Istanbul, fancy hotel part

Orientation Day – Saturday (Oct 20)

I’ve finished the exhaustive and exhausting health inventory that I came over here for.  After some stress and drama I’m set up in my downtown hotel.  So here I am, with ten days (Saturday – Monday or so I thought…) to explore exotic Istanbul.

I am Big Picture excited, but Small Picture I am still pretty burnt by the last couple of days. All that travel followed by all that being poked and prodded by doctors requires a little recuperation. So my first day in the big city will be a lot of rest and an e.z. exploratory walk around my new neighborhood.   The hospital folks told me that Taksim Square is the happening place.  My hotel is pretty near there, so that will be my destination today.

The Titanic Comfort Hotel is on a steep hillside, as is much of Istanbul as I will come to find out.  It’s on a quiet little street, with the main drag a couple of blocks uphill.  Now that I think about it, the main avenues tend to follow the crests of the hilles, so it seemed like I was always going uphill to get to the cool places (how can that be, that I’m always going uphill?).

Partly because of last night’s misadventure and partly because I am a little intimidated by the idea of taking on this big, strange city, I cocoon in my comfortable wifi-d bed till about one in the afternoon.  I miss breakfast (yikes!  a free meal and I missed it!  Won’t let that happen again!).  The very nice lady comes up with a muffin and coffee, bless her.  I’m finally ready to hit the world, so up the hill, left on Cumhuriyet Cadessi (Cadessi = Street) for my exploratory walk.  My neighborhood is upscale but not very interesting.  Taksim is more exciting.  The streets are always clogged with traffic, the sidewalks are always full of people and it is always noisy.

Lunch was a tasty stuffed cabbage-y kind of thing at a little cafeteria off the square.  I sat outside in the noise and fumes and watched the tour buses and motorbikes and taxis cut each other off and honk and yell in the five-way intersection.  The nice waiter brought me a nice Turkish tea (cay) without even asking!  Tea is always just the thing over here, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.  It energizes me in a much more pleasant, less jangly way than coffee.

Walking Day – Sunday

Here’s my thinking … if I spent a week at  a resort in the mountains, the daily plan would include hikes of five miles or more as a matter of course.  But in civilization you look at that distance and say, “oh too far, that’s a cab ride”.  So my plan here is to “think ourdoors”, and plan on some pretty substantial walks.  Looking at Google Maps, I can pretty much cover this whole side of the city in a five mile hike, so that’s today’s goal.

My upscale hotel offers an excellent breakfast as part of the package.  After breakfast, I exit the Titanic (I love writing that!) and roll downhill instead of the usual up, through another part of my upscale neighborhood.  Actually, the residential areas weren’t particularly fancy, but the shops (closed on Sunday) were very fancy Euro couture-type places, which gives it a fancy feeling.

This would be a good time for a Google Maps note.  I have of course turned off my cellular service, so I cannot refresh maps walking around the city.  But … it turns out that good ole Gmaps keeps a pretty large chunk of map in memory, so if you have to foresight to look up the areas you will visit that day at the detail you need while you have wifi, then you’ve got them all day!  I failed on a couple of days, and the solution of course is to grab a bite at a restaurant with wifi and get yourself up to date.

Anyway … I roll on downhill through Maçka Park, past Beşiktaş Stadium, where it appears there is a soccer match today.  The Beşiktaş Sports Club is a big deal around here.  Its colors are black and white.  The other big deal locally is Galatasaray, colors yellow and red.  Drunken, singing soccer fans are a common part of the scenery around Taksim, I am un-delighted to report..

I happen to walk right past the fan store, tucked under the stadium.  I buy myself a hat and a bitchin Beşiktaş scarf that I quite love (and which is my new favorite fashion accessory back in Reno)

Now I am at the water, my first up-close with the Bosporus on this trip.  I’m at the Dolmabahçe Palace, built by the sultans in the 1840’s, because apparently they thought Topkapi Palace was a little frumpy and inconvenient.  “Eclectic elements from the Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassical styles” is not particularly my thing, so I did not do the tour, but it’s pretty cool from the outside.  I took a right and started following the edge of the Bosporus towards the old city.

Here’s another handy word – nargile = hookah!  I came across a row of 6-7 pretty big restaurants, all with “nargile” in the name or featured prominently.  Clearly I had found hipster heaven!  Sofas and easy chairs and low tables, with couples or bunches of dudes all lounging around a giant hookah.  Each restaurant had it’s own fire-hazardy charcoal fire threatening my safety right next to the sidewalk, because it ain’t a real hookah unless you heat the tobacco with real charcoal.

This turned out to be the western edge of the Tophane District, which had a Soho kind of vibe, complete with gay guys!  I did myself a favor and took a break at a little cafe where I had a refreshing lemonade as a break from the usual tea.  I had every intention of returning to this pleasant little place, but never did.

With my refreshing lemonade coursing through my system I now have the energy to power through another mile of funky back streets and noisy avenues, to what became one of my favorite haunts, the Karaköy District – the wharf and hillside at the west end of the Galata Bridge.

The Galata Bridge is quite the experience.  Up top it has two lanes of traffic each way with T1 trolly tracks in the middle.  The sidewalks on each side are about 20′ wide, plenty of room for fishermen to line the edges, various kinds of vendors to set up in the middle and the usual thongs of jostling Turks to walk between the old city and new.  Down below is even more interesting.   There is a full second level of the bridge lined with seafood restaurants!   There is a stretch of open water in the middle for the ferry boats to pass through, but under the entireity of the bridge in both directions and on both sides are restaurants.  There is an aisleway so the public can walk the length of this area, but the cost on making this stroll is that you are aggressively hectored by menu-wielding gentlemen at each and every one of the restaurants.  After resisting them all, I was brought to ground by the fellow at the very last one, Club Zeno, where I enjoyed an Efes beer and the first of the many servings of grilled sea bass that I would have on this trip.

After eating I hung around and I watched the boat show for a while – the endless stream of ferries leaving and arriving from both sides of the water at a high rate, backing out of their slips and narrowly avoiding each other as a matter of course.  Then back to Karaköy where I really enjoyed my walk through the fish market.

Now it’s time for the long, steep walk up the hill. The main drag over here for pedestrians is İstiklâl Caddesi.   This was the main drag of the capital city back in Ottoman days.  The embassies were here.  Many of these buildings are still active and manned by their countries, although they are downgraded to consulates. The capital has moved to Ankara and you can’t be an embassy if you’re not in the capital.  Also there are a lot of the collateral institutions you would have in the foreigners enclave of a major nineteenth century capital – the French, German, and English schools, (non-functioning) cathedrals and churches, really old cafes, all kinds of interesting buildings.  About twenty years ago they closed it to traffic and extensively renovated it.  The funky old streetcar still runs up the middle.  It is clogged with a rushing tide of humanity in all directions at all hours of every day.  Here at the end of a beautiful Sunday afternoon it is extra crowded and kind of exhausting for me to pick my way through.  I eventually make it to Taksim at the top of the hill, then …  another mile and a quarter to get back to the Titanic.

Metro Day – Monday

I’ve been studying my transportation options, and there’s a quite complete Metro system here.  It will turn out that I use it pretty much every day to get somewhere.   Because of the challenging topography of the City it has a few quirks, but it’s quite usable.  From my p.o.v.  these are the main components:

• the M2, an underground train which runs from Şişhane to Taksim to the eastern European suburbs.  The first stop out of Taksim is Osmanbey, which is near my hotel.
• the Funicular, a one stop funicular train down the hill from Taksim to Kabataş.  very cool and fun marvel of modern engineering.
• the T1, an above ground train running from the ferry terminals at Kabataş across the Golden Horn over the Galata Bridge, past all the big time tourist attractions in the Old City, to the western European suburbs.
• the M1, which connects with the T1 and ends at Ataturk International Airport.

The Funicular and the T1 were a big part of my life here.  Almost every day started and ended with a ride on the Funicular to get off the substantial hill that Taksim is the top of, then to get back up that hill.  Most of those days included a transfer to the T1 across the Galata Bridge and up the substantial hill on the other side to various exciting parts of old Constantinople.

Payment is really simple, each of these transportation segments requires a 3TL ($1.68) jeton – a little plastic token. So today for instance I will ride each of the first three of these:

• Enter the Osmanbey underground stop, feed a 10TL note to the machine, get three jetons and a 1TL coin in change.
• Feed the first token to get past the turnstile to the M1, which I take for a mere one stop to Taksim.
• Out the exit turnstile for that line, feed the next token to the entrance turnstile for the Funicular.
• Out the exit turnstile for the Funicular at Kabataş, feed the third token to the entrance turnstile for the T1, take it across the bridge, up the hill past Sultanahmet to the stop for the Grand Bazaar.

The Grand Bazaar is the ancient bazaar district, acres of shops in winding little alleys probably a thousand years old.  I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be my thing, and indeed I did not. but it was the farthest away part of the Old City tourist experience, so I thought I’d just metro to there and work my way back.

I cruise aimlessly through about 1/2 mile of shops, feeling not the least desire to shop, so I exit and head back uphill (always uphill!) to the avenue.  Wikipedia tells me that I was walking the “Road to the Imperial Council“.  It has some interesting churches and ironwork and monumental things, but not much excitement until Sultanahmet, which is ground zero for your beginner Istanbul tourist.

It’s the top of the so-called First Hill of the old city of Constantinople.  The ancient Hippodrome was here.  Sadly nothing is left of the Hippodrome but a couple of monuments and a really wide flat area which is a park.  The big attractions here are the Blue Mosque (real name, Sultan Ahmed Mosque) and the Hagia Sophia.  I visited Hagia Sophia a few days later, but never did go to the Blue Mosque.  Looking now at the Wiki page, it appears to be exquisitely beautiful, but at the time I just wasn’t feeling it.  In my old age I’ve become alienated from organized religion.  Spirituality, love of nature and your fellow humans, all that stuff is great.  But intense religiosity is kind of bogus from my p.o.v., and I really don’t have much patience for it  Anyway, to make a long story short, I did not feel like visiting any functioning religious places on this trip (technicality – Hagia Sophia is a museum now. It was built as a Byzantine, eastern Roman church, was converted to a mosque after the Conquest, but has been decommissioned to be simply a museum).

I headed back down the hill towards the Galata Bridge, and made the very good decision to detour through Gülhane Park.  The park is very pretty and quiet and a great relief after the noise and busy-ness of the main drag from Sultanahmet to the Golden Horn.  It’s enclosed by a very old 20′ wall on the street side and an even higher wall on the other side. I thought the sign said that Topkapi Palace was beyond that wall, but I found out later it is the Archaeology Museum, with Topkapi on the other side of that.  The story goes that they use to let the ladies of the harem take the air in these gardens, which would explain the high walls.

I followed the edge of the museum walls around the corner and up the hill and found myself at a really awesome panoramic view of the mouth of the Bosporous.  At first I was annoyed that there was a restaurant between me and the view, but I turned that from a bug to a feature by sitting down to a nice pot of tea at the edge of the bluff.  Pretty cool place, this Constantinople!  (the city as a whole is of course, Istanbul, but when you are inside the old City Walls, you can accurately call it Constantinople if you wish :).

I followed the outside edge of the park to the bottom, where the lower exit dumps one somewhat inconveniently on a freeway-ish kind of boulevard with not much of a sidewalk.  There was about a third mile of that, then it opend up into the Eminönü ferry landings  This is the third big ferry spot, along with good ole Kabatas and Karaköy, where I spend so much of my time.

Back across the Galata Bridge on the upper level this time instead of the restaurant level, with the plan of eating at a funky little restaurant wedged in between the fish vendors over in Karaköy, which I walked past yesterday.

It was sweet little spot – cheap and definitely a local’s place.  Turns out every restaurant will say “Yes! we do serve beer!“, but many, like this little place don’t really carry it. Rather they send a kid to the store around the corner to buy a can of Efes and hustle it back to your table.  Whatever, after a longish wait I had my beer.  The locals were knocking back huge plates of what looked like fried sardines.  I wasn’t too clear on how to negotiate the little fishbones, so I stuck to my grilled sea bass. My salad was pretty representative of how they roll over here – little piles of shredded or sliced raw vegetables, completely unmixed and undressed. Quite healthy and filling though!

Second day in a row to grumble and stumble and wheeze my way up the hill past the Galata Tower.  The crowds on İstiklâl Caddesi were about as thick on Monday evening as they were on Sunday evening!   I crested the hill and celebrated with a large Efes draft at the Aspen Cafe, off the quiet side of Taksim, on the edge of my long walk down the avenue to the Titanic.

Moving Day – Tuesday

The Titanic Comfort Hotel is pleasantly swank in it’s way, but it’s a little too expensive for an extended stay (70Euro ~= $91), especially since they stuck me in the basement and they have some kind of construction project going on.  So I’ve identified a cheaper and closer place, the Ar Palas (100TL ~= $56).  Saving $35/night for six (or nine!) nights sounds good to me, so I do it.  I have my last excellent breakfast at the Titanic where I take my last chunk out of that honeycomb, close out my account, pack all my shizzle and walk my borrowed roller suitcase down that sidewalk I’ve come to know so well in the last three days, to the other side of the square and my new home.

My new home is a funky little place, quite downscale compared the Titanic, but much, much cooler.  My room is tiny.  The windows don’t open, but there is a door that opens onto the firescape, with a breathtaking view down the hill and over the apartments to the Bosporus.

Mid-afternoon I finally got off my ass to see more of Beyoğlu, which is the name for this whole part of the city where I am living. I tend to just call it the New City, since I never quite learned how to pronounce Beyoğlu, and in my limited experience, folks usually talk more about the neighborhood (Tophane, Galata, Taksim, Karaköy) than the district.

I ended up in Tophane, followed the signs to the Modern Art Museum.  It’s to late to go in, but now I know where it is.  Again I followed the avenue around the corner where the Golden Horn meets the Bosporous to Karaköy where I had my first sea bass sandwich from a vendor I’ve walked past for the last two days – a mere 5TL, really yummy, and no bones to pick!  I then had an Efes at one of the Galata Bridge restaurants, then headed up that hill again, for the third day in a row!

This time it is dark, and Galata Tower looks amazing.  I walk up to the gate to discover that the tower is open till 7:30 and it is 6:40, so woo!  I’m going for it!  The view is enchanting in all directions.  I happened to be there for the evening call to prayer, and it was the craziest racket you ever heard.  Sound carries upward really well, you know.  It went on for some time.

I continued my walk up İstiklâl Cadessi.  It rained quite heavily for a while; after the first few drops the umbrella vendors sprang up instantly.   I took shelter in a few storefronts then made my soggy way up the hill.  When did finally make it to the top I was very pleased with myself to be “home”, at my new hotel rather than having another mile plus to go to get to the Titanic.