a delicious dinner of street-side falafel, walked through a pedestrianized shopping street, bought scarves, and retired for coffee and bed. In the morning, we headed out for fresh juice and the Grand Mosque, which is one of the older mosques in Islam. As another sign that we weren't in Turkey anymore, we of course had headscarves with us, but weren't allowed inside even the mosque courtyard til we'd donned large, shapeless, button-front robes over our clothing. The mosque was beautiful, and immense. It also was on the edge of the bazaar district, which we happily plunged in to after turning in our shapeless robes. We spent quite a bit of time ambling down aisles, bargaining, and avoiding the English-speaking touts, and managed to make it out with a respectable number of purchases at pretty decent prices. We were really amused when we found out that the name of the shop we'd bought pashminas at was "Oscar Wilde"; we had a great conversation with the owner, who was really interested in America, as his boyfriend was at Princeton. I think Danaijo came closest to buying a carpet in Aleppo; the prices there were the best I've seen, and they had some gorgeous ones. The ones we saw were predominantly Iranian, so the designs were very different than the Turkish/Kurdish/Armenian designs I'm familiar with. They use an entirely different color palette as well.
After wandering some more through the bazaars, and getting wonderfully lost trying to find a fabled amazing restaurant, we ended up having falafel again before heading to the bus station to hop a bus for Turkey again. We got there to find that the busses had all left for the day, so we had to take a cab. Luckily, the cab drivers at the station spoke a fair amount of Turkish, so I was able to bargain the cost down and get a cab to Gaziantep instead of Antakya. The border crossing this time was a breeze; I don't think many tourists come through the Gaziantep road's border, so the Turkish border official made us take as many Turkish tourism brochures as we could carry, even though half of them were in German. We got to Gaziantep in the late evening, and met up with my friend Alex, who's teaching English at the local university, after a brief adventure on the Gaziantep city busses.
We pretty much just made dinner and crashed at Alex's place, before getting up to explore the city the next day. We ended up at the very edge of an industrial part of town after taking a city bus, and finally made it downtown in time for lunch and shopping and baklava. Gaziantep's bazaar district is pretty adorable, and there are really good deals to be had; it's much more relaxed than the Istanbul bazaars, and the local handicrafts are better quality. We spent a lot of time chatting with shopkeepers and learning about handicrafts, with me translating between the shopkeepers' Turkish and D's English. It was a great linguistic exercise. After shopping, we stopped at a cave cafe for a narghile and baklava, which were both delicious. I'd wanted to stop by Gaziantep's museum, which is probably my favorite museum in Turkey, but when we got there, at about 4:35, the exhibit halls were closed, even though the museum closed at 5. Ah well, that's Turkey.
We met up with Alex for dinner, after she finished her teaching for the day, at the best restaurant in town. As I've mentioned in earlier entries, Gaziantep food is unique in Turkey, and unlike traditional Turkish cuisine. We had a great bulgur and lamb dish (D's was lambless of course), and for dessert the waiter brought us something I'd never even heard of before: Gaziantep coffee. It was fabulous, even if it wasn't strictly coffee. Gaziantep coffee is made of pistachios, roasted like coffee beans and brewed in milk. It smelled of chocolate and tasted of deliciousness. We then all headed back to Alex's place to grab our bags before D and I headed to the otogar to grab our overnight bus to Ankara. With my previous Gaziantep-Ankara bus experience (see October 2008 entries) still fresh in my mind, we'd purchased tickets in advance, and had verified that we had seats and a reputable company. We boarded the bus, and settled in to sleep. Sadly, that was easier said than done as the bus proceeded to stop hourly between midnight and 4am. Oh boy. We did make it back to Ankara just fine though, and nobody had to sleep on the floor, so that was a success in my book.
In Ankara, we headed to my place first to drop a few things and collapse before heading to my friend's apartment, where we were staying as I was catsitting starting that day (Saturday). We dropped more stuff, took stock of our exhaustion, and headed out for Ulus and Ankara's citadel, which we climbed and explored for a bit before heading to Kizilay. In Kizilay, we walked throught the subway and a few streets before meeting up with a group of expats at a bar to watch a football match. I'd never met those particular expats, but the football match meetups are part and parcel of the Round Ball in Ankara blog (ankarafootball.blogspot.com), whose co-author I've known for quite some time.
I'd never been to a football match besides my younger siblings' games before, so I was quite excited. We met up at a bar in Kizilay before the match with a Scottish teacher who's been in Turkey off and on for a few decades and a few Bilkent folks, generally here for a year as Communications Skills Instructors at Bilkent's English language preparatory program. After a quick lunch for D and I, and a beer all around, we headed en masse to 19 Mayis Stadyum, where both Ankaragucu and Genclerbirligi play their home matches. The match we saw was Ankaragucu, who were playing Sivasspor; I'm sure this doesn't mean much to most of my readers. For perspective, Ankaragucu is fighting relegation and is I think 4th from the bottom in the league, while Sivasspor is the top-ranked team in the league. Clearly it was not going to be a knock-out win. The stadium had 2 different security checks, where we were patted down and had to surrender any coins or bottle caps we had so we wouldn't throw them on the field later. At each checkpoint, there were maybe a dozen male police officers, and one female police officer to check the few women attending the match. It was a bit interesting to see how few women were actually at the match; there were 4 in our group, but maybe 10 others total.
We found decent seats and settled in to watch the match. I don't think D or I really followed which player was doing what, but the first half was pretty closely-fought, and ended scoreless. Much more interesting than the match (to us) was the crowd: Ankaragucu supporters tend to be young, male, and energetic, and the area behind the goal was full of guys on their feet and chanting the entire game, their section undulating as they waved their scarves and gestured in unison. It was really cool to see. I tried to figure out what the crowd was shouting, but aside from one ridiculously easy cheer ("La-la, la-laaaa, Ankaragucu!"), couldn't distinguish many words. In the second half, Sivasspor showed why they were top-ranked, and outplayed Gucu quite a bit. The game ended with Sivasspor winning by 2 or 3, and the Ankaragucu supporters showed their displeasure by turning their backs for the last few minutes.
After the game, we all headed back to Kizilay to discuss the game, and after a bit D and I headed back up the hill to have dinner at one of my more-favorite restaurants in Ankara, Spice. It's an Indian place, and we both had delicious dishes, and D tried raki for the first time. It wasn't her favorite beverage, but then there's a time and a place for raki, and it's not all-the-time and everywhere. It's traditionally eaten with fish, but as D doesn't eat fish, it went decently with her Indian food.
After dinner, we were so exhausted. We headed back to the apartment and D packed before we grabbed a few hours of sleep. The next morning I got up at 5-something to get Danaijo to the airport bus. I looked outside to see...a snowstorm, with a few inches of snow already on the ground and driving winds of heavy snows. We headed out early, but still just barely made it to the Havas bus before it left for the airport. I took the same taxi back up the hill, and the roads were so bad the taxi couldn't make it up the last bit and the driver and I had to abandon the cab. The entire time I was a bit terrified that I'd get a call from D saying that her Ankara-Istanbul flight had been cancelled, but luckily the flight got out fine and I spent the rest of the day watching the storm from my fantastic hilltop vantage point.
And that was Danaijo's and my epic Turkish-Syrian adventure, briefly.
kib,
-R
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Ridiculous amounts of photos
To save everyone the pain of wading through the several-hundred photos from my last trip (and so my grandmother can see them, Hi Grandma!), I'm featuring a few highlights here:
Flags outside Bogazici's gate in Etiler; The 3 big parties (AKP, CHP, MHP) are all represented.
Danaijo and I in the Yerebatan Sarnici, or Basilica Cisterns
Sultan's Loge at the Aya Sofya; the royal family would use this so as not to be disturbed by the great unwashed masses during prayertime.
Danaijo and I in the balcony of the Aya Sofya.
Topkapi Palace and the view behind it. Gorgeous even on a gray rainy day.
Me and a fountain outside the Sultan's bedroom. The bedroom itself was in its own building, in the middle of the family section.
D wasn't trying to get my eyes in this one, but it turned out kind of cool. That's the Yeni Cami (New Mosque) behind me.
Troy. Those different wall sections are all from different Trojan cities. This is why I'm not an archaeologist.
As I get more uploaded to Flickr, I'll get more up here as well.
kib,
-R
Flags outside Bogazici's gate in Etiler; The 3 big parties (AKP, CHP, MHP) are all represented.
Danaijo and I in the Yerebatan Sarnici, or Basilica Cisterns
Sultan's Loge at the Aya Sofya; the royal family would use this so as not to be disturbed by the great unwashed masses during prayertime.
Danaijo and I in the balcony of the Aya Sofya.
Topkapi Palace and the view behind it. Gorgeous even on a gray rainy day.
Me and a fountain outside the Sultan's bedroom. The bedroom itself was in its own building, in the middle of the family section.
D wasn't trying to get my eyes in this one, but it turned out kind of cool. That's the Yeni Cami (New Mosque) behind me.
Troy. Those different wall sections are all from different Trojan cities. This is why I'm not an archaeologist.
As I get more uploaded to Flickr, I'll get more up here as well.
kib,
-R
Monday, March 23, 2009
Taking the long way
So, my last post left off on the way to Canakkale. Canakkale is the jumping-off point for both Troy and Gallipoli, but because we only had a week, we were skipping Gallipoli. We got in past midnight; the bus ride down was kind of nice, as the bus drove down the Gelibolu Peninsula before taking a ferry to Canakkale, and the bus itself was new and had satellite television instead of a DVD player. So we got to catch up on our Turkish news and soap operas.
Monday morning bright and early we struck out from our hotel to the minibus garage, where we hopped a bus for Truva (Troy, in Turkish). After a decent 30-minute ride through villages and along the coast, we arrived at the front gates, where we bought a ticket, flashed my MuzeKart, and walked down the access road to the excavation house and large wooden Trojan Horse model. It was a little tacky-wonderful, and had a cabin/playhouse thing built on top of its back. It would have made for a pretty awesome treehouse. D and I headed in, and started down the one path that didn't have Japanese tour groups. We ambled for a bit between bluffs and ancient stone walls helpfully labelled with "IV", "II", and "VII" to indicate which Trojan city that particular section was from. After rounding a bend, we got to the good parts: the Trench, where the German-American explorer who discovered the site bulldozed through most of the top cities to get to the Troy II layer, and temple remains, and city walls and entrance ramps. The interpretation was pretty decent, with explanatory signs up every so often. We were trying to take in everything, which wasn't quite the pace the tour groups were setting, so we ended up alternately caught up in a group and passed by them a few times over. About halfway through the winding path, we noticed a branching-off path with a small sign that said "CAVE" with an arrow. Naturally we had to check that out, so we wandered down to this little wooded area with a manmade cave that was probably used for water storage and later other storage. It was really pretty, and set off a bit from the main site. On our way back to the entrance of the site, we made a quick backtrack to see the main gate, which we'd somehow completely missed the first time 'round. Then it was back to the main entrance, where we killed time waiting for the minibus by checking out the 2 open gift stalls (it was clearly not the high season: there were perhaps 2 dozen stalls, but only the 2 were open). We could have bought many, many Trojan Horses, in a variety of sizes. What an opportunity...
Back in Canakkale, we wandered through town to the bus station, where we picked up tickets to Izmir before heading back to the waterfront, stopping en route to pick up some borek for a light on-the-bus lunch. We had time to check out Canakkale's Trojan Horse before we left, which was much more gritty and impressive than Troy's version: it was a prop from the Hollywood movie Troy, released a few years ago.
We trundled off to Izmir on an afternoon bus that got in a little later than we'd expected, and hopped a servis shuttle to Buca, the area of town where my Fulbright friend Deirdre lives. She's an English teacher at one of the universities in Izmir, and had offered to let us stay the night. We met up with Deirdre and stopped by her gorgeous flat to drop off our things before heading out for lahmacun and pide. We had a great evening catching up and chatting over wine and baklava, before heading off to bed so we could catch our flight the next morning.
Tuesday morning, we bade farewell to Deirdre and set off once again to Izmir's airport. We flew from Izmir to Adana, which was wonderful as a bus ride between the two would have been probably 12-14 hours. Not all that fun. We landed in balmy Adana and went straight to the bus station, where we hopped a bus for Antakya. A short 2 hours later, we disembarked in downtown Antakya and wound our way through the side streets to the Catholic Church, where we'd planned to stay the night. Antakya gets quite a few pilgrims passing through, so the Catholic Church in town has rooms for travellers that are really nice, and not very spendy (I can't recommend it highly enough, everyone should spend a few days in Antakya at the Catholic Church). I'd stayed there before, when I was in town in August for the Armenian festival in Vakiflikoy. When we walked in the courtyard, the place was teeming with Italian tourists, but we sat down and chatted with some of the Turkish kids that always seem to be in the courtyard til things quieted down somewhat. We spoke with the priest to arrange our room, dropped off our bags, and headed out to this hole-in-the-wall restaurant that I'd remembered as being excellent. The place is called "Hummuscu ve Baklaci", and it has 2 items on the menu, hummus and bakla. D's a vegetarian, so a place that didn't even have meat on the menu was a good choice. We walked in and ordered one of each, to split. The owner made both the hummus and the bakla from scratch in front of us. I'll spare the hummus details, as it's pretty well-known, but bakla is a thinner spread made chiefly from mashed bakla beans stewed in I believe oil, then mixed with spices, hot peppers, lemon, tahini, and garnished with pickled vegetables and tomatoes. They were both delicious. Fully sated, D and I wandered through the central part of town, along the river, to the bazaar district. I had been hoping to pick up another pair of the mad awesome pajama pants I'd found in Antakya in August, but they were nowhere to be found, so I settled for buying a shoulder bag, as mine gave up somewhere around Izmir. D found some decent scarves, and we had a nice chat with the headscarf shop employees before heading back to the Catholic Church. We'd intended to chill for a bit before heading back out to grab a late dinner, but ended up just falling asleep; after all, we'd travelled something like 1000 miles just that day. In the morning, we went out in search of breakfast and ended up in this tiny basement tostcu in a dilapidated business center, where we had the best egg sandwiches outside of West Africa. The lady running the shop wasn't quite sure what to do with 2 yabancis in her shop, and was quite anxious to hear what we thought of our sandwiches--we reassured her that they had been delicious and huge. After breakfast, we headed to the Antakya Museum, where we wandered through the impressive collection of mosaics, before grabbing our bags and heading to the Church of St. Peter. This is the first physical Christian church in the world, and is where the term 'Christian' was first used. I had tried to visit it in August, but it was closed. This time, we were able to take a dolmus most of the way there, but still ended up dragging our luggage up the winding road to the church's hillside perch. When we got there, the ticketseller said "Oh, I watched you guys struggle up the whole way; why didn't you drive?" We got our tickets (this was also a MuzeKart site, as was the Antakya Muze; that card was a Very Good Procurement) and entered the church. It was really nice and quiet, as we were the only visitors, and quite small: the original church had been added to by the Crusaders, who gave it a front wall with some pretty blatantly Crusader-era decoration. The interior had a spring in one corner, fragments of mosaics and frescoes, and an escape hole out the back, so that celebrants could get out if the nonCatholics in town decided to round them up during services. It was all pretty simple, of course, but just impressive with the weight of history. We stuck around for a bit to take photos and watch the city of Antakya, which spread out from the foot of the hill.
Once down from the Church of St. Peter, we walked back to a main road and grabbed a dolmus to the bus station. From there, we grabbed a bus headed to Aleppo, but that will have to wait for the next post. I have photos of the Istanbul part of our trip, as well as some of the Troy portion, up on Flickr; inshallah I'll get the rest up soon!
kib,
-R
Monday morning bright and early we struck out from our hotel to the minibus garage, where we hopped a bus for Truva (Troy, in Turkish). After a decent 30-minute ride through villages and along the coast, we arrived at the front gates, where we bought a ticket, flashed my MuzeKart, and walked down the access road to the excavation house and large wooden Trojan Horse model. It was a little tacky-wonderful, and had a cabin/playhouse thing built on top of its back. It would have made for a pretty awesome treehouse. D and I headed in, and started down the one path that didn't have Japanese tour groups. We ambled for a bit between bluffs and ancient stone walls helpfully labelled with "IV", "II", and "VII" to indicate which Trojan city that particular section was from. After rounding a bend, we got to the good parts: the Trench, where the German-American explorer who discovered the site bulldozed through most of the top cities to get to the Troy II layer, and temple remains, and city walls and entrance ramps. The interpretation was pretty decent, with explanatory signs up every so often. We were trying to take in everything, which wasn't quite the pace the tour groups were setting, so we ended up alternately caught up in a group and passed by them a few times over. About halfway through the winding path, we noticed a branching-off path with a small sign that said "CAVE" with an arrow. Naturally we had to check that out, so we wandered down to this little wooded area with a manmade cave that was probably used for water storage and later other storage. It was really pretty, and set off a bit from the main site. On our way back to the entrance of the site, we made a quick backtrack to see the main gate, which we'd somehow completely missed the first time 'round. Then it was back to the main entrance, where we killed time waiting for the minibus by checking out the 2 open gift stalls (it was clearly not the high season: there were perhaps 2 dozen stalls, but only the 2 were open). We could have bought many, many Trojan Horses, in a variety of sizes. What an opportunity...
Back in Canakkale, we wandered through town to the bus station, where we picked up tickets to Izmir before heading back to the waterfront, stopping en route to pick up some borek for a light on-the-bus lunch. We had time to check out Canakkale's Trojan Horse before we left, which was much more gritty and impressive than Troy's version: it was a prop from the Hollywood movie Troy, released a few years ago.
We trundled off to Izmir on an afternoon bus that got in a little later than we'd expected, and hopped a servis shuttle to Buca, the area of town where my Fulbright friend Deirdre lives. She's an English teacher at one of the universities in Izmir, and had offered to let us stay the night. We met up with Deirdre and stopped by her gorgeous flat to drop off our things before heading out for lahmacun and pide. We had a great evening catching up and chatting over wine and baklava, before heading off to bed so we could catch our flight the next morning.
Tuesday morning, we bade farewell to Deirdre and set off once again to Izmir's airport. We flew from Izmir to Adana, which was wonderful as a bus ride between the two would have been probably 12-14 hours. Not all that fun. We landed in balmy Adana and went straight to the bus station, where we hopped a bus for Antakya. A short 2 hours later, we disembarked in downtown Antakya and wound our way through the side streets to the Catholic Church, where we'd planned to stay the night. Antakya gets quite a few pilgrims passing through, so the Catholic Church in town has rooms for travellers that are really nice, and not very spendy (I can't recommend it highly enough, everyone should spend a few days in Antakya at the Catholic Church). I'd stayed there before, when I was in town in August for the Armenian festival in Vakiflikoy. When we walked in the courtyard, the place was teeming with Italian tourists, but we sat down and chatted with some of the Turkish kids that always seem to be in the courtyard til things quieted down somewhat. We spoke with the priest to arrange our room, dropped off our bags, and headed out to this hole-in-the-wall restaurant that I'd remembered as being excellent. The place is called "Hummuscu ve Baklaci", and it has 2 items on the menu, hummus and bakla. D's a vegetarian, so a place that didn't even have meat on the menu was a good choice. We walked in and ordered one of each, to split. The owner made both the hummus and the bakla from scratch in front of us. I'll spare the hummus details, as it's pretty well-known, but bakla is a thinner spread made chiefly from mashed bakla beans stewed in I believe oil, then mixed with spices, hot peppers, lemon, tahini, and garnished with pickled vegetables and tomatoes. They were both delicious. Fully sated, D and I wandered through the central part of town, along the river, to the bazaar district. I had been hoping to pick up another pair of the mad awesome pajama pants I'd found in Antakya in August, but they were nowhere to be found, so I settled for buying a shoulder bag, as mine gave up somewhere around Izmir. D found some decent scarves, and we had a nice chat with the headscarf shop employees before heading back to the Catholic Church. We'd intended to chill for a bit before heading back out to grab a late dinner, but ended up just falling asleep; after all, we'd travelled something like 1000 miles just that day. In the morning, we went out in search of breakfast and ended up in this tiny basement tostcu in a dilapidated business center, where we had the best egg sandwiches outside of West Africa. The lady running the shop wasn't quite sure what to do with 2 yabancis in her shop, and was quite anxious to hear what we thought of our sandwiches--we reassured her that they had been delicious and huge. After breakfast, we headed to the Antakya Museum, where we wandered through the impressive collection of mosaics, before grabbing our bags and heading to the Church of St. Peter. This is the first physical Christian church in the world, and is where the term 'Christian' was first used. I had tried to visit it in August, but it was closed. This time, we were able to take a dolmus most of the way there, but still ended up dragging our luggage up the winding road to the church's hillside perch. When we got there, the ticketseller said "Oh, I watched you guys struggle up the whole way; why didn't you drive?" We got our tickets (this was also a MuzeKart site, as was the Antakya Muze; that card was a Very Good Procurement) and entered the church. It was really nice and quiet, as we were the only visitors, and quite small: the original church had been added to by the Crusaders, who gave it a front wall with some pretty blatantly Crusader-era decoration. The interior had a spring in one corner, fragments of mosaics and frescoes, and an escape hole out the back, so that celebrants could get out if the nonCatholics in town decided to round them up during services. It was all pretty simple, of course, but just impressive with the weight of history. We stuck around for a bit to take photos and watch the city of Antakya, which spread out from the foot of the hill.
Once down from the Church of St. Peter, we walked back to a main road and grabbed a dolmus to the bus station. From there, we grabbed a bus headed to Aleppo, but that will have to wait for the next post. I have photos of the Istanbul part of our trip, as well as some of the Troy portion, up on Flickr; inshallah I'll get the rest up soon!
kib,
-R
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Before taking the long way
Hey folks,
I figured I should start at the beginning of my 'Highlights of Turkey' week with Danaijo, so I'll back up to the Saturday before last, when I had a day to spend in Istanbul before picking D up at the airport that evening. I'd stayed with my friend Cat, of my previous Kartalkaya adventure, so we headed out bright and early for some menemen (by far my favorite Turkish breakfast food, and what would be my favorite Turkish food ever, if not for the wondrousness of manti). Cat has a local menemenci across the street from her, so we had breakfast al fresco and I learned about the shop's rad intercom system: the shop supplied tea to all the shops in the neighborhood, but it wasn't efficient to just send a kid around constantly and ask if folks wanted tea, so there were several intercoms located around the neighborhood, in shops and on the street, and shopkeepers would just buzz over when they needed a glass or two. The speaker was above the cooking surface, so the menemen guy'd listen to Ahmet from around the corner saying he needed 3 glasses, send off the tea boy, and continue cooking. Brilliant. I cannot believe I've lived here so long and not noticed this ingenious system. At least I've noticed the cab call boxes...
Thusly fortified, Cat and I set off up towards Etiler to photograph some election flags. Local elections are at the end of March, and the parties are going all out: in addition to the household appliances mentioned in an earlier post, flags from the major parties are everywhere in the cities, blanketing major intersections, and vans with candidates' photos plastered to their sides drive around all day blaring patriotic party campaign music. A particularly catchy one in Antakya (sadly for Danaijo, it was stuck in my head the rest of our trip) just repeated "Simdi CHP zamani!" ("Now is CHP time!") ad nauseam. Anyway, we photographed our way to Besiktas, where we parted in a pouring rain after stocking up on bootleg dvds; while I was on the hunt for a travel book that included Syria, Cat ended up at a CHP rally with a bunch of politically-active women from GOP (in Ankara, that's the ritzy neighborhood, but in Istanbul, it's one of the more distressed neighborhoods).
I ended up not minding about missing 6 hours of party speeches and songs, because while walking around Tourist Central, Istanbul, I picked up something mythical and wonderful: a MuzeKart. For background, in August the government raised prices for all museums and sites it manages (so, pretty much everything but Dolmabahce Palace and the Basilica Cisterns), while removing the option of a student discount. This meant that Topkapi, had I had the urge to go see both the main part and the Harem part, would have been 35 lira just for me. I felt this to be outrageous, and thus hadn't seen Topkapi, but I did cough up 20 lira for the Hagia Sophia. There is one way to avoid having to pay (outrageous amount) for all those tourist sites: buy a MuzeKart. This 20-lira card, with your photo badly scanned to the back, allows you in to all state-run sites across Turkey for free, for a year. Awesome. The only catch is that it's only for Turkish citizens. No 20-lira pass for yabancis. I had heard, though, that within the past month the rules had relaxed enough to allow students at Turkish universities to also buy MuzeKarts, at a discounted price of 10 lira (because they're, you know, poor students). Armed with my ODTU ID, I braved the line at the Hagia Sophia to try my luck...and it worked! I didn't want to say anything while getting it in case they decided I didn't sound Turkish enough, but mere hours before picking up D I had scored a 10-lira card that would halve our total admission costs at every museum we visited (aside from the Cisterns, but I successfully argued for the Turkish student discount there).
So, fresh from my exciting MuzeKart buying, I headed off to the airport. Apparently at Ataturk International one is not allowed into the baggage claim area if one has not just disembarked from a plane, so I hung out with a bunch of liveried drivers with fancy name-signs, looking for American-looking people as they departed baggage claim. After a group with matching Yale sweatshirts trundled by, Danaijo walked out, and we had our emotional reunion before heading down to the Metro to head back to Sultanahmet. Once settled at our hotel, we then had to get back on the light rail line, take it to the end, hop on a bus, and slowly make our way through rush hour traffic to meet up with Cat for dinner in Arnavutkoy. This would've worked much better if the bus we were on had gone to Arnavutkoy. Instead, we took an unexpected turn in Ortakoy and ended up in some bus depot, with a confused driver asking where exactly we wanted to go. Oboy. I'd even asked when we got on if the bus went to Arnavutkoy.
No matter, we got on another bus, and headed back to Ortakoy, where we took a quick detour through the handicrafts bazaar there on the waterfront before grabbing a cab to Arnavutkoy. Once finally there, we grabbed Cat for dinner at Bodrum Manti (if you've read my other Istanbul entries, you may recognize the name; this is because Bodrum Manti is perhaps my favorite restaurant in Istanbul), where D had her first authentic Turkish meal, kitir ispanakli manti, or fried spinach manti.
Given that D had just gotten off a double-digit-hours-long plane ride, we didn't do much else til the next morning, when we headed out bright and early to the Aya Sofia, before heading to the Basilica Cisterns (they're just cool; I think I've been there 3 times now, and I never get tired of them). After the Cisterns, we headed over to the Blue Mosque before noticing that it was closed for prayer time, so we ambled over to Topkapi, stopping for fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice en route. Topkapi was, in a word, overwhelming. We passed through gate after gate, entering room after room, all absolutely gorgeously decked out in the heights of Ottoman fashion. Detail was everywhere. Tiles were handpainted. Pillows and sofas were richly embroidered with silver and gold thread. Mother-of-pearl inlay was on quite a bit of the woodwork. It was gorgeous. We went a little out of order through Topkapi, and ended up at the very back, where the private quarters open up to a view of both Europe and Asia across the Bosphorous. I simply cannot use enough adjectives to describe the opulence of the setting or the Palace itself. After the Sultan's family quarters, we went through the Treasury. If I said the rest of Topkapi was overwhelming, this was at least triply so. It felt like going through House on the Rock (in Wisconsin, also a cool site, but not quite so pedigreed as Topkapi). There were jewels and thrones and artifacts from the Royal Family. There were medals and awards. But most impressively, there were religious and historical artifacts ostensibly from pretty much all the major players in Muslim (and therefore Judeo-Christian) accounts. There was Moses' staff. Swords from Mohammed aas well as from all his major male associates. The Prophet's beard hair. Other relics from Old Testament prophets. The hand of St. John. The head of St. John. The artifacts went on and on, winding through rooms to the sound of the Quran being read aloud. We figured at first that it was a recording, til we turned a corner towards the end and ran into a little cleric perched on a stool, singing the text into a microphone in front of him as screens to the side scrolled the Turkish and English translation of the verse he was currently singing. Pretty cool.
By that time we had seen so much, my eyes were aching, so we wandered over to the Galata Bridge, where we snagged a few beanbag chairs and had lunch while watching the fishermen above us and the boats below us. Quite nice. After lunch, we went through the Spice Bazaar and its side streets, and spent an enjoyable time haggling over some copper pots and coffee sets. With those purchases in hand, we headed back towards the Blue Mosque to try and find a carpet shop. Normally I avoid carpet shops like the plague, but D had mentioned maybe buying a carpet if she could find a good deal, so we stuck our heads into a shop, to see what we could find. The guys in the shop were naturally quite friendly, and eager to show us 'just the perfect' carpets. They piled up carpet after carpet on the floor, asking us to mention when we saw ones we liked, so they could set those aside to cull the pile slowly but surely. Unfortunately, they didn't show any kilims until I specifically asked, and even then just brought out one half-hali half-kilim, and a few brand-new, machine-made kilims that were as soulless as any beige wall-to-wall. D quite liked the half-and-half carpet, so I asked how much they wanted for it so we could start working our way down. Their original asking price was literally over 4 times what the carpet should have been. Were we wiser, we'd have walked out immediately. Since we weren't that wise in the ways of carpet shops yet, I expressed shock at the outrageous price, and reminded the salesguy that we were students (...close enough) on limited budgets. We managed to knock a few hundred off the price before we decided it was time to check out the selection at a few of the neighboring shops. While we were packing up, we kept chatting, and the salesguy lowered the price significantly. He really didn't want us to check out other shops. We headed out anyway, with the promise that we'd return, as I was hoping that the selection in other shops would be at least closer to what I'd seen in Diyarbakir. Unfortunately, Sunday afternoon is not a popular carpet-buying time, and the other shops either didn't have a great selection, had no staff, or argued with D when she told them she wanted to see pieces with kilim elements. So back we went to the first shop, where after much more discussion and side ponderings on the merits of a few smaller rugs, we felt like we could make a deal, and for a decent price: 500-600 for a medium-sized half-hali half-kilim for D, plus a newer smaller kilim for me. We were within one hundred lira of our tipping point with the salesguy, and finally got him down to our price. Fantastic, no? Wrong! At that point, the owner of the shop (who had been observing, with the occasional comment) stepped in to say that the price for D's rug was 1800, and that there was absolutely no way he would consider going under 1800. What??? We were not amused. (It definitely was not an 1800 lira carpet) We marched out, and decided that carpets were not going to be an Istanbul purchase on our trip. With that enlightening shopping experience under our belts, we picked up our luggage and headed to the Otogar, where we grabbed a bus out to Canakkale that evening. And that will have to be another blog entry, where D and I take perhaps the most circuitous route ever between Istanbul and Ankara.
A quick note on post-travel goings-on: I finally, after a year and a half here, have made it to a football match. I've actually made it to 2, one for Ankaragucu and one for Genclerbirligi (both local Ankarali teams). Both times 'my' team didn't win, or even score, but it was pretty darn fun; today's match featured a hockey-style body check. I've also been meeting up with a few of the other Ankara Fulbrighters, including a new Fulbrighter just in from Greece, and got to an ARIT lecture on historical embroidery which was actually quite charming. It's been busy.
But more of that inshallah in the next post,
-R
I figured I should start at the beginning of my 'Highlights of Turkey' week with Danaijo, so I'll back up to the Saturday before last, when I had a day to spend in Istanbul before picking D up at the airport that evening. I'd stayed with my friend Cat, of my previous Kartalkaya adventure, so we headed out bright and early for some menemen (by far my favorite Turkish breakfast food, and what would be my favorite Turkish food ever, if not for the wondrousness of manti). Cat has a local menemenci across the street from her, so we had breakfast al fresco and I learned about the shop's rad intercom system: the shop supplied tea to all the shops in the neighborhood, but it wasn't efficient to just send a kid around constantly and ask if folks wanted tea, so there were several intercoms located around the neighborhood, in shops and on the street, and shopkeepers would just buzz over when they needed a glass or two. The speaker was above the cooking surface, so the menemen guy'd listen to Ahmet from around the corner saying he needed 3 glasses, send off the tea boy, and continue cooking. Brilliant. I cannot believe I've lived here so long and not noticed this ingenious system. At least I've noticed the cab call boxes...
Thusly fortified, Cat and I set off up towards Etiler to photograph some election flags. Local elections are at the end of March, and the parties are going all out: in addition to the household appliances mentioned in an earlier post, flags from the major parties are everywhere in the cities, blanketing major intersections, and vans with candidates' photos plastered to their sides drive around all day blaring patriotic party campaign music. A particularly catchy one in Antakya (sadly for Danaijo, it was stuck in my head the rest of our trip) just repeated "Simdi CHP zamani!" ("Now is CHP time!") ad nauseam. Anyway, we photographed our way to Besiktas, where we parted in a pouring rain after stocking up on bootleg dvds; while I was on the hunt for a travel book that included Syria, Cat ended up at a CHP rally with a bunch of politically-active women from GOP (in Ankara, that's the ritzy neighborhood, but in Istanbul, it's one of the more distressed neighborhoods).
I ended up not minding about missing 6 hours of party speeches and songs, because while walking around Tourist Central, Istanbul, I picked up something mythical and wonderful: a MuzeKart. For background, in August the government raised prices for all museums and sites it manages (so, pretty much everything but Dolmabahce Palace and the Basilica Cisterns), while removing the option of a student discount. This meant that Topkapi, had I had the urge to go see both the main part and the Harem part, would have been 35 lira just for me. I felt this to be outrageous, and thus hadn't seen Topkapi, but I did cough up 20 lira for the Hagia Sophia. There is one way to avoid having to pay (outrageous amount) for all those tourist sites: buy a MuzeKart. This 20-lira card, with your photo badly scanned to the back, allows you in to all state-run sites across Turkey for free, for a year. Awesome. The only catch is that it's only for Turkish citizens. No 20-lira pass for yabancis. I had heard, though, that within the past month the rules had relaxed enough to allow students at Turkish universities to also buy MuzeKarts, at a discounted price of 10 lira (because they're, you know, poor students). Armed with my ODTU ID, I braved the line at the Hagia Sophia to try my luck...and it worked! I didn't want to say anything while getting it in case they decided I didn't sound Turkish enough, but mere hours before picking up D I had scored a 10-lira card that would halve our total admission costs at every museum we visited (aside from the Cisterns, but I successfully argued for the Turkish student discount there).
So, fresh from my exciting MuzeKart buying, I headed off to the airport. Apparently at Ataturk International one is not allowed into the baggage claim area if one has not just disembarked from a plane, so I hung out with a bunch of liveried drivers with fancy name-signs, looking for American-looking people as they departed baggage claim. After a group with matching Yale sweatshirts trundled by, Danaijo walked out, and we had our emotional reunion before heading down to the Metro to head back to Sultanahmet. Once settled at our hotel, we then had to get back on the light rail line, take it to the end, hop on a bus, and slowly make our way through rush hour traffic to meet up with Cat for dinner in Arnavutkoy. This would've worked much better if the bus we were on had gone to Arnavutkoy. Instead, we took an unexpected turn in Ortakoy and ended up in some bus depot, with a confused driver asking where exactly we wanted to go. Oboy. I'd even asked when we got on if the bus went to Arnavutkoy.
No matter, we got on another bus, and headed back to Ortakoy, where we took a quick detour through the handicrafts bazaar there on the waterfront before grabbing a cab to Arnavutkoy. Once finally there, we grabbed Cat for dinner at Bodrum Manti (if you've read my other Istanbul entries, you may recognize the name; this is because Bodrum Manti is perhaps my favorite restaurant in Istanbul), where D had her first authentic Turkish meal, kitir ispanakli manti, or fried spinach manti.
Given that D had just gotten off a double-digit-hours-long plane ride, we didn't do much else til the next morning, when we headed out bright and early to the Aya Sofia, before heading to the Basilica Cisterns (they're just cool; I think I've been there 3 times now, and I never get tired of them). After the Cisterns, we headed over to the Blue Mosque before noticing that it was closed for prayer time, so we ambled over to Topkapi, stopping for fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice en route. Topkapi was, in a word, overwhelming. We passed through gate after gate, entering room after room, all absolutely gorgeously decked out in the heights of Ottoman fashion. Detail was everywhere. Tiles were handpainted. Pillows and sofas were richly embroidered with silver and gold thread. Mother-of-pearl inlay was on quite a bit of the woodwork. It was gorgeous. We went a little out of order through Topkapi, and ended up at the very back, where the private quarters open up to a view of both Europe and Asia across the Bosphorous. I simply cannot use enough adjectives to describe the opulence of the setting or the Palace itself. After the Sultan's family quarters, we went through the Treasury. If I said the rest of Topkapi was overwhelming, this was at least triply so. It felt like going through House on the Rock (in Wisconsin, also a cool site, but not quite so pedigreed as Topkapi). There were jewels and thrones and artifacts from the Royal Family. There were medals and awards. But most impressively, there were religious and historical artifacts ostensibly from pretty much all the major players in Muslim (and therefore Judeo-Christian) accounts. There was Moses' staff. Swords from Mohammed aas well as from all his major male associates. The Prophet's beard hair. Other relics from Old Testament prophets. The hand of St. John. The head of St. John. The artifacts went on and on, winding through rooms to the sound of the Quran being read aloud. We figured at first that it was a recording, til we turned a corner towards the end and ran into a little cleric perched on a stool, singing the text into a microphone in front of him as screens to the side scrolled the Turkish and English translation of the verse he was currently singing. Pretty cool.
By that time we had seen so much, my eyes were aching, so we wandered over to the Galata Bridge, where we snagged a few beanbag chairs and had lunch while watching the fishermen above us and the boats below us. Quite nice. After lunch, we went through the Spice Bazaar and its side streets, and spent an enjoyable time haggling over some copper pots and coffee sets. With those purchases in hand, we headed back towards the Blue Mosque to try and find a carpet shop. Normally I avoid carpet shops like the plague, but D had mentioned maybe buying a carpet if she could find a good deal, so we stuck our heads into a shop, to see what we could find. The guys in the shop were naturally quite friendly, and eager to show us 'just the perfect' carpets. They piled up carpet after carpet on the floor, asking us to mention when we saw ones we liked, so they could set those aside to cull the pile slowly but surely. Unfortunately, they didn't show any kilims until I specifically asked, and even then just brought out one half-hali half-kilim, and a few brand-new, machine-made kilims that were as soulless as any beige wall-to-wall. D quite liked the half-and-half carpet, so I asked how much they wanted for it so we could start working our way down. Their original asking price was literally over 4 times what the carpet should have been. Were we wiser, we'd have walked out immediately. Since we weren't that wise in the ways of carpet shops yet, I expressed shock at the outrageous price, and reminded the salesguy that we were students (...close enough) on limited budgets. We managed to knock a few hundred off the price before we decided it was time to check out the selection at a few of the neighboring shops. While we were packing up, we kept chatting, and the salesguy lowered the price significantly. He really didn't want us to check out other shops. We headed out anyway, with the promise that we'd return, as I was hoping that the selection in other shops would be at least closer to what I'd seen in Diyarbakir. Unfortunately, Sunday afternoon is not a popular carpet-buying time, and the other shops either didn't have a great selection, had no staff, or argued with D when she told them she wanted to see pieces with kilim elements. So back we went to the first shop, where after much more discussion and side ponderings on the merits of a few smaller rugs, we felt like we could make a deal, and for a decent price: 500-600 for a medium-sized half-hali half-kilim for D, plus a newer smaller kilim for me. We were within one hundred lira of our tipping point with the salesguy, and finally got him down to our price. Fantastic, no? Wrong! At that point, the owner of the shop (who had been observing, with the occasional comment) stepped in to say that the price for D's rug was 1800, and that there was absolutely no way he would consider going under 1800. What??? We were not amused. (It definitely was not an 1800 lira carpet) We marched out, and decided that carpets were not going to be an Istanbul purchase on our trip. With that enlightening shopping experience under our belts, we picked up our luggage and headed to the Otogar, where we grabbed a bus out to Canakkale that evening. And that will have to be another blog entry, where D and I take perhaps the most circuitous route ever between Istanbul and Ankara.
A quick note on post-travel goings-on: I finally, after a year and a half here, have made it to a football match. I've actually made it to 2, one for Ankaragucu and one for Genclerbirligi (both local Ankarali teams). Both times 'my' team didn't win, or even score, but it was pretty darn fun; today's match featured a hockey-style body check. I've also been meeting up with a few of the other Ankara Fulbrighters, including a new Fulbrighter just in from Greece, and got to an ARIT lecture on historical embroidery which was actually quite charming. It's been busy.
But more of that inshallah in the next post,
-R
Friday, March 13, 2009
A city a day is the Bonkano/Danaijo way...
I'm sitting in Gaziantep, updating briefly before heading off to dinner, afterdinner things, and an overnight bus to Ankara. This week has been a whirlwind of cities and adventures: my friend Danaijo flew into town Saturday night, and we've spent the week since travelling from İstanbul to Çanakkale, to Troy, down to İzmir, flying to Adana for Antakya, over the border to Aleppo in Syria, and back across and up to Gaziantep. It's not a route Lonely Planet would ever recommend, but we,ve seen a great and varied swath of the country, and it's been quite fun. I'll leave the detailed explication til I'm back in Ankara, but a few short bites for now:
-Syria is gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. And incredibly cheap. I was a little sad that we could only see Aleppo, but it means I'll just have to return to see Damascus, Homs, Palmyra, and everything else. Also it is delicious, we had falafel every meal, and lıtres of squeezed-in-front-of-us fruit juice.
-Fulbrighters are awesome and hospitality-ful, we stayed at a friend in İzmir's place and also at a friend here in Gaziantep. Both of them have bent over backwards to get us directions, dinner, and anything else we could possibly need while staying with them. It's also great to catch up, as I hadn't seen Dierdre since Thanksgiving, and Alex since Şeker Bayramı. They're both teaching English, and having such different experiences to mine as a researcher in Ankara.
-We still have bought no carpets. Maalesef. I was fairly certain either Danaijo or I would end up with at least one in İstanbul or, failing that, Aleppo or Gaziantep, but it seems fated not to be. We have seen a loooooot of carpets now though, and I'm fairly certain we're both minor experts in regional carpet variations and quality differences by now. We also have a newfound disdain of İstanbul carpet shops; we spent an hour chatting and haggling down to a more-than-fair price until the carpet seller we were talking to suddenly raised the price by almost 1000 lira and refused to reconsider. Inanılmaz. Maybe I'll just have to head back to Diyarbakır for my Turkish carpet...
All right, that's all from Gaziantep. kib,
-R
-Syria is gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. And incredibly cheap. I was a little sad that we could only see Aleppo, but it means I'll just have to return to see Damascus, Homs, Palmyra, and everything else. Also it is delicious, we had falafel every meal, and lıtres of squeezed-in-front-of-us fruit juice.
-Fulbrighters are awesome and hospitality-ful, we stayed at a friend in İzmir's place and also at a friend here in Gaziantep. Both of them have bent over backwards to get us directions, dinner, and anything else we could possibly need while staying with them. It's also great to catch up, as I hadn't seen Dierdre since Thanksgiving, and Alex since Şeker Bayramı. They're both teaching English, and having such different experiences to mine as a researcher in Ankara.
-We still have bought no carpets. Maalesef. I was fairly certain either Danaijo or I would end up with at least one in İstanbul or, failing that, Aleppo or Gaziantep, but it seems fated not to be. We have seen a loooooot of carpets now though, and I'm fairly certain we're both minor experts in regional carpet variations and quality differences by now. We also have a newfound disdain of İstanbul carpet shops; we spent an hour chatting and haggling down to a more-than-fair price until the carpet seller we were talking to suddenly raised the price by almost 1000 lira and refused to reconsider. Inanılmaz. Maybe I'll just have to head back to Diyarbakır for my Turkish carpet...
All right, that's all from Gaziantep. kib,
-R
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Small Things
In contrast to the last few epic posts, here's a short one, of still-shorter collected thoughts:
-Elections are coming! At the end of the month, Turkey has its local elections. Campaigning has been fierce; I personally was somewhat put out to find that I do not reside in one of the cities where the municipal government is handing out free washing machines in a blatant vote-garnering bid. This was especially distressing as my washing machine broke today, with about 2/3 of my seasonally-appropriate wardrobe still locked inside. Harika.
-Accomplishment of my February: I got YouTube to work. I am a technological master. Ok, maybe I followed a set of clear directions, but it involved monkeying around with my system and fiddling with settings.
-Some things you don't think about when looking at differences between life in Turkey and life in the US. Milk is one of them: I've been on a bit of a milk kick lately, and have run up against several issues: 1. most milk sold here is shelf stable. To me, this just tastes off. 2. There is pasteurized, refrigerated, goes-bad-in-4-days-or-less milk available in the grocery stores, but nothing larger than 500 mL. Also, there is typically one row of milk cartons, hidden next to 10 rows of Ayran cartons, which are next to the other containers of Ayran. Turks love their Ayran. 3. While some of the 'shelf-stable' milk is 'Light', all of the refrigerated milk is whole. Not even 2%, whole/ This takes some getting used to. It does make for great chocolate milk though.
-In this article, a Parliament commission notes that 15% of Turkish students bring guns or knives to school. Not such a good thing. I don't know much firsthand about the primary and secondary education system here, but from what I've heard and read, it's extremely difficult for children coming through the public school system. Turks with any money send their kids private, and if that's not possible, they supplement the public school educations with private exam prep schools.
-As you may have noticed, I'm trying out a little bit of a new look for the blog; I like it so far, but we'll see how it goes.
-Elections are coming! At the end of the month, Turkey has its local elections. Campaigning has been fierce; I personally was somewhat put out to find that I do not reside in one of the cities where the municipal government is handing out free washing machines in a blatant vote-garnering bid. This was especially distressing as my washing machine broke today, with about 2/3 of my seasonally-appropriate wardrobe still locked inside. Harika.
-Accomplishment of my February: I got YouTube to work. I am a technological master. Ok, maybe I followed a set of clear directions, but it involved monkeying around with my system and fiddling with settings.
-Some things you don't think about when looking at differences between life in Turkey and life in the US. Milk is one of them: I've been on a bit of a milk kick lately, and have run up against several issues: 1. most milk sold here is shelf stable. To me, this just tastes off. 2. There is pasteurized, refrigerated, goes-bad-in-4-days-or-less milk available in the grocery stores, but nothing larger than 500 mL. Also, there is typically one row of milk cartons, hidden next to 10 rows of Ayran cartons, which are next to the other containers of Ayran. Turks love their Ayran. 3. While some of the 'shelf-stable' milk is 'Light', all of the refrigerated milk is whole. Not even 2%, whole/ This takes some getting used to. It does make for great chocolate milk though.
-In this article, a Parliament commission notes that 15% of Turkish students bring guns or knives to school. Not such a good thing. I don't know much firsthand about the primary and secondary education system here, but from what I've heard and read, it's extremely difficult for children coming through the public school system. Turks with any money send their kids private, and if that's not possible, they supplement the public school educations with private exam prep schools.
-As you may have noticed, I'm trying out a little bit of a new look for the blog; I like it so far, but we'll see how it goes.
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