Craig's Blog: Turkey

Twenty-Four Hour Travel

Jenny and I were very good and we got to the airport two hours before our flight to Istanbul, just like we were supposed to. Turkish Airlines was not as good, and delayed the flight 3 1/2 hours. (We found this out when we got to the airport; when we left for it, the flight was still reported to be on time.) This means we were at JFK more than 5 hours before our flight. We whiled the time in the International Food Court: Sbarro, McDonald's, and a place called "Greenwich Village Bistro," which as far as I could tell, and in defiant disregard for its name, served nothing but alcohol.

About an hour before our flight, we left the food court to go through security. "Your boarding pass is no good," said the security line ID checker. "You need to go register at the Turkish Airlines desk. Oh wait, there is nobody there. Checkin for your flight is closed." I argued with her that the e-ticket I had printed out clearly said "Boarding pass" on it. "It is no good," she said again. "It's a boarding pass!" I said again. We each got increasingly frustrated.

In the end, she turned out to be entirely right. They finally tracked down a Turkish Airlines person willing to check us in (thank goodness), who confirmed that indeed, we needed to exchange our boarding pass for a different boarding pass. I still have no idea why ("we wanted to make sure you were in the airport" was the best she could explain). I was taken by the irony that we were at the airport 5 hours early, and still managed to almost miss our flight.

The flight to Istanbul was uneventful -- well, apart from the fact we spent two more hours sitting on the runway at JFK -- but of course we totally missed our connecting flight to Cappadocia. (It was actually closer than it might have been, since we had built in a 3 1/2 hour layover. It seemed like enough at the time.) So back to crossing swords (scimitars?) with Turkish Air. We went to the checkin line in Istanbul, from which we were directed to, in turn, the standby line, the ticket line, and the other ticket line. Each station was accompanied by about 10 minutes of furious typing and, bizarrely, repeated instances of the agent picking up a phone, pausing a second or two, and then replacing the phone without actually using it. This must have happened 5 times in total over the 4 locations.

Each of these stations was a new experience in mutual incomprehension. At the first (wrong) ticket desk I went to, I couldn't get across that we were supposed to have tickets waiting for us. "This is where you buy tickets," the lady kept saying. "If you need to pick up tickets, go to the check in desk." "But they sent me here," I said. (I was wrong, again. The check-in folks had sent me to a different ticket desk, where in fact the tickets were waiting, albeit with a $100 charge attached to them that I had to dispute.)

After I got the tickets, at the correct ticket desk, the lady said, "And now, the chicken deck." "Come again?" "The chicken deck!" "I'm sorry," I said. "Chicken deck! Chicken deck!" She took my ticket and, apparently to illustrate what she meant, wrote a big chicken scratch on it. "Chicken deck!" She pointed to another part of the airport, where, confused, I went. It was the check-in desk. (That chicken scratch turned out to be the letter L, which indeed was prominently displayed over the check-in desk for some reason.) More typing, more picking up phones without actually using them, and we got our boarding passes. Success! And only 2 more hours to wait until our new flight was scheduled to take off. Oh wait, make that 3 hours -- another delay...

All In One Day

After traveling for over 24 hours straight, what does one want to do next? That's right! -- get up at 5am for a balloon ride. This was actually somewhat successful as a way to combat jet lag: just be so tired all the time the body didn't care when I let it sleep.

The balloons are considered the best way to see Cappadocia all at once, and this region of Turkey is worth seeing, with its weird stone formations, fairy chimneys, and human-cut caves dating back 2000 years (those little holes are for pigeons!). But perhaps the prettiest part of the balloon ride -- and definitely Jenny's favorite -- was all the other ballons. Our own balloon was ugly, but who cares? When you're inside it, you can't see.

After seeing Cappadocia by air we went over it by ground, which took considerably longer. We had signed up for a tour, which was good because otherwise it's hard to know what you're seeing. On part of the tour we saw this amazing underground city: the stone here is so easy to cut that the locals decided carving out an underground city was a perfectly reasonable way to hide from attackers. (This was done in the bronze age!) On the tour, there was a wall plaque that said "rolling door," but it took our guide to explain that the way they protected against invaders who found the city was to roll this big round stone over the entryway, in such a way it could only be rolled back from the inside. Just like Indiana Jones! The Indiana Jones bit was my contribution, not the tour guide's.

This evening we moved from one cave hotel to another, so we could try living in two different towns in the region. When we booked the trip, we were really excited we found a spot at a cave hotel: a hotel literally carved out of the rock here, so it's like a cave. But once we got here we discovered that aroud here, all the hotels are cave hotels. There must be hundreds. The one we ended up at today is a designer cave hotel, so not only does it have electricty and indoor plumbing, it has a heated towel rack and cool stained glass. Now that's cave living. I've taken to quizzing Jenny about current events, and when she doesn't know the answer I say, "What, have you been living in a cave??" I think this is a funny-always. I'm not sure Jenny agrees.

Off the Beaten Track

After being a tour group among tour groups yesterday, we decided to have a non-tourist day today. So we walked the 4 miles from our hotel in Urgup to the next town over, called Mustafapasha. We went to lunch at this place called "The Old Greek House" -- lots of Greeks lived here until the 1920s, when they were forcibly repatriated back to Greece, an event our tour guide yesterday described as if it were some sort of cultural exchange program -- and the owner came over and confided to us, "I had 28 people eating here today. Rick Steves." So much for being off the tourist beaten track.

But in truth, Mustafapasha is not a tourist town, but is actually a college town. We got to see people going around their daily life, like leaving mosque. The highlight was when Jenny, in her inimitable way, befriended some college kids hanging out a local cafe. Soon we had joined in their game of Okey (which reminded me of Rummikub, and in fact turned out to be pretty similar).

This cafe experience exemplifies why it's so great traveling with Jenny. I'm always too self-conscious about my tourist-ness, or my lack of native language ability, or just being a stranger, to go and approach people in the places I visit. But Jenny has no such self-consciousness, and makes friends wherever she goes. "Is this game very popular?" she asked (in English), and she was off.

The university in Mustapasha is an eclectic one. One of the students we met was studying to be an English interpreter, which was very helpful for us, conversation-wise. But another one was a horse trainer. Or maybe he was a jockey trainer; it was a little heard to tell. His English wasn't as good (though still much better than our Turkish! So far I've learned how to say "water" and "exit.") He showed us his English class notebook, and we made corrections. He had trouble with 'v' and 'w', just like Germans. A third student, we never figured out what he did, just that he was a big fan of Pokemon. I think he figured Jenny would approve, being Asian herself.

The Land of a Thousand Churches

Our hotel came with a local guidebook, which had this to say: "It is useful to know that a Cappadocia tour without visiting the museum will be seriously incomplete." (It went on to describe the town we were in like this: "If we tell you Urgup is one of the most touristical areas in Cappadocia, no one can tell us that we are exaggerating.") So we decided to go to said Museum, called the Goreme Open-Air Museum. Basically, it's a collection of 11th century churches, all carved into the same soft tufa stone that holds all those pigeon holes and underground cities. I don't know why they built so many churches right next to each other, but they did.

We made the circuit of the museum, visiting churches in various states of repair. One, which had been restored, had really beautiful murals. Others seem to have been done by artists who mostly possessed a serious case of brick envy ("We'll draw rectangles on the ceiling to pretend it's made out of bricks!")

Jenny loves Turkish food, in no small part because Turkish meses are like tapas, and Jenny is a food sampler. I, on the other hand, love pizza. And Turkey has its own variety of pizza, called pide, and the best in Cappadocia was rumored to be just a mile from the Open-Air Museum. So we walked over, and had some pide, and it was sooooo good. I tried to explain to Jenny why it was better than other pide we'd had -- a better crust basically -- but I was interrupted by some other guests who likewise appreciated the quality of the food at Cappadocia Pide Salonu: a bunch of cats. In general, Cappadocia is a cat region, not a dog region. It turns out this is true in much of the Arab world, because Mohammed loved cats.

Istanbul? Not Constantinople?

We took a European-style low-cost airline from Cappadocia to Istanbul. It had ads on all the overhead bins, charged for water (and for the privilege of picking your own seats!), and flew into the airport way far away from downtown. Our (twenty-something) driver picked us up and said, "Going to Istanbul?" I said, "or Constantinople," and he started singing the They Might Be Giants Song! I liked this place already.

We checked into our hotel, which Jenny picked because it has 4000 lamps hanging from various ceilings, including 60 or so in our hotel room. We then hit the downtown tourist sites:

• the Hagia Sophia, which was very very sadly being renovated which ruined the entire effect;
• and the Blue Mosque, which had some people praying in it while we were there, which led me to wonder, what kind of person chooses to pray at a place that is also an extremely popular tourist attraction?
• and a different mosque, which was my favorite because it was newly renovated and beautiful, but not crowded;
• and the cistern, which despite being huge and right downtown was somehow forgotten about for hundreds of years until it was rediscovered in the 16th century;
• and the Hippodrome, which made me think of the game Hungry Hungry Hippos the entire time i was there, though the two are, as far as I know, unrelated;
• and a mosaics museum, which showed what is possible when one puts care and craftsmanship into one's mosaics, unlike what they are doing today in New York City subway stations. But I digress.

The Hippodrome, where they used to race horses, now has various monuments the Byzantines and Turks plundered over the years. One is an Egyptian obelisk from 3000 BCE, in as good a shape as the day it was carved. Elsewhere in the trip we had seen murals, which were faded, and mosaics, which were half fallen off, and carpets, which were frayed; all of them thousands of years newer than the obelisk, but much the worse for the wear. It gave me new appreciation for the ancient Egyptians.

An Instanbul Mosaic

We got lost this morning (not on purpose) and ended up near the Spice Bazaar, which actually was full of spice sellers. I don't know how even as big a town as Istanbul can support an entire bazaar full of people selling spices, but we did our part to support the local economy by buying a collection of spiced teas. Jenny also did a surprising amount of Halloween shopping -- surprising since they don't celebrate Halloween in Turkey -- by buying up hundreds of orange plastic plates at what she assured me were a bargain price.

I expected us to be taken for a ride at the Spice Bazaar, but I don't think we did. However, we definitely did on the cab ride after, where the cabbie refused to start the meter, and instead suggested an exorbitant flat rate, just like the guidebooks warned about. The guidebooks advise you to get out in that situation and wait for another cab, but what they don't consider is that you're tired of walking and you are carrying all sorts of stuff and you just want to get to where you're going. So we sucked it up. Jenny did bargain down from twice as expensive as it ought to be to only 75% more expensive than it ought to be, which we took as a moral victory.

It was worth it, though, when we made it to the Chora Church, my favorite site in Turkey so far. It has these beautiful Byzantine mosaics, supposedly the finest in the world and certainly the finest I've ever seen. I'm always impressed by mosaics; first, because they seem so hard to do, and second, because their colors don't fade so they look just as amazing now as when they were created (except where they've fallen off the wall, which alas, is not so uncommon in an earthquake region like Turkey). They had mosaics at the royal palace, which we had gone to earlier in the day, but there they seemed a bit gaudy and over the top. Here they were awe-inspiring. My favorite mosaic showed little Mary (you know, the mother of God), taking her first baby steps.

The Chora Church is in a non-touristy part of town (when it was first built, in the 1500s, it was outside of town altogether), which we were happy to walk around in. And Jenny was super-happy when she ran across another game of Okey! So we sat and watched for a while. Then we climbed up the remains of the old city wall, on super-steep steps, really more like ridges in the stone just like they have on Mayan temples, which were very scary! The whole wall was about three stories high, and clearly not meant for tourists: there were no handrails, and the only folks about were some local kids. But worth it because a) we got an amazing panorama of the entire city, and b) we didn't fall off and die.

Taking a Bath

Some people when they travel, sneak out at night to go visit the red light district, or maybe some clubs. Last night, Jenny snuck out for wifi. Our hotel advertised wifi, but it turned out to be one of those "only in the lobby" deals. I woke up and she was gone! Luckily, I know Jenny well enough to know exactly what had happened.

Today was took the intercontinental ferry across the Bosporus to the Asian side of town. We ended up at a neighborhood with lots of book stores. It's like a throwback to an earlier era! (The Istanbul newspaper also had a sizeable classified section.) Alas, the books were all in Turkish. Still, everyone around us spoke English. Sometimes, they would greet Jenny in Japanese; I guess Turkey gets lots of Japanese tourists but not yet Chinese ones.

We trekked back to Europe and ended up at the Grand Bazaar right before closing time. Luckily, it takes them about an hour to finish closing, so while we had to dodge the clean-up crews, we got to shop around for little rice bowls (for Jenny) and a carpet (for me). I ended up actually buying one! -- a 'contemporary' Turkish rug (actually a flat-weaved rug called a kilim). One way it was contemporary is that they didn't haggle. But I still got offered tea. Jenny got to haggle for her bowls, but it was all for naught when we learned all the bowls -- they're probably all made in the same place and then farmed out to the various shops, which I've never understood since the shops are right next to each other -- use a lead-based glaze, and aren't suitable for eating rice.

It's interesting to me how some cities embrace a local historical figure, like Philadelphia does with Ben Franklin. In Istanbul they've adopted an architect, named Sinan. I think that says a lot about the place. Appropriately then, we celebrated our last night in Turkey by visiting a traditional turkish bath, in a building built by Sinan in the 1500s. The actual 'bath' consists of a 15 minute soapy scrub-down, and then they pour hot water over you head. It seems to me everyone would have a different preference for how hot they'd want hot water to be if it were poured over their head, but they only have one temperature, and for me at least, it was perfect.

Thirty-one Hour Day

We basically missed last Sunday, flying out, but we made up for it today, with a 31-hour Sunday. We did an amazing job of cash management this trip: we last took out cash days ago in Cappadocia, and without really trying very hard, ended up at the airport having spent all of it but $2. I then capped it off by tracking down some ice cream at the airport Burger King for $1.80, leaving one 25-cent Turkish coin to take home as a souvenier. It's silly how I didn't bother at all about the price for thousands of dollars worth of carpet, but am inordinately proud of having no leftover Turkish lira. But there you have it.

Traveling with Jenny was great: she's an easy-going traveler. I was like, "I want to see the mosaics museum, and let's walk, it's about 20 minutes away," and she'd be like, "OK." (I carefully left days for her to pick the itinerary herself since I didn't want her easy-going-ness to mean she missed out on the things she really wanted -- ok, admittedly with advice from me "to let her know some of the options." She thought this turn-taking was really amusing.) She's also really good at things like asking directions from strangers, which proved helpful multiple times. It's another attitude difference: I always feel like I'm imposing on someone when I ask for directions (and didn't even bother to learn their language first!), while Jenny has more the view that we're doing them a favor by letting them help us. I'm working on cultivating that attitude.

Jenny is easy-going for the most part, but not about everything. You may have noticed we stayed in 3 hotels in two cities: I actually had had to bargain her down from 4. She likes sampling hotels the same way she likes sampling food. And picking Turkey in the first place required some negotiation: she definitely had strong feelings about the types of places she would and would not like to visit. Luckily, her feelings mostly coincided with mine, and when we went down our lists of places we had always wanted to visit, Turkey was near the top of both! And now we have.

I had these preconceived notions of Turkey -- it would have amazing architecture, the people would be extraordinarily friendly and welcoming -- and while they were exactly right, the effect was still overwhelming. Just walking around Istanbul with its 7 mosques on 7 hills is an exhilerating experience. And yes folks were helpful, but when even the touts trying to sell you postcards on the street would give up their sell to help you find where you're going, that's hospitality of a different order. I was glad we got to see both some rural life and some urban life -- we even got to sit in on a Turkish wedding that was taking up the other half of a restaurant we ate in our last night -- and while of course you can't experience an entire country in one week, we experienced enough to know we like it. As the t-shirts (almost) say: I [heart] Turkey!