TURKEY 2009: Americans in Turkey – Day 1 (December 17 or 16/depending where you are)

We arrived in Istanbul a bit exhausted having been up for about 40 hours and having put in the better part of Tuesday (Dec 15) as a work day at the office and heading to the airport for a 7 pm flight. Needless to say — what with the open house and a busy weekend, the previous days weren’t all that restful either. Anyway, we got to Heathrow without any problems and were prepared for a three-hour layover… but did not anticipate a nearly six-hour layover. We arrived in Istanbul at about midnight and decided to be wimps and take a taxi to the hotel (which is in the very old section of Istanbul – The Sultanmiet) -and the driver had trouble finding it. The hotel (Empress Zoe) is small — maybe 20 rooms at most, and quite delightful. We are on the top floor with a very sweet balcony that overlooks the life of the area. There are only two or three rooms per floor and five floors. Being on the top floor has advantages (like the balcony) and disadvantages — no elevator and only a very narrow and steep spiral staircase as access. Glad that the staff carried the bags up.. not really sure how they did it (and don’t think I’d even dare try it.)  After doing a rather meager job of unpacking we fell asleep.

This morning (Thursday) we started out late (11ish) and decided to retrace some places we’d been to 20 years ago — the usual monuments that are “must see” but since we’d already seen them I’d say our visits were quite token — Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia, etc.

My general impression of Istanbul is that it has gotten much much larger and more sprawling in these two decades and is much more cosmopolitan than I remembered. All of which is making the days here quite interesting.

In late afternoon, we headed to the ferry to meet the brother of a friend. The brother has lived here in Istanbul for about 20 years. Naturally in our sleep-deprived state, we managed to board the wrong ferry — and wound up in a totally other part of the Asian side of Istanbul than we were supposed to be at. Thank god for cell phones (which by the way, everyone 10 years and older seems to have here…) so we connected — but a bit late. Now we are armed with some additional information about the city and the surroundings and tomorrow should be interesting.

For those of you interested — December is a pretty terrible time of year to come here — rain and cold, although it is not quite as cold as we anticipated, but that will change as we rise in elevation and go inland starting on Monday. The good side of traveling in December is that there are far fewer tourists, and mostly from non-North American countries. The best we can hope for is overcast (no rain) which seems to be a pipe dream. Again we already knew this, as our last trip here was also in December.. but oh well.. the mist and clouds add to the drama of an already mystical place.

Catch up with you tomorrow.

Fern

PS — I’m writing this on my netbook as I seem to have a problem with my Blackberry and I didn’t take my laptop. My Blackberry is sending messages but not receiving any. Ah the challenges of technology. According to AT&T this is a “known problem” and it is being fixed, but there is no time as to when that fix might happen. Thus, I’m resorting to reading emails late at night and early in the morning on the netbook.. but I can write at any time…