I couldn't post the blog because the Osmanhan Hotel didn’t provide enough bandwidth for text and photos yesterday, or so I thought. The fact that Telstra is extorting an extra $10 a day from me didn’t seem to mean that I had enough bandwidth to post photos, either.
However, today I am able to post text and photos. I think what happened was it took so long to load that I gave up. I didn't check it again until today, and then I saw that the post I tried to do yesterday was successfully published.
The following is an account of what I have been doing since I got here, to Istanbul.
Wednesday, my first day here, is easy to remember. Didn’t manage to sleep at all on the flight from Sydney to Abu Dhabi. It would have been around 9 a.m. Sydney time when we landed. In Abu Dhabi it was 5 a.m. The flight left for Istanbul at 9:30. I walked around in wonder for an hour, taking photos, and then twiddled my thumbs for three.
After the four-hour connecting flight from Abu Dhabi, I landed in Istanbul and took the one-hour taxi trip to the hotel.
By the time I got here to the hotel, it was around 2 or 3pm. I went to sleep pretty soon and didn’t wake until 3 a.m. At about 6:00, I walked down to Kennedy Caddesi to look at the Bosphorus. Saw some dolphins and a bunch of half-naked old men from the swimming club. Walked back to the hotel for breakfast and then down to the Sultan Ahmet area to visit the Basilica Cistern. Wow! What a sight. Missing Vivid now, but this was spectacular!
Yes, I've just realised I managed to publish the entry about the Basilica Cistern out of order, but there you have it.
The next day, Thursday, I walked around the Sultan Ahmet area a bit and tried to work out how to buy and charge an Istanbulkart, so that I could use it on the public transport. There are machines for doing that at the tram stop. But they’re incredibly difficult for a non-speaker of Turkish to use. First, depending on the time of day and the position of the sun, the user has a hard time reading what’s on the screen because the glare hides the text. Second, I never worked out how to hear the instructions in English. There is a button you can tap to do this, but I suspect the label is in Turkish because I never found it, even after I used the machines a couple of times. I always asked an innocent bystander to do it for me. The first time I managed to buy the card and charge it, two young Russian tourists did it for me, listening to the instructions in Russian.
I wanted to go to Karaköy to get a meal in a less touristy restaurant than the ones around here.
Unfortunately, I got off the tram too early. I debated whether I would get back on the tram or walk, but I caught another tram because walking, and trying to cross the road, is mission impossible. I have never experienced anything like the traffic here. Very often, even red lights won’t stop the traffic, and yesterday I saw a three-way ding with a tram, a van and a car involved. The cars won’t even give way to trams!
Having left the tram at Eminönü instead of my destination, Karaköy, I returned to the tram stop and jumped on the next tram. A couple of Spanish speakers got on and I told them where the tram was going and showed them on my phone. It was going in the opposite direction to where they wanted to go, I told them. They wanted to go to Sultan Ahmet, where I had come from, so they rushed out at the next stop.
My feeble sense of direction did not just cause mayhem for me, that day. That tram was going in the right direction for them. It was going in the opposite direction to my destination. The tram took me back to where I had first boarded in Sultan Ahmet. I alighted feeling guilty about the bad information I had given to my Spanish-speaking fellow passengers.
I was still determined to get to Karaköy to look for genuine Turkish food at a normal price. So, I took the third tram of the day.
I got some soup and chicken and rice in a restaurant I found and got talking to an English couple at the next table. They were leaving Istanbul that afternoon, so they gave me their Istanbulkart with value left on it, they said.
When I left the restaurant, I had to walk 500 metres out of my way, and then 500 metres back again on the opposite side of the same street, just so I could access a pedestrian crossing. (The screen grab from Google maps above shows you the route I had to take to return to the tram stop.) Really, the pedestrian is a second-class citizen here: the car is king.
This is the view from my hotel window: tiny laneways, parked cars, vans and even buses sometimes!
When I boarded the tram to return to the hotel, I used the card the Brits had given me, but it was out of charge, so I used my own.
Friday, I went to Balat to look at all the multi-coloured houses. It was charming; the suburb is, at least. What didn’t charm me were the hundreds of Russians who poured out of five or six tour buses at the same time. You couldn’t see the Turks for the Russians. Not what I was expecting in Istanbul, but, of course, Russians can come overland, or I guess, over the Black Sea too, if they want to. They don’t have to fly like I did.
When I got back on the bus to return to hotel, I discovered that I had used up all the value I had charged to my Istanbulkart.
A young Turkish man kindly used his card to pay for me.
I decided I was going to get to the bottom of this Instanbulkart mystery, and managed to charge my card again, with the help of an innocent bystander. Ok. A fully charged card now.
But I wasn’t sure which of the two Instanbulkarts I had was the one I had charged and which was the spent card of the English couple. They were identical. I had seen on a Youtube video that there was a way to check the balance on the machine. So, I had a go. What could go wrong?
Without enough Turkish to find the language button and hear the instructions in English, I saw the numbers which told me the amount of money left on the cards. I was able to see which one was mine, with a balance, and which one was exhausted. However, there’s a very tricky little detail when you check the balances, and if you don’t tap the right button, if you just remove the card after checking your balance, the machine eats the rest of your balance. So, this morning when I took a bus to the spice market, neither of my cards were working. I had to use my credit card.
That’s the very sad tale of the Istanbulkarts, but it’s not as sad or painful as the experience I had while walking back to the hotel that day.
It was Friday, the day of rest and prayer here, and there were lots of families out in the Sultan Ahmet. Sultan Ahmet is a large area, but there’s not much shade and only a handkerchief-sized area of grass. I wanted to get a photo of one of the mosques; however, there was a hectare of heads in front of me. The only vantage point I could see to get a clear photo was from the middle of that tiny patch of grass. There was a family there playing with a football, so I stood to one side of them, composing my photo.
Suddenly, something very heavy, something that I didn’t see coming, collided with me and I fell hard. I had no idea what had happened. I’d had the wind knocked out of me. My right knee was hurting, and I was confused.
A ten-year-old tank, who probably weighs as much as I do, had brought me down in his rush to get the ball. I had tears in my eyes. I was so shocked.
Well, since then, I’ve been walking much more slowly. My right knee is swollen and hurts. I couldn’t climb the stairs to the 5th floor this morning for breakfast. (Probably a good thing for the healing of the knee.) I did some slow walking around the spice market today, though, so I hope that the knee will recover eventually.
Tomorrow, I have a mercifully short flight to Madrid. And now, you can see, how relevant the title of my blog is: all a blur until you slow down.
I have slowed right down to a snail's pace.
