A Turkish Wrap

As you may very well know, I arrived in Istanbul on January 23th, spent time in Sophia, Bulgaria for three days before returning to Istanbul the morning of December 31st to celebrate the New Year in style. I could give you a run-down of exactly what we did every day, but I think that would boring for you to read and for me to write. Instead, you’ll get just a general idea of what was done, with an inordinate amount of detail (I’ve got a bit of time on my hands).

We spent the first few days just walking around Istanbul, seeing the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern, and even spending a day on the Asian side of the city. It can be fascinating to walk around the city, hearing the Muslim call to prayer five times daily emanating from the various mosques spattered around the city. Our hostel was literally a five minute walk from the center of things, so it was very convinent to get around. We also learned where the Russian/Eastern European part of the city was (more on that in a second), the Grand Bazaar, the Spice Market, and perhaps the most striking thing we learned was simply that Turkish people are amazing. Their generosity, hospitality, and friendliness are all something to behold.

This was evident from the moment we arrived in Istanbul and had to take the metro to our
hostel where we stayed; not knowing where to transfer, we simply approached a security guard, pointed to our address, and pointed to the various train options we had. He didn’t understand what we meant at first but once he realized our intent he smiled, pointed, and seemed totally happy to help us. And one day a police car pulled up along us and stopped, something that in Chisinau means a hassle of some sorts. However, in Istanbul it meant an opportunity to ask directions (in English) to a bar that was tough to find.

We also spent some time with a man named Atilla, the Turkish business partner (he sells rugs) of the host-mom of a friend with whom I traveled. He picked us up at the airport, gave us a quick run-down of the city, and even had his nephew spend a day with us in the Asian part (the nephew, Vulcann, speaks great English and even has an Australian wife). Atilla’s shop was located only 100 yards from the hostel, and we had an open invitation to drop by. The only problem (a pleasant problem) was that, because of his generosity, any attempt to ‘drop in’ would be at least 15, 20 minutes. The first time we were there he offered up tea and told us it was no problem. When we accepted his offer he opened up a small door that adjoined with a café window, pounded on the window, and yelled something in Turkish, with warm cups of tea arriving a minute later. It was shocking and hilarious to see.

After three days in Istanbul we decided to make a change of location, and the decision came down to Sofia, Bulgaria or Antalya, Turkey (a resort the south that borders the Mediterranean Sea), both locations of which were 12 hours and 25 dollars, one way, on a bus or train. I was really pushing for the south of Turkey but was outdone, so we decided to travel to Sofia. The only catch was that we needed approval from Peace Corps, as they had approved our travel only for Turkey. To solve the situation we wrote the Peace Corps Moldova Country Director and Safety Director, telling them both of our plans and asking them if it was ok for us to venture out. They OK’d our request on the condition that we go to the Peace Corps Office in Bulgaria upon our arrival and register, so on the evening the 27th of December we set out for Bulgaria on a sleeper car. On the train with us were two Peace Corps volunteers from Romania and it was great to spend time talking with them (the lesson learned - all Peace Corps experiences are nTot made equally). The train itself, a sleeper car, was not bad - the nightmare was spending four hours at the three miles bordering Bulgaria and Turkey, waiting and waiting and waiting. As a result, the twelve hour ride quickly became fifteen hours, of which I spelt maybe three hours.

But we arrived in Bulgaria and actually met some PC Volunteers at the train station who were themselves heading to the Peace Corps office and invited them to come with us. We got there and were introduced to the Safety Officer there, who was amazingly generous to us. Not only did he give us basic information on what to do and what not to do, he also answered all of our basic questions. When we asked him how to get to the nearest ATM and to the hostel we had found on the internet, and in explaining it to us he realized that we were likely to never find it on our own and offered to accompany us - we accepted and had a great time talking with him, and it turned out to be a great idea that we was with us because the hostel we found didn’t exist. With him it was simple - he just got on the phone and called another place and led us there. Without him . . . . it would have been very interesting.

Bulgaria was great, overall. We spent one day just walking around the city seeing the old buildings and churches, and one day going to the top of a mountain. Literally. We took a gondola up a while to near the top of a skiing peak, then three of us decided to walk the final 300 meters to the summit. It was an amazing sight from the top (see photos), and we were up so high that we literally up above the clouds and we could feel the thinness of the air as we walked, an odd sensation. The walk up was tough as there was no path and a steep, show-lined, rocky way. It took us 56 minutes to get up but only 13 minutes to get down, because we developed the technique of simply sliding down the mountain on our butts.

We returned to Istanbul again for New Years, arriving on the morning of the 31st. We spent one day walking around the city, celebrated New Years (I slept only six hours that night after spending the four hours between 12:30 AM and 4:30 AM walking around the city with a friend: more on this in a second) , one more day simply buying gifts, and the night of January 1st in the airport (we didn’t want to pay for another night in the hostel) before returning to Moldova on January 2nd, where my family was more than happy to see me. Because I slept only six hours and two hours my last two nights (the 1st and the 2nd, respectively), I slept - no joke - 13 hours my first night back in the village, from 10:30 to 11:30. It was a great ending to a great trip.

Notes on the Journey:
- Language was not an issue at all. First, in Turkey, everyone speaks English. And I mean everyone. Indeed, just walking down the streets in the tourist section it was common to hear people call out in English, inviting a person to stop into their shops or their food stand to shop or eat. And in the Grand Bazaar and Market, people not only speak English but speak it very well, just a part of doing business there. Once I was walking and saw a sign in Spanish- I turned to a girl I was traveling with and asked if it was Spanish, upon which the vendor who I was passing said "Yes, we have Spanish, Chinese, every language in the world." That was odd.

And in Bulgaria we (the other girl in the group and I who speak Russian) simply spoke to people in Russian to get answers to our question. Bulgarian is a Slavic language so a lot is the same, and most of the people over the age of thirty were forced to study Russian in the Soviet Union and at the very least they understand the language. As a result, communication was not much of a problem for us (as for our friends who speak Romanian . . . well, they just had to rely on us or on English). In fact, at our hostel worked in the evenings an older man who didn’t really speak English, just Bulgarian and Russian, and our Romanian speaking friends would have had an issue without us, especially the time some of the clothes they had washed had disappeared (and were all found). Plus, the old man like us being around too for times like the one where he asked me to talk on the phone because he didn’t speak English that well, leaving me as interpreter for those inquiring things like if we had any free beds for the evening and what one night costs.

- As for food, the hostel’s we stayed at had free breakfast in the mornings. Otherwise, we were able to go the stores in both city’s and buy what we wanted, usually just bread, cheese, sausage, and things like that. One great thing about Istanbul is that everywhere on the streets are stands that sell sandwiches for 1 Turkish Lira, the equivalent of about 65 cents. We also did our best do drink a Turkish coffee (totally different from any other coffee) every day, with each costing slightly under two dollars even at a nicer shop.

- Getting around both cities was very easy. Istanbul has a very easy to understand and use metro system and everything can also be reached on foot, and while sometimes that means a bit of a walk, if the weather was nice it simply meant an opportunity to spend some extra time strolling the ancient and beautiful city. In Sofia too everything is easy to find on foot, and thing that are too far to reach by walking (such as the mountain and Peace Corps office) are manageable by the metro system.

- As you very may well know, I spent Christmas and New Years both in Istanbul. Christmas day was great. I was able to go to mass for the first time since June at an ancient church in Istanbul, and when the clock changed the day from Christmas Eve to Christmas, I was standing between the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia - I can spent think of a lot worse ways to spend the moment.

As for New Years, we had asked a lot of Turkish people where the ‘hot-spot’ in the city was and they all told of us the section that we knew fairly well - indeed, on December 31st some of us traveled there to scout out where to go in the evening. There was already a large crowd there and we figured that the buzz for the evening was just getting started.

So that night we spent some time having a beer or two in the hotel room before venturing out to the place where the celebration was to be. While waiting at the metro stop we happened upon two American, a couple, who were looking for a place to go for the evening - an invitation was quickly given for them to accompany us and was quickly accepted. However, once we got to our destination we were actually disappointed by the amount of people there (the crowd was noticeably larger at 4:00 in the afternoon there). We made our way into a bar by 11:45 and ordered drinks, waiting for something to happen - before we knew it we looked down at our watches and it was 12:02, the moment passing without an ounce of fanfare from the Turks around it. A bit of a letdown, to say the least.

- However, one of the problems was that we were during there during the Muslim holiday (they said ‘bayram’ in Turkish but it’s a different work in Arabic) in which they first have to visit those who have passed, then slaughter a lamb and give the meat to the less-fortunate. It’s supposed to be a day of quite remembrance, and unfortunately for us the first day of the celebration was December 31st, making for a lesser amount of people wanting (or able) to really celebrate. There was one silver-lining - because of the holiday, I was able to read on the Drudge Report that 1200 Turks had been admitted to hospitals for wounds self-inflicted in the
slaughtering of the animals.

Also, while in the airport our first day in Istanbul we noticed a lot of people in a simply white outfit that looked (not to sound disrespectful) like a simple bath robe: there was an especially large group around the Saudi Air desk. We had no real idea what was going on but thought it maybe was the Hajj, and watching television and reading the internet a day later confirmed our thoughts. The Hajj had begun.

- I simply can not imagine the amount of tourists in Istanbul in the summer. For our time there we could see the amount of people gradually getting larger and larger as New Years approached. In a way, we were lucky to get there when we did. There is one place there that is the basement remnants of an ancient basilica built in the early AD’s. When we were there a line at the door was nonexistent and we were able to enjoy the beauty and tranquility of the place in peace. However, by December 28th we walked by and there was a line of people for 30 feet our the door with the Hagia Sophia also filling rapidly.

And everyone says that the tourists in the summer are even worse. I can’t imagine.

- We only had one problem in Bulgaria, and it could have been a big problem: it basically involved the ticket-checker on the train when we were trying to leave not doing his job and reading our ticket (which had a receipt for 5 places). He let the two girls in our party on with little hassle but he took the ticket that had all 5 places on it and demanded to see our tickets, not realizing that he had it the whole time. And in his confusion he started yelling at us, telling us to get off the train because we were holding things up, which caused my friends and I to yell back in English and Russian and tell him that we were going nowhere until he did his job. He finally realized that he was in the wrong and subsequently let us take the places we had paid for without an apology or even the slightest admittance of wrong-doing. Classic.

- I’ve written about the Russian district we found at night. We actually walked through it our first day there and knew where it was - because there are a lot of Moldovans working there we made it our goal to find them. We asked a lot of Turks where it was possible to meet the and they told us that we were in the place but that it was risky to go there at night because one could enter a bar, order one drink, and be brought the tab by a guy with a gun who told you that the bill was 50 dollars (or something like that could happen). Nonetheless, we made it our goal despite the inherent danger.

So the night of the 26th my friend, his cousin who met up in Istanbul, and I headed out to the district at night to find someone from Moldova. We carried fifteen dollars each and nothing worth stealing to maximize our safety. We entered one bar off the main street (one that looked legitimate) and the beer was 8 Turkish lira, amazingly expensive, so we walked to another reputable looking bar where there were four Mafia-looking types sitting around one table. A guy came up to us and said something in Turkish while pointing to his watch, then gave us a card advertising some sort of show (the card was in Arabic). We left that place quickly.

Finally, we came upon a street that looked exactly Bourbon Street in New Orleans with the exception that it was totally empty, not a soul to be found. We walked one block and were quickly greeted by a Turkish man who quickly rattled off words in Turkish before he said, "Russian?". I responded in the affirmative and he quickly asked me what we wanted. I told him we were Americans who live in Moldova and we simply wanted to talk with someone from Moldova, that we didn’t want anything more and that our salary is only 100 dollars per month. He told me that it was possible and that we simply needed to get into a taxi and we would be ‘with the girls’ soon. I asked him two questions: 1) Where is this bar located?, and 2) How to get there on foot?, because we were under no circumstances getting into a taxi. Out of the question. It quickly came clear that they would not tell us anything and that we were not going anywhere in a taxi, so we ended up walking home.

On the way home we decided we wanted some beer and walked along the main road to find a store, where some Turkish man approached us, asked us something in his language, and pointed to his watch. I showed him mine and he asked where we were from - when I said ‘Moldova’ he started speaking Russian to me; turns out, he lived in Yalta, Moscow, and Kazakhstan for a while and asked us questions about Moldova. After a few minutes he also, subtly, told us he knows of a bar where there are girls from Moldova, Russia, Romania, Ukraine . . . By this time we were not interested in anything anymore and simply told him that we were going to bed.

There is also a long story that took place New Years Night which basically involves my friend and I walking for four hours around Istanbul (we were lost for a while) on a mission to meet a Moldovan, fully realizing that it would likely have to be a . . . . lady of the night. So we ventured to the Russian district on a mission, ended up talking to a Turkish pimp in Russian (making it totally clear that we wanted only to talk to the Moldovan, that we didn’t want to do anything else). The total? 30 dollars for 2 hours. So the man, after we denied his request to go by taxi, led us to a ‘bar’ where we could only see a corridor and a staircase going up. I only had about 20 dollars on my at the time so maximize safety but my friend has his passport and visa card plus about 20 dollars cash too: thus, we decided to play it safe and not enter, despite the man’s promises that nothing would happen to us. And if you are reading this and worried about my safety, don’t.

- Finally, I’ll retell what we did in the airport the night we flew out of Istanbul - the highlight and low-light of the trip.

Low-light: Between Turkey and Bulgaria, when we got off the train for passport control. It was 3:30 in the morning, about 0 degrees outside, I was tired and miserable. So was another girl I traveled with. We agreed that if possible, we would have - in an instant - gotten on a train going back to Istanbul.

Highlight: Being in the Blue Mosque during incantations of prayer in Arabic. It was peaceful, surreal, tranquil - simply put, the highlight of my time.