Gebze, part II

It was time to leave and travel on to Gebze's Coban Mustafapasa Cami, the old mosque in Selcuk that was the setting of several OHB paintings. Unfortunately, it was pouring and the streets were overrunning with water. We made a dash for the dolmus, and headed uphill to historic central Gebze, where we found the mosque and learned from Em about various Arabic inscriptions and architectural elements of the structure. We also ran into a guy who seemed to be affiliated with the mosque in some way, Zeki, who showed us around the turbe (tomb, of Coban Mustafapasa, the guy who built the mosque) and got us in to the balcony of the mosque. By that time though, we were soaked to the bone and not about to take our shoes off again, so we sent Matt in to report on the interior from the balcony. After he got back, we headed back to the street and picked up a bus to the train station. The bus was full of preteens, who whispered between themselves the entire ride about whether we were speaking English, Spanish, Russian or Arabic (Arabic?? Really???). Once at the station, we were really glad to dash on to the train and enjoy the scant warmth from the train heaters – we were still soaked to the bone and it was about 35 degrees Fahrenheit out, so from that standpoint were pretty miserable. Gebze was awesome though, and Eskihisar is situated just beautifully on the side of the Marmara, with a harbor full of small fishing boats and the Osman Hamdi Bey house museum fronting on the water. In like May, it'd be the perfect get-out-of-Istanbul daytrip. From the reactions of the people at the house, the mosque, and on the bus, it was clear that not many foreigners actually visit Gebze, which is a pity. It was gorgeous.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonkano/4412860205/" title="102_3534 by Minnesota Globetrekker, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4022/4412860205_6020577df1.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="102_3534" /></a>

Osman Hamdi Bey's seaside house

Gebze'de gezmek, or Why everyone should travel with art history grad students

With a former-Istanbul-resident friend in town, the normal tourist things are off the activities list, because we've both been there, done that. So yesterday, Em's first full day back in the 'Bul, we headed out to the edge of the city for some sightseeing and antics – to Gebze, a feature of very few guidebooks.

In about two years, Gebze will be a summer weekend jaunt of choice for Istanbullus. I have no idea why it isn't already. Gebze is awesome. So awesome.

Em and I ambled our way out the door and down to Karakoy about midmorning, where we caught the ferry to Haydarpasha to meet up with Matt, a Fulbright teaching assistant from Kayseri, and grab the banliyo train out to Gebze. The banliyo is the suburban train, and Gebze is the last stop. It is not technically in Istanbul, it's actually in Kocaeli province and much closer to the city of Kocaeli itself, but it is reachable on Istanbul public transit, which is always a plus when you're carless. But I digress.

 

After a nice hourish train ride, past the Marmara coastline and some light industrial zones, we ended up in Gebze, where it had clearly just stopped raining. We found a road sign for Eskihisar, the bit of town where the waterfront and the Osman Hamdi Bey museum are located, and set off, winding through some gorgeous summer homes in the back streets.

At this point, I should point out that Em's a grad student, and Islamic/Ottoman art is kind of her thing, and Osman Hamdi Bey is most definitely her thing. Osman Hamdi Bey is a bit of a rock star – he's perhaps the best-known Ottoman painter, and also the first Turkish head of the Imperial Museum. In his spare time, he founded the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul (now Mimar Sinan University), built the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and directed the first Turkish-helmed archaeological dig. So he's kind of a big deal.

By the time we got to the waterfront and found OHB's stately house, it was closed for the lunch hour. We decided to take our lunch hour as well, and headed next door to a decent place for some tavuk in various forms and some catch-up gossip. We then headed back to the museum/house, and found it still locked, so we headed across the courtyard to the two-storey administrative complex adjacent to try and find someone with a key.

Well, we did find someone with a key, but much more awesomely we found the museum's Saturday painting circle! We walked in to this room to find a dozen women painting and chatting away over tea, supervised by an instructor who'd occasionally lean over someone's shoulder to suggest some technique or another. They were really excited to see us, and we were really excited to chat with them, but first we had to see the museum itself, so one of the painting women detached herself from her canvas and brought us over to the house to check out Osman Hamdi Bey's abode.

The museum itself was excellent. Everything was preserved just as it was when OHB lived there, and they had a lot of original artifacts, furnishings and furniture. Em about died when we opened a door dividing the study and a gallery, and the guard casually remarked, "oh, Osman Hamdi Bey painted that door, that's his original painted flowers you're touching."

The house had a lot of reproductions of OHB paintings (many are in the Pera or the Sabanci museums), and Em gave an impromptu lecture on his painting hallmarks (He painted himself into a lot of his paintings, or his wife, and he used a lot of locations in Bursa. Also, because he was in charge of the imperial archeological collection, he painted a lot of pieces from the collection into his artwork, many of which are pretty identifiable.).

The second floor of the house had a few rooms of OHB's painting supplies, including one with wax figures recreating the setting for one of his paintings. The house itself was gorgeous, with some beautiful late-19^th-century Ottoman fixtures. The security guard showing us and the painter (a German woman, Marita, who moved to Turkey some 30 years ago) around the house was really impressed by our enthusiasm about the house, and gave us DVDs with the story of Osman Hamdi Bey produced by the municipality.

After the tour, we headed back through a light rain to the painting studio, where we had tea with a whole group of painters and chatted about their art, OHB, Eskihisar, and pretty much everything else. They were all pretty talented, and were painting in pretty varied styles. I may have finagled an invite to join their Saturday classes.

A Tale of two taxis (and a bonus bus ride)

For myriad reasons, I ended up taking a cab both Saturday morning and Sunday morning last week. And in keeping with the dual nature of Turkey/Istanbul/Fatih, they were diametrically opposite.
Saturday morning, I was headed out to meet up with a group to walk the shore on the Bosporus, so I grabbed a taxi out off the main road. As an aside, all foreigners are warned about taxi drivers looking to scam foreign tourists, but so far I've been lucky and have just had a few "taking the extremely long way" experiences.
As we're crossing the Galata Bridge, I glance at the meter to see: it's at nearly 14 lira, or twice what it should be. The meter's been tampered with. My driver has his phone wedged into the steering wheel, and is talking with his girlfriend on speakerphone while driving, but we get to Besiktas in short order, where I inform him that I have no intention of paying 24 lira for a 12 lira ride. After I haggle down to 20, I hand the driver my cash... and he switches it out.
A classic trick. Too bad I didn't notice til I got out, after handing over even more cash after my 50 lira bill magically became a 5 lira bill. Gah.

Sunday I was running a titch late for somewhere awkward to get to by public transportation, so I went out to the same main road and hailed another cab. Total 180-degree difference. The driver and I spent the whole trip chatting along about the economic crisis, unemployment, the cost of living here and his adorable 2-year-old daughter (he showed me photos at a red light). When we got to the intersection where I was getting out, he wouldn't let me pay the full fare, because he'd told me a slightly lower price en route.
Turkish hospitality at its best.

And another, as-long-as-I'm-writing-about-things-as-banal-as-taxi-rides story: Last Wednesday, I had by far my most exciting experience on an intracity bus. I was on my way home from work, earphones in, Lady Gaga blaring (don't judge), when the bus pulls over suddenly to the side of the road, between stops. I might not have noticed anything amiss at that point had the bus driver not gone tearing out the door and sprinting around to the back of the bus. At that point, the back of the bus starting rapidly filling with acrid smoke and the bus assistant opened all the doors for the passengers to skedaddle. As I wedged myself in the mass exodus, I glanced behind me to see 8-10 foot flames shooting out the back of the bus.

That's right, my bus Caught On Fire. Not simply smoke and burning smells, respectably sized flames and a busful of duly impressed passengers. Once we were all a safe gawking distance away, we watched the bus driver and his assistant dither before folks started hoofing it to the next bus stop to grab another bus. It was pretty clear our original one was not going to be resuming its route any time soon. I updated my Twitter as I walked, because I am that kind of adherent to modern technology.

Luckily, but far less interesting from a blogging perspective, all my transportation choices since those have been fairly commonplace.

One final note: Sorry for the dearth of posts recently; for some reason Blogger doesn't seem to be working in Turkey. Shockingly, this is a Google issue, not a the-government-banned-it issue. I'm working out options.

kendine iyi bak,

Life in this fair city

So I'm using one of my few nonwork Internet opportunities to catch up a tiny bit on this; in theory I should be getting at-home internet any day now, at which point my blogging will expand prodigiously I'm sure.
Autumn in Istanbul is kind of a more temperate autumn in Boston, minus the trees changing color and plus about 10 or 20 degrees, depending. People are still out at all the outdoor dining spots, picnicking in median strips and all the other various outdoor activities I'd normally associate with summer. The one thing folks've stopped doing is jumping into the water to cool off, which, given the pollution in the Bosporous, is probably a very good thing.
In the weeks since I got back from the States I've had several visitors, catsat at my home and the neighbors', collected a fairly impressive amount of Expat Treasure (the contents of my fridge at the moment is roughly: bacon, rum, vanilla beans, caviar, more bacon [different kind], duty-free wines -- and the peanut butter, chocolate chips and wild rice are hanging out in my cupboards) and figured out where the Brits of Istanbul have their pub quiz nights (my newly adopted team won, in part because I knew that the lady who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel with her dog dies of suffocation when her dog pressed its nose against the airhole so tightly it blocked the airflow to the rest of the barrel. Important things like this, that's what my brain's full of...).
My landlord visited for a few days, which was good as it was a chance for him to see what I'd done with the place so far and an opportunity to get some work done around the place, as he was home during the day and could supervise contractors. I came home to new hallway lighting and no more wires protruding from various walls. The cat was pretty upset about that latter improvement.
Somewhat more exciting was my other visitor this month: my friend flew in from Switzerland to run in the Istanbul Marathon, which starts in Asia, goes across the Bosporus Bridge, along the Bosporus, up the Golden Horn, and ends at the Hippodrome, directly behind the Blue Mosque. A pretty interesting course, for sure; also the one day a year the bridge is open to pedestrian traffic. We toured the main sites on Saturday, hitting up the Blue Mosque, Aya Sofya, Grand Bazaar, Spice Bazaar, Eyup Camii and the Besiktas DVD markets as well as the marathon expo before heading to my Favorite Restaurant in Istanbul for manti. As I don't, as a habit, run, the marathon expo was entirely new to me -- marathoners get some pretty decent swag. The booths were a strange combination of more athletic gear than I have ever seen in Turkey before and random other products, like the Gumussuyu traditional goods association. They had walnuts in molasses, it was kind of but not actually similar to fruit leather, but thicker.
On Sunday, we headed up to Sultanahmet under intermittent rain to catch a marathon bus to the starting line. Having only seen the Boston Marathon before this, the Istanbul marathoners looked a little less...overtly athletic, I guess, in general. Once we got to the starting line, people were milling about as some guy with a bullhorn and a speaker system yelled really excitedly about the Culture Minister, who apparently was there observing the start. I actually started with the marathon runners, just to run across the bridge, and ran about 5 kilometers before grabbing a cab to the finish line to meet up with Kevin. He "just" ran the 15k, so we were able to see the marathon winners run in, complete with motorcycle escort, which was pretty cool.
After the marathon, we ended up walking along the marathon route by the Maramara Sea, which is ordinarily a four-lane roadway but was closed to traffic til mid-afternoon so much calmer. We ended up at Topkapi, which was overwhelming as always but also gorgeous as always, before taking a ferry up the Golden Horn to the Koc Museum, where we speed-walked through before heading over to Istiklal. I don't know how many kilometers we walked, but it was a pretty darn respectable amount.
I really do enjoy exploring this city with newcomers to the country -- I think the experience of seeing Istanbul with a fresh perspective reminds me of just why this city is such an awesome place to live and be in. Plus, I'm a tour guide at heart, and any chance I can get to natter on about the Topkapi palace social hierarchy is something I leap on.
This week has been, it seems, mainly catching up and planning ahead, as I've got another visitor, an old friend in town, my long-term catsittee is leaving, and potentially a quick weekend hop out of the country or two in the next six weeks. In between preparing and planning for all that, I found time to make it to an expat meetup, where I caught up with a few acquaintances and met some new folks in town. It's really fascinating how many expats are in this city, and for how many reasons. I don't know if this Istanbul life is glamorous, but it certainly keeps me on my toes.
And with that, I'm off for now,
-R

 

So I'll inshallah get a more descriptive post up soon, but this weekend I ran across the Bosporus Bridge from Asia to Europe as part of the Istanbul Intercontinental Marathon. I didn't run the marathon, I peaced out about 5 km in, but I did get to run across the bridge, which was all kinds of cool.

Sometimes when I'm traveling through or reading about Western Europe, I start to think about how nice it would be to live there for a while, or at the very least to explore it more. Today began as one of those days: I got in to Helsinki this morning, and though I was too exhausted to head to the city just to head back 4-6 hours later and figure out customs and security again, the airport itself seemed nice and the people in general seemed ridiculously attractive and pretty darn nice to boot. Then my battery ran low and my metaphorical battery started flagging -- there's like 1 outlet in the international terminal, and one cafe, where a small cup of black coffee and a muffin with hot-pink icing dribbled haphazardly across the top set me back $8. Eight dollars is like 12 lira, and I don't think I'd ever pay that much even for a medium latte and absurdly large-topped muffin at Starbucks. I figured that maybe I'd splurge and buy a day pass to the FinnAir lounge, and enjoy light refreshments in between naps in their sleeping pods, but unlike perhaps every American airline with a lounge, FinnAir doesn't offer day passes. Maybe it's a European thing.
In actual plane experience, though, FinnAir has been pretty darn awesome, especially when compared with my Delta flight over the same ocean last week. Between the actually nice blanket, the gigantic selection of newspapers when boarding, the better wine with dinner (and the quite good dinner, although Turkish Airways does better) and the comfier chairs, I was a pretty happy camper before the lights were even dimmed.
Also a huge plus, and one that I've not failed to complain about on every US-carrier transAtlantic flight I've taken (I suppose I'm a little spoiled), was the in-seat entertainment system. Lufthansa and Air France had more than decent seatback entertainment options in my experience, but FinnAir took it to the next level -- they had over 50 movies, at least 15 television shows and games and other media options galore, and all of them were set up to start whenever you wanted. My other European carriers have had a selection of movies, but the played on a loop, so once you finished the first, you'd switch over to the second movie of your choice and it'd be like a third of the way through, with no way to back it up.
Sealing my support of FinnAir (note to FinnAir: get a domestic partner to the Midwest and I will fly you all the time. Probably. Four legs is just a tad long, you know) was the fact that they had electrical outlets in every seat leg so you could charge your laptop in-flight. Delta's in flight magazine had promised such a thing, but closer inspection revealed no outlets, and the flight attendant said either they were just in one row in Economy or only in their planes to like Singapore. All very well if you're flying to Singapore, but I am not.
Unfortunately my seat was in the very last row of the plane, by the engines, so I hardly slept but aside from that everything was just brilliant. Kudos to FinnAir, even if their home airport could use a little razzledazzle. Get a decent homemade sandwich shop and some of those nice leather armchairs with outlets in the armrests in here and Helsinki'd be my layover of choice, rather than Midway.
Perhaps an airline comparison guide is in my future; I was totalling up the airlines I've travelled with in the last year and change, and it's a formidable number, from tiny little subsidiaries-of-budget-carriers in Turkey to a scattered handful of European national airlines to a grab bag of American outfits. So far Turkish Airlines is my favorite, not out of any nationalist pride but because they manage to serve a full hot lunch and beverage service on the 45-minute flight from Ankara to Istanbul. They should market that hop as a flying restaurant, really. In comparison, on my two flights between Chicago and Minneapolis last week, also about 45 minutes or so, we got a begrudging beverage service and had the opportunity to buy some peanuts if we wanted. The Chicago-Minneapolis pilot told better jokes, though. I'm not sure how that scoring rubric should look.

On that note, I'm off to wander the halls of the international terminal once more,
kib,
-R

Ramazan days

The month of Ramazan started last Friday here. While I lived through Ramazan in Turkey last year, it was really not any sort of an issue, as I lived in a diplomatic section of Ankara, and socialized with expats and fairly westernized folks. Neighborhood restaurants were full all day long. I never even heard the early-morning drums, which are sounded to wake people up before dawn to eat before sunrise.

This year, oh boy is Ramazan a part of my life. About 5 people at work do not fast; that leaves at least one hundred people in the building not eating, drinking or smoking during daylight hours. As a Catholic, I look at our fasting and feel like a weakling: we get water, there's nothing about smoking for those so inclined, and we even get a light meal as part of our fasting requirements. And our fasting days are generally one at a time, spread out over the year. A solid month of not eating or drinking, even water, from sunup to sundown, while working, is rough.

As part of Ramazan at a religiously-inclined workplace, the company cafeteria has been shut down, as has the bakery on the ground floor. The coffee machines are out of coffee and will not be refilled until late September. The snack machine has 2 bags of pretzel rods left and also will not be refilled til almost October. The one thing that is still around, thank goodness, is the water cooler. Us non-fasting heathens have stockpiled tea and instant coffee mixes to get our workday coffee fixes, although I've tried to avoid drinking my blackberry tea, because the smell wafts across the news floor, and that seems pretty insensitive especially towards the end of the day.

The nice part about Ramazan at work though is that the company gave the nonfasters gift cards to spend on lunch at local restaurants. Unfortunately, so far they only work at McDonald's and Sbarro. On the bright side, Sbarro has caesar salad, which is excellent. On Fridays, when we work late, the cafeteria opens to serve iftar, or the fast-breaking meal, which is a big production. Community iftars are pretty fun, especially as the countdown to sundown begins: there's a tide of noise as everyone gets excited to finally eat, which gives way to absolute silence, save the occasional clink of silverware.

One cultural crossover I learned about today is the Ramazan gift exchange. One of our page editors is organizing this, at work; it's exactly like Secret Santa, except the exchange occurs at the end of Ramazan. It's fitting, because Seker Bayram, the holiday at the end of Ramazan that literally means "sugar holiday," is somewhat Christmas-like.

In my neighborhood here, as well, most people observe the fast. The restaurants are nearly empty, and even the touristy fish restaurants are hurting for customers until about 8p.m., when everyone can eat again. My bread guy has a small stand in front of his shop piled high with Ramazan bread, which is apparently special and made only for Ramazan. It's delicious, so I wish they'd make it year-round, but alas. It's round, and slightly puffier than their normal pide bread.

Another new experience for me has been the Ramazan drums. On Sunday morning I heard them for the first time ever. Good Lord are they loud. I'm fairly certain there was a two-party drum-off below my window Sunday morning; it went on for over ten minutes, which I'm sure many would agree is not at all what you want to hear when it is 4a.m. and you don't need to get up and eat because you can indeed eat all day, heathen that you are. Also, it woke the cat up, who then decided that 5:30a.m. was most definitely time for me to get up.

Aside from the drums (which actually can be somewhat pleasant, part of the charm of living in my part of Istanbul) and the lack of coffee and breakfast at work, I've really enjoyed Ramazan this year, as I've actually been able to see and live with people who are really fasting, and who embrace the spirit of Ramazan. I'm really impressed by everyone I know who is able to work all day without caffeine or even water (I think the water part is particularly impressive); going all day without imbibing anything would be not bad at all if one did absolutely nothing all day, but to get up, travel to work, concentrate on frustrating wording issues all day (current challenge: trying to catch every time writers refer to the government's Kurdish initiative as the "final solution to the Kurdish problem" -- because that's just not good) and then travel home, all without water or anything to nosh on, that's just really darn impressive. And they do it every day for a month.

I've heard that tempers get short towards the end of Ramazan, which is understandable. Luckily, I've just happened to plan my trip back to the States to coincide with the last week of the fasting month. So while everyone here is counting down the days til they can eat normally again, I'll be doubly haraam, with my not-fasting and my seeking-out-of-pork-products planned for my visit to the States. It's going to be good.

-R