ISTANBUL, 27 August 2010—I think I'm living in a movie. Writing this, I'm sitting on the roof of the Hotel Noah's Ark in the Sultanahmet neighborhood of Isatanbul; to my left (north) I can see the Bosporus Straits, spanned by what our group has taken to calling the "Bridge to Asia" (yes, Asia is indeed visible past the bridge and beyond the dome of the Hagia Sophia mosque at my 10 o'clock). Immediately surrounding me are the distinctive reddish terra cotta rooftops so ubiquitous in Mediterranean lands; just visible at about my 1:30 are the minarets of the enormous Blue Mosque. Of course, I'm sipping a Turkish tea from one of the distinctive glasses the drink is served in, about four inches high with a rounded base, narrow waist, and flaring top.
For the first time in my life, today I have dined on two continents: breakfast on this very rooftop this morning, lunch on the Asian side of the straits as part of our Bosporus cruise, and supper somewhere in this neighborhood back on the European side. It's so surreal as to be almost impossible to keep track of.
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So that was supper. We ended up going out to the same place that we went to last night, where we all queue up inside the restaurant, point at what we'd like to eat, and then head outside to the table, followed by the waiter carrying the plate of food we've just selected. The food is delicious, but the custom is not to combine hot and cold foods on the same plate, which is a bit of a pain since I'd often like to sample some of each. After the meal itself was over, we got to sample our first taste of Turkish baklava as well as several packages of dates.
Back to the Bosporus: we started out of the hotel at 0930, walking down to the waterfront to board a ferry tour of the straits. It took close to two hours to travel the twenty or so miles from the dockside to the end of the line just a few kilometers from the mouth of the Black Sea, where long lines of oil tankers were visible all the way out to the horizon, stacking up at the mouth of the straits in anticipation of the afternoon reversal of traffic from north to south. (Because the straits are a half-mile wide at their narrowest point and only three times that at their widest, commercial traffic travels from south to north in the mornings and heads back down towards the Mediterranean in the afternoons.)
At the far end of the cruise, we disembarked at the site of an ancient Ottoman castle, one of many twin castles that was built by the various ancient empires who desired to control the most strategically and commercially vital shipping route in the Mediterranean world. As the boat pulled up to the dock, we were welcomed by the shouts of waving shopkeepers, who all crowd the waterfront rails of their restaurants and try to put on the best show to attract boat tourists to lunch at their establishments. After a quick bathroom break, we headed up the hill to view the castle, which had an expectedly spectacular view of the straits to both sides. Once the history had been explained and the pictures taken, it was back down the hill to our "official" welcome lunch at one of the dockside restaurants we'd seen earlier. (Its owner had made the best overture by having his waiters stand along the rail waving the flags of Turkey and most common tourist nationalities, but we had made reservations previously.)
Lunch consisted of salad, fried mussels, Efes (the local brew, tasting suspiciously like Miller but for half the price), and whole grilled fish. Unlike in Belize, I ate the eyes! Afterwards, we bought cones of Turkish ice cream (gelato-esque) and wandered off to spend our free hour and a half or so before departure exploring the little port town. We wandered out of the restaurant in a big group but quickly split off, with most of the group headed back up the streets we'd taken to hike up to the castle earlier. For my friend Kari and I, that was just too tame: we followed Kari's rule to never retrace our steps in any particular location.
And off we went, past the Turkish navy installation at the end of the row of restaurants, up the hill past the otopark to a little playground, which proved too irresistible to pass up. After running up one slide, across the rope bridge and down the other slide, we took on the other half of the playground, which apparently consisted of odd-looking, light blue equipment. It turned out to be an exercise facility, so we did our leg extensions, pull-downs, and crunches before finding the torture device at the end of the line. I recognized the contraption for what it was, an inversion table, and promptly hooked my feet in, grabbed the sides, and flipped myself backwards until I was hanging upside down. Kari got a couple of phenomenal pictures, but demurred on actually trying the miracle of inversion for herself once I was through with it.
At the top of the hill past the castle, we were passed by the loudspeaker-blaring "Vote yes on the referendum!" van, whose occupants insisted we take a couple of "Evet!" ("Yes!") pamphlets of our own. Doubting very much that we'd find ourselves voting either evet or hayir on the referendum (the exact nature of which neither of us was clear on in the first place), we continued on up the hill, until we both stopped at the same thought: This isn't an island, is it. No indeed—there might have been water on both sides of us, but the next time we'd see the ocean if we continued east would be the Sea of Japan, an entire continent away.
With only twenty minutes to go before boat time, we decided to leave the pan-Asian challenge for another day, opting instead to stroll down a lovely cobbled street back to the harbor, eventually sliding right into the line of fellow students boarding the boat without even breaking stride. Waving goodbye to Asia, we set sail for Europe once more, alighting an hour or so later (the current's pretty strong) back at the port we'd started from that morning. We had just enough time to squeeze in another quick tour of the Grand Bazaar on our way back up to the hotel before supper.
After we'd eaten, we took a walk up to one of the big mosques a few blocks away to see the official Ramadan celebration of Istanbul. It was great fun, with music, dancing, hawking, colored lights changing the façade of the University of Istanbul every few moments, and spotlights dancing across the sky. We stayed for an hour or so, watching a band perform, taking silly pictures, and laughing our heads off. Finally, we walked back to the hotel in order to get some sleep before having to get going at 0830 tomorrow for a full day of touring famous sites, including the Blue Mosque and Top Kapi.
So now it is time to sleep, even as friends and family on the East coast are just heading out for coffee to fight off the midafternoon case of the drowsies. Here in the 2010 culture capital of Europe, the full moon is high over the Hagia Sophia, the "Bridge to Asia" is doing its changing-color light show, my fellow guests (not groupies) are paying their bar tab, and I'm off to bed. It already feels like we've been here for forever, and there's so much to see and do. I can already navigate the little corner of Sultanahmet around from the bazaar to the waterfront and out to the Hagia Sophia; by Kari's logic that means it's time to branch out further tomorrow.
