Around The World – Istanbul, Turkey And Home
Apologies for the delay posting the last installment of my trip. The day I got home, a new friend from California flew in and we went up to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai and then down to Koh Phi Phi. I can now catch up on my sleep!
And now, on to the end of the trip.
My first full day in Istanbul was not great, but you’ve just got to get some stuff out of the way to be able to enjoy the rest of your visit. My goals today were to get a local SIM card for my phone, get a public transport pass and explore around my neighbourhood a bit.
The day started badly when I went to use the shower. It has the usual small electric water heater on the wall and even though the light came on with the water flow, it was freezing cold. The temperature adjustment knob was broken and locked into the coldest setting. Hmmm. I now realize this is what the lady was trying to apologize for last night. How can you expect people to pay money for a room with known-broken hot water? I messaged my host and he replied he would move me to another room. I packed up my stuff and moved downstairs. I tested the water and it’s warm! Yay!
My Airbnb is in the center of the area called Sultanahmet, where all of the historical stuff is, but a bit of a walk to get there. And it’s located on a serious hill up from the junction of the Mediterranean Sea and the Bosporus Straits. I decide to not fight gravity this morning so I went downhill and over to where a train station is marked on Google Maps. Mind you, it’s right at the freezing point, with flurries of snow coming down. It’s January but I expected slightly warmer conditions at the junction of Europe and Asia.
I get there to find the station has been closed for 2 years… The helpful man at a kiosk points me back up the hill to get into town, so off I go. I notice as I’m walking that almost every shop I walk past is a shoe store. There must be literally millions of shoes in this part of the city. I think Douglas Adams was on the mark when he wrote about the Shoe Event Horizon in the radio show episodes of the Guide.
I reach the main road and turn east towards the Hagia Sophia. I try to buy a public transport card, the Istanbulkart, but the machine requires exact change of a TL10 bill which I don’t have, all larger bills from the ATM last night. I’ll need to buy something and get change and try again later.
Getting Internet coverage on my phone is always a priority in a new country, I just don’t like to be away from Google Maps for too long. Given my history with local SIM cards, I don’t want to buy one from a little kiosk only concerned about my money so I search for a large company-owned shop. Turkey is a little complicated because the government requires registration of all foreign phones. You can get a SIM card but it will be quickly deactivated if not registered. This rule has tighted up over time so a Google search on the subject gives conflicting information but I figure it’s better to be safe than sorry. I found a big Vodafone shop, the #2 provider here, went inside and made my request. The girl told me “System stop, come back tomorrow.” Ugh, here we go. I walked outside and continued my search.
Shortly a local man fell into step next to me and I could instantly tell I was his target. He starts the normal conversation, where are you from, how long in town, you look like a Turkish man, etc. I play along as I’ve got over a week here and what the heck, I might as well see what he’s offering. After the song and dance, he shows me his souvenir shop and then walks me back to his “cousin’s” rug shop. The cousin seems to be my long-lost brother, full of love for me and my family and everyone I’ve ever known. He’s a Kurd, from the far south-eastern part of Turkey. Realize at no point have I said I’m interested in buying anything, much less a rug. He serves me tea and actually sends out for a full lunch for us of bread and delicious roasted veggies and cheese. He and his sons proceed to show me over 100 rugs, I don’t envy the kid who had to roll them all back up.
The sales pitch gets stronger, what size do you like, which of these two do you like better, which color do you like better… Never a hint of a price yet of course. I see a few I say look nice and he pulls out the calculator, thinking hard, talking about how bad his business is now with the low season and the bombing last week. I’m thinking a few hundred Euros for the one I like best, he types out, I’m not kidding E3860. This is more than my around the world plane ticket cost. I tried not to laugh but said no, no, too much, I don’t want it!
He hems and haws, talking about how he can ship it or I can take it on the plane, they roll it up and start wrapping it in paper and packing tape, I say no I don’t want it, too much. Without me ever making a counter-proposal or saying I want to buy it, he bargains himself down in several steps to E800. Now this is actually probably a good price for this rug, but I explain again I don’t want it and I don’t need it. I get up to leave and he loses it. He starts muttering what I’m sure are curses against my whole family tree, and the hate in his eyes is palpable, I can almost see steam coming out of his ears. I offer to pay him more than double what the lunch cost but he just stares at me as I slowly walk out the door, hoping I don’t get a throwing knife in the back. I saw this same issue in Morocco in shops and even getting a haircut. Everything is great, best friends until the money. Then they go all Sybill and things get deadly serious, all pretense of friendship is gone. I understand he’s got a business to run and I seemed like a good mark, but it’s my choice to buy or not, he’s just reinforced my previous experiences.
Back out in the cold air, I spotted the door to the Yerebatan Sarayi, or Basilica Cistern. It’s a huge underground water storage tank built in the 6th century by the Roman Emperor Justinian. The massive space is held up by 336 marble colums. The draw for me is it was a critical location for the novel Inferno by Dan Brown. I won’t give away the plot if you haven’t read it yet but I got tingles just being down there where “it all happened”, especially the northwest corner with the two Medusa head colums. It was also a scene in the 1963 James Bond film From Russia With Love. My phone camera is absolute crap in low light conditions, even with the flash in here so I’ll put up a couple of shots but it’s worth Googling for better pictures. It could be the inside of a magnificent mosque but the fact that it’s underground and holds about a foot of water with carp swimming around in it is amazing.
Back on the surface, I walked up the street and spotted an Avea cell store, the #3 provider here. I went inside and made my request. With 4 employees in the store and me as the only customer, I just wanted to scream with how slow they were. Really, how much chatting and looking at your phone can you do when you have a paying customer standing there? After 15 minutes of 1-finger typing, I hand them my passport to do the government registration. They said no, don’t do that here. I have to go to “another place” to get the registration done. Where? “Down the street.” Yeah, I’ve seen this movie before, they want to shuffle me off. Luckily I hadn’t handed over any money yet, so I grabbed my phone and walked out. Thanks for nuttin.
It was getting close to dark so I walked back down the hill to my place and came across a TurkCell shop, the #1 company here. I make my request and the man had me up and running in 5 minutes, and at a better price than Avea. Brilliant. It was sketchy being without Internet and Google Maps for a day in a new city, now I feel whole again! After a rough start, I ended the day on a good note and that’s always a good thing.
I don’t usually remember my dreams but I had a very vivid one last night. The seed must have been planted with my discussions of PhDs with Silvia back in Thessaloniki. I was back at my university and on the first day of my PhD program, in Computer Science or maybe Electric Cars or some other technical subject. I walked into a classroom and sat down. The professor starts talking about covalent bonds in the transition metals group of the Periodic Table and I start to panic that I’m in the wrong class. I ask the guy behind me for paper and pencil and I start madly scribbling notes and diagrams. After 5 minutes I decide I’m quitting my PhD, so I get up and walk out of the room. I woke up, my heart was pounding. So maybe I won’t do that PhD after all, or just make sure I don’t have to take any chemistry classes. At least I was wearing pants.
Today is explore the public transit system day. Istanbul has an extensive tram / subway / bus / ferry / funicular train system. And it’s all paid for with a single RFID touch-card. I walked up the hill from my Airbnb (steep but not Lisbon-steep) and just across a main road to a tram station. Armed with a TL10 bill, I walked up to the dispensing machine, selected the button for English, pushed the button for a new card, stuck in the bill and my card dropped into the slot below. Dead easy. But you must use only a TL10 bill. From this point on, you can top up funds onto the card easily with bills, but no coins. You just put your card against a tilted surface on the machine, wait a few seconds for a beep, slide in any denomination bill, wait for a beep, take the card and walk away. Fast and effective, I like it.
I wanted to explore the western side of the city today, so I walked over to the platform, placed my wallet on the reader and walked through on the beep. It’s good the card can be read without having to remove it from your wallet every time. The trams are very modern, but after looking carefully there was no hint as to who the manufacturer was, not even looking through the glass into the driver’s compartment. I did spot a sticker on the glass on the door written in German, so I’m suspecting Siemens, but wondering why they or the city or the manufacturer wouldn’t want to show the name.
I rode for about 30 minutes through the city to what was shown as the terminal station on this line, but the track continued forward, so I stayed on board, along with several other people. I was looking at the track map on my phone and realized that the track did a loop and was heading back, rather than dead-ending and reversing direction. I got off at the next stop and went back to the end. I got off and walked about 300m to the Metro (subway) station that would continue my journey to the north-west. I rode one stop to the end of that Metro line, then interchanged to another metro going north. I rode to the end of that line and went to the surface to find, well, not much except a bus station, snow on the ground and bitter cold.
I went back down into the station and followed the same path back into town, but stopped at a large shopping mall. I went inside where it was nice and warm and walked the floors and into the food court. It was 5 PM at this point and I was really hungry. Not trusting the local food to not have onions, I broke down and had two slices of Sbarro’s pizza, flashing back to my after-high-school-graduation trip to Florida with Elan Bush. The counter was sandwiched between a KFC and a McDonalds. Burger Kings are everywhere here also.
Back on the tram and home just after dark when the temperature really started to drop, it’s below freezing here at night now. Weather reports show it will warm up to 10C / 50F in a couple of days, that will be nice.
The next morning is the day to do recon for my route to the airport for my flight out in a week. Istanbul has two airports, Istanbul Atatürk is the main airport which is on my side of town and accessible by a direct tram ride with one connection, and Sabiha Gokcen which is on the Asian side and then a further hour outside the city. Guess which one I’m booked at? Go ahead, guess. Yep. That’s OK, it just happens to be where Qatar Airways is located and they are an American Airlines partner and my host for my last two flights home.
So I see from the public transport maps that I can get close to Sabiha Gokcen with some extensive travel and changing modes of transport several times but then I’d have to take a taxi for the last stretch. The metro line to the airport is scheduled for completion in 2018. The other option is to cross over to the Asian side and then take the municipal airport shuttle bus directly to the airport. This is a better solution for me because I can go the whole way on public transport just by tapping my Istanbulkart and it’s cheaper at about TL15 for the whole trip and I have lots of time. My flight is at 6:30 PM so I don’t need to get up super early.
I leave my place at 2 PM and walk uphill and board the tram going east. This will be the toughest part with my rolling bag on the cobblestone streets. It’s near freezing and there’s a snowy drizzle coming down, with a thin layer of slush on the ground that makes walking treacherous.
I get off 3 stops later at Sirkeci station. I walk from the tram station right into the Marmaray train station. This train goes under the Bosporus and I get off two stops later at the Ayrilik Cesmesi station. It takes me a minute to realize I’ve just travelled from Europe to Asia on a subway!
Staying underground I transfer to the metro and get off at the Kadikoy station. I emerge to the surface right on the waterfront and walk north a few hundred meters to the big bus station. I locate the Havatas direct airport shuttle bus and tap my card for TL9 and get on board. 50 minutes later through dense city traffic and a highway, we arrive at the airport.
I go through a security screening just to get into the airport and find my check in counter for Qatar at A16. I walk up to it right at 4:15 PM, 2 hours and 15 minutes after I left my place. There are people in line to check in for today’s 6:30 PM flight so the timing works out perfectly. With my status on American Airlines and OneWorld, I can check in at the Business class desk and might get to go into their lounge. The recon is a success!
I find the outgoing Havatas bus on the departure level and head back to Kadikoy. It seems like a nice area so I wander around in the early evening. I spot the local tram, it does a big loop around a big chunk of land sticking out into the Med. It’s a single car and vintage 1960s I suspect. It reminds me of the TTC trams I used to go on in Toronto as a kid. I stopped at one restaurant but they only had meat, but the second one had all manner of international food. I ended up with a falafel and tahini salad for a local touch, and spinach ravioli for what I missed back in Italy. The servings were large and the waiter was really helpful and the cost was only TL33.
The drizzle has abated so I strolled through the winding streets of yet more shoe shops until I got to the metro station. I retraced my steps back to Europe and my place. I spent the evening turning my Greece-to-Turkey journal notes into actual prose and posted on Facebook.
I woke up the next morning to continued cold, nearly freezing and overcast, but less drizzly than yesterday.
Today’s goal is to visit three landmarks in a row, just east of me. The first stop was the Blue Mosque but just before it I stumbled upon the Hippodrome. It’s a big rectangular area with two very tall obelisks, one was transported from Egypt and is about 3,500 years old, with the engravings of the hieroglyphs still looking good.
The Blue Mosque is a misnomer, something the non-Turks started calling the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. And it’s mostly grey on the outside which threw me off. The name comes from the use of blue tiles in the interior ceiling mosaics. It was built in the early 1600s. This is an in-use mosque, so non-Muslim visitors are asked to carry their shoes in a plastic bag and go in via a side entrance. According to the signs, women are supposed to wear only ankle-length skirts and have their shoulders and hair covered but the guards didn’t seem to care about that. The inside is magnificent, with rich carpeting and tilework and vaulted domes with the blue tiling. Outside the main mosque but within the exterior walls are a series of large signs, explaining things about Islam. One of the signs traces the family tree of Adam and Eve, through Noah, Moses and Noah a bunch of other people I recognize from the Old and New Testaments, right down to the Prophet Mohammed. It says there were over 122,000 prophets in total. There are also a couple of quotes from the Koran by Jesus and his Disciples saying they believe in Allah as God and they are believers only of Allah. I wonder what my Christian friends think of this? Please, no religious flame wars!
Next up was the Hagia Sophia. This Greek name translates to “Shrine of the Holy God.” The site has a complex history. It started out as a Pagan shrine in the mists of time. Then a church was built by Emperor Constantine II in 360 AD. it was burned in a riot in 404 AD and then repaired in 405 AD and destroyed in another riot in 532 AD. A new church was built by the order of the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian in 537 AD. In 1453, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet II conquered the city and converted the church to a mosque. It was reinforced and expanded over the centuries until the founder of Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, ordered the building to be transformed into a museum in 1934. It reminds me of the King who tried to build his castles in the swamp in The Holy Grail. But this one stood up!
I was mildly annoyed by the ticket process. You go through a gate and then pick one of two lines for a ticket window. Guess which line I got in! Go ahead. Yes. The slower one. Not sure why it was taking them 5 minutes for each person to take in some money and hand back a ticket. But anyway.
The inside of the shrine/church/mosque/museum is quite damaged and is undergoing extensive renovation. One whole side of the building is scaffolding. It’s a truism in travelling: There Will Always Be Scaffolding. There are remnants of some quite beautiful mosaic tile paintings, check out the pictures.
Leaving the Hagia Sophia, I wandered down the street towards the Topkapi Palace grounds. I passed a shop window that had the most amazing display of sweets I’ve seen in my life. I went inside and got a hot chocolate and big sampler plate, chocolate baklava, bird’s nest pastry with cashews inside, a slab of Turkish Delight and several other things, mostly everything there is honey-based and delicious.
Rolling out of there, I walked to Topkapi to find it had closed 15 minutes earlier. That’s OK, I just wanted to wander the grounds and not go inside, I’ve had enough staring at the ceiling for one day.
I jumped on the tram to Kabatas, a ferry point for getting across the Bosporus, but more importantly the launching point for boats going to Prince’s Islands. It’s too late today and the weather is still supposed to be wicked cold tomorrow but Friday looks good for a trip over. I figured out which ticket office to go to, speeding my process Friday morning.
There’s another quite steep hill from the shoreline at Kabatas up to Taksim, which is a trendy shopping and club area. Neither really interests me, but it’s fun to just walk down the streets, so I got on the funicular train. It’s cable-driven and set up with two carriages, one goes up while the other goes down, with a wide spot in the middle where they pass. Like everything else, I just tapped my card to get on, it’s so easy to get around this town!
At the top, I climbed up to the surface and into what could have been a busy pedestrian shopping concourse in any modern city with clothing shops from all of the well known labels. This city is loaded with Burger Kings and I even saw a Carl’s Junior, for you Californians. I saw on my map that there’s a historic tram car that goes down the center of the walkway but I only saw it go by once in the hour or so I walked around, so I didn’t have the chance to ride it.
I found a nice place with Anatolian food from the eastern part of Turkey. Dinner was tzatziki, hummus and Turkish cheese pancakes.
I took the usual public transport connections home and watched From Russia With Love. The plot took some poetic license with the Yerebatan Saray cistern being directly under the Russian Embassy. James had a meeting in the Hagia Sophia and he literally stood right were I stood today at one of the columns, and walked right past the same marble water vessel I did, I got a bit of a chill… It was filmed 52 years ago, in the year of my birth, and of course James had no scaffolding to obscure his views of the interior. I ate the last of my Greek border Toblerone as I groaned at the incredibly sexist attitudes and bad fight scenes…
The next morning I walked straight up to the Grand Bazaar, just past the tram station. This thing is big. I mean several city blocks big. It took me 2 hours to walk each hallway, luckily it’s set up as a rectangle. Most of the shops are selling gold as jewellery or ingots. Then in decreasing quantities, other jewelry, rugs, clothes, shoes, coffee shops and plastic crap. Actually I would say it’s very high quality, as these things go.
From there I jumped on the tram and made a connection to the tram line that goes mostly north for about 20 stops. It makes a few underground stops along the way so we’re coming up to the surface and going down several times. I wanted to get a snack at the end of the line but the neighbourhood was not hospitable to that, so I went back south again and got off at an indoor/outdoor shopping mall that is meant to be like Venice, complete with a canal and canal boats inside. There’s a similar attempt called The Venetian back in my town in Thailand but after an initial surge, it’s a ghost town. They charge a cover fee to get inside and it’s mostly busloads of Chinese tourists. This one seems to be doing much better.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, as I’m walking along I hear something coming from a nearby speaker mounted on the wall, in Turkish. It’s barely discernible above the general noise. I kept walking and realized it has now switched to English. And I hear this exact prerecorded message: “Attention. Attention. This is an emergency. Evacuate the building immediately.” Oh shit, I’m thinking. This is it. My luck finally caught up to me. But I don’t hear any alarm bells or sirens, just this almost-inaudible message over a speaker. And apparently I’m the only one who can hear it because nobody else is reacting. I turn around and head to the exit at faster than my normally fast walking speed. I see people are still coming inside. I spot three security guards at the front door, I stop and ask them about the message. One guy has a walkie talkie in his hand and they are definitely not on the alert, not rushing people out or stopping people from coming in. Nope, just standing there watching humanity go past. They say “No problem.” Well, I’m not taking any chances in case these clowns just didn’t get the message yet, so I cross the street, get on the next tram and get the hell out of there. I’ll check on the Internet to see if anything makes the news today.
Down I go on the tram to the junction with MetroBus, which will take me across to the Asia side again. I walk from the tram, through a cemetary / park and across a walkway over half of a highway, then down the steps to the bus stop. There are two bus lanes, one for each direction, embedded in the middle of an 8 lane highway. Four buses came and went by the time I finished eating a pretzel I bought in the park. These buses are running nearly back to back, and they’re fast. I got on and we flew down the road, passing the hapless drivers stuck in traffic. We crossed the Bosporus, I held my breath all the way over as I don’t like heights and we were high up on that bridge. We made it across safely and after about 5 total stops I got to the end of the line, near where I was two nights ago.
I walked through that part of the city and had dinner at Happy Moons again, I like it so much last time. Tonight I had falafel salad and 3 cheese tortellini. Really, really well done.
I walked through the shops, down to the Metro, connected with the Marmaray subway under the river, connected to the tram and walked home the last bit.
I crawled into bed and started prepping my laptop to start working on my Android electric car app again. It’s been 6 months so there was a lot of Eclipse and Android SDK components to update and it went successfully. Except when I tried to launch the SDK Manager, it just did nothing. After a lot of investigation, I found it was just running a batch file under the covers. I ran it by hand and found several Access Denied messages, just trying to copy files from one directory to another on my laptop. This should never happen. After fiddling and fiddling, I finally got Windows to understand it’s my directory and I’ll do damn well whatever I please with it. Then the script ran and I updated my support toolkit for the newest versions of Android. And, that’s more than you wanted to know, I understand. But writing it out makes me feel better. I triumphed over Microsoft stupidity. Luckily, Microsoft seems to have a limitless supply of stupidity so tomorrow I’m sure will be another challenge. Not that I like Apple or Macs either, because I don’t. I liked Linux for the several years I used it at IBM, but that’s some hardcore nerdy stuff there. I would have been able to fix the directory permissions problem in 5 seconds though…
The weather is beautiful the next morning, significantly warmer at 10C and bright sun so I took the tram up to the Kabatas station and bought my ferry ticket to the Prince’s Islands.
The Islands, as they’re known by the locals, are a set of small islands just off the south shore of the Asian side of the city. One cool thing is there are no gasoline vehicles allowed, except emergency vehicles. Everything I’ve read says skip the first two and explore the 3rd and 4th islands. The water was nearly dead flat so the ride was sunny and windy but enjoyable. You pay for each segment of your ride, TL5 or TL6 for each hop. The ferry just skipped right past the first two islands so that decision was made for me, perhaps they stop there in the summer when the crowds flock there to escape the heat of the city.
We arrived at the island of Heybeliada and the ferry just nosed up to the straight wharf and we all stepped / jumped off while the captain kept the boat pressed against some tires with the engine. OK, no OSHA here. The little village is very picturesque, with cafes and little shops along the waterfront and the next couple of streets up. The island is shaped like a saddle with an 11th century monastery at the top, of course. Everywhere I go, I find that monks have built monasteries in the most inhospitable, hard-to-get-to locations imaginable. Maybe that’s part of the deal.
After 30 minutes, I jumped on another ferry over to the can-almost-swim-there island of Büyükada, the largest of the islands. I went for a long walk down the waterfront to the marina where I watched a new stretch of breakwater being built. A rusty old barge was roped to the shore while a front-end loader, sitting inside the barge, was scooping out dirt and rock and dumping it into the water. That operator was a magician with the controls, smooth as silk. I walked uphill a couple of streets and into the center of town and had a hot chocolate for the highest price I’ve ever paid. Oops. My mistake, should have expected that. The islands have horse-drawn carriage rides and also little two seat electric motorbike taxis and tiny electric pickup trucks. I found it very quiet and refreshing from the noise and pollution of the city.
I jumped back on another boat for the run back to Kabatas and we arrived just after sunset and it started getting *cold* out on the water! Again I took the funicular up to Taksin and wandered down the streets. I went back to the same place as last time and had exactly the same meal. My travelling motto is, if you liked it, do it again. More of my motto of life. I like repeating comfortable and optimized patterns, much to the dismay of the people around me who I perceive as living in nothing but chaos and anarchy. To each her/his own I suppose.
One new thing in Taksim tonight was the vintage tram was pulling a flatbed railcar with a live band on it. I heard it coming a few blocks away and it really drew a crowd as it was passing by. I walked down some new streets to the Karakoy tram station and home.
Without any real plan of what I wanted to do the next morning, I stepped outside. It’s was cool and overcast and gently misting, like you’re standing in the middle of a cloud. So much for outdoor sightseeing. I decided to ride the rails and take the tram down to the main airport.
I had to make a connection from the tram to the metro at Aksaray. The map showed the stations were quite close but when I got there and followed the signs, it was more like half a mile. Anyway, I took the M1 metro all the way to the end at Havalimani / Ataturk airport. I took the lift 4 floors up to the International gate area and concluded the trip just before I had to go through security screening. This is how you do public transport to the airport right. When they get the metro extension complete to Sabiha Gokcen, it will be a breeze to get there.
There’s only one major tram line I haven’t tried yet, the M2 up to the north past Taksim. I came back into town to the end of the line on the M1, switched to the M2 and headed north. It’s another above/below ground line, ending up in Haciosman at a bus station and not much else. I took the M2 back south again and got off at Taksim. I seem to be drawn to this area, must be the sweets shops and restaurants because I can easily pass on the ladies clothes and shoe shops. I found a new restaurant and had a grilled halloumi cheese salad and then a plateful of sweets at a baklava / turkish delight shop.
I walked down yet another set of streets to Karakoy, stopping in at a few guitar shops, and took the tram home.
The next morning is my last full day in Istanbul and I don’t have a firm plan of where I’m going to go. I go outside to find the best day yet, sunny and cool-ish. I walk up to the main street then head east downhill towards Topkapi Palace.
I stop for a light lunch and have a big bowl of hummus and bread. I continue downhill and just like on day one a man sidles up to me and starts making smalltalk. I’ve got the whole afternoon ahead of me so I figure I’ll let him show me his shop. He says, just at this corner. We walk across the tram tracks and towards the cistern entrance. We turn left and I realize this is the same street as my disaster on day 1. I tell him I’ve been here before, he says what shop. I say the white souvenir shop and the rug shop in the alley on the left. He stops and looks down at the street like, damn, we already caught this fish. I looked at him and said “The rug man got very, very angry with me, I’m not going near there. Ask him about the Canadian man living in Thailand” and I turned around and walked away.
I headed into the Gülhane Park next to Topkapi Palace, quite nice with many old trees and flower beds that are now dormant in the winter. It’s Sunday, so the park is alive with families strolling, kids playing and a handful of tourists taking pictures.
On the left side I spotted a building labelled “Museum Of The History Of Science And Technology In Islam.” Being a science geek and it only cost TL10, I went inside. It’s built on two long narrow levels and you’re directed to the second level straight away. The hallway is lined with busts of Western writers and scientists who helped publicise early Islamic scientific work to the world. There was a video playing with about 30 ottomans (get it?) placed in front of the screen so I sat down to watch, expecting a summary of the scientific work I was about to see in detail. Nope. It was at least 15 minutes (I got up and walked away at this point) of repetitious commentary with English subtitles about how Islamic science has been covered up, and others have taken credit for earlier Islamic work. OK, I get it. But to bang on and on for 15 minutes is a bit much, and this just after you heaped praise on a dozen or so Westerners who passed on early knowledge. It left a bad taste for the rest of the museum, which I felt was good unto itself. I walked through exhibits on astronomy, timekeeping, architecture, mathematics, physics, optics and war machines. Many devices were on display, largely replicas where the original was located at a museum somewhere in the world. Quite a number of engraved brass devices meant to show the motion of the earth, the moon, the visible planets, the sun or the stars. They had amazingly accurate models of the solar system.
I continued through the park to the waterfront where I watched a couple of car ferries come in from, I kid you not, Harem, a port on the Asia side. Sadly I didn’t manage to get over there.
I walked up to the Galata Bridge, which I had crossed many times on the tram, but this time I walked along the bottom of the structure where many cafes and restaurants were built. I stopped for an expensive hot chocolate, then boarded the tram to go home for a rest. At 7PM, I walked down the steps to the restaurant I went to the very first night, for my last night’s dinner. I ordered the same veggie kebab plate but the spicy sauce was somehow different and I was slightly disappointed…
In the morning I woke up and prepped for the trip. I left the room at 1:30 PM, leaving the key in the room as instructed.
Following my pubic transport plan of tram to train to tram to bus to airport went well. I had TL8.45 left on my Istanbulkart and couldn’t use a coin to top up to the TL9 that I needed for the bus. I tried to give the card and a TL1 coin to the ticket man, which after a short discussion he finally accepted.
I arrived about 10 minutes before the Qatar area opened. I checked in at the business class desk but couldn’t talk my way into an upgrade or access to the lounge. I went through security and sat down in a remote gate, plugged into power in the wall to watch videos. After a while a security man closed the gate so I had to move to another gate.
I moved to our departure gate when it was announced. There was a massage chair there so I had two massages for TL1 each while I watched everyone else board.
The four hour Flight to Doha on an airbus A320 went well. A lady in the first row of coach had a panic attack as we descended into Doha. We parked on the apron and paramedics came on and started doing a full medical workup while the rest of us passengers were stuck and couldn’t get out. An ambulance came shortly and they carried her out, then we got into a bus to the terminal.
On the flight from Doha to Bangkok, a child was sitting in my seat as I boarded. I realized his father was down a dozen rows looking for space for his stuff. The father then tried to convince me I had the aisle seat, this is not happening, I booked that seat 9 months ago. He then strangely sat between me and the boy, it would have been better for us to have the boy in the middle for more elbow room. I watched many Big Bang episodes on the seat-back system and slept a bit. When I woke up, he had switched places with the boy, but the boy was lying across the seat and kept pushing me in the side and leg. Ugh.
Most people on the flight were continuing on to Ho Chi Minh city. I got off in Bangkok and went through immigration. The agent was focused on an old visa stamp so I had to show her the proper stamp – you do not want to have a mistake in your passport here, can jeopardize your status which can take a lot of effort to correct.
I picked up my suitcase and went out into the terminal where Jen and I agreed to meet. She’s a friend of a friend from California who decided to come here on a holiday after I was gushing about how great it is.
My Thailand SIM card phone magically had some credit left so I didn’t need to top up. We went down to the bus desk to find that the 1:30 PM and 3:30 PM buses to Hua Hin were sold out. We decided to stay in Bangkok for the night so we bought tickets for the 11:30 AM bus tomorrow morning.
The bus ride the next morning was smooth as usual and I’m finally back home in Hua Hin.
After an amazing 7 months, I’m both sad and happy to be home. Time to relax, catch my breath, sleep in my own bed and get back into my retired-in-the-tropics groove.
My thanks to loyal readers who have stuck with me and my adventure for so long. My invitation still stands to anyone who wants to come to visit me here. Just let me know when your plane lands in Bangkok.
