Istanbul again

We left Kusadesi early Saturday morning to catch a flight from Izmir to Istanbul. The experience at Turkish Airlines was quite the chaos. First off, the ride there took longer than expected and we only got there an hour before the plane was supposed to leave. Which I suppose would be alright on domestic flights but the airport check-in line was packed and long. The other complication was that our names had been completely misspelled on our etickets. In fact, Larry’s name was not his name at all. I thought to ask at the ticket selling counter whether we had enough time to check in and what the scoop was with our completely misspelled names. We ended up having to buy new tickets entirely and then getting a refund on the wrong ones from Yashir who purchased them for us. The check in line got crazier as people were anxious about getting on their flights. The check in counter workers began calling out instructions at some point in Turkish which we of course didn’t understand. I continued to ask airport people I saw around whether we really had enough time. Then when people started budding, crawling under stantions, pushing ahead, things got even more nuts. An airline man I’d already spoken English with once now clearly agitated, shouted “No speak English” the next time I tried to ask him something. In the end the woman in front of us spoke German and translated the instructions everyone was shouting out. We became pushy too then and finally got ourselves checked in and flown off.

Arriving in Istanbul went very well. We made arrangements with Mark’s friend Fatih to meet up with him later in the day. He was happy that we were coming to visit and that he would get to meet his good friend’s sister. He also fondly spoke about my dad’s visit to Istanbul a few year’s ago. We found our way quite easily to the metro and the tram to get us in to downtown Istanbul. It was very cool because it felt like a familiar place, even though we only spent 4 days there last week we did get to know a bit the little corner we had explored. We ended up taking the whole tram route from beginning to end. We reminisced about Eminonu. A little group of us that had had dinner in Asia the first night we arrived in Istanbul had a lot of fun with that name on the ferry back to Europe where our hotel was. It became a fun little inside joke.

We met Fatih in Taksim on the square by the statue in the little piece of shade that there was. It was another hot day. Spending time with Fatih was particularly nice because we got to experience a piece of Istanbul in a more authentic way somehow. Even actually getting to places by public transport the way the Istanbullus do. (People from Istanbul are called this, I discovered.) The three of us first had tea at a cool little tea room on the roof top of a building. Tourists would never have discovered this. Fatih had to go back to work for a couple of hours so Larry and I wandered the pedestrian zone streets of Taksim. There were millions of people I’m sure quite literally. When you looked on down the street it reminded me of what Queen St looks like during the Beaches Jazz Festival. Fortunately being in it didn’t feel as crammed. The little side streets were often filled with cafes and vendors, lots of fish vendors here for example and some cool architectural designs. Later when we met up with Fatih again we drove down to the Bosphorus. He took us to Adem Baba, a favourite seafood restaurant of his. They apparently serve the freshest fish and we tried a variety of different sorts. The atmosphere down there was charged. There are many night clubs in the area and many people were out on this Saturday night. The traffic getting there and finding parking was horrendous and we had to shake our heads at some of the crazy driver maneuvers we witnessed. After a walk along a bit of the Bosphorous (and reminiscing about our choir boat tour there the week before), and Fatih rushing in to a mosque to say his final prayers just as the call to prayer rang out, he so very generously drove us all the way out to the airport, the other airport; the one that’s on the other side and farther out from town. We got there about midnight and began waiting for our 3 am flight, which wasn’t all that bad since we had to stay on our toes to push our way into the various different line ups. We did very well actually and were practically the first ones on the plane. We did however accidentally leave the bag of chocolates behind in our haste to be first, that I’d bought at the duty free to help keep us company. Oh well, we didn’t need that many anyway. :-)