Tourist Interlude

Saturday May 23

(still working on the travelogue part of this below)

Anadolu Medical Center is a new-ish hospital (five years old) out in the far suburbs of Istanbul. It’s so far out in the burbs that it’s basically the countryside. They are working hard to attract an international clientele. It is a half-mile off the Sea of Marmara, my new favorite place, and every room and pretty much every window has a fantastic view out over the hills and islands and water.  It the morning with the sun just right one can see snow on the mountains to the southeast.

Geography digression

Got this cool little map from Wikipedia.

• Black Sea at the top
• Mediterranean at the bottom
• Sea of Marmara in the middle
• the shockingly narrow strip of water between Marmara Sea and the Black Sea is the Bosphorus. It is pivotal in the history of the world and ridiculously cool.
• Europe to the left, Asia to the right (duh)
• the pinkish area around the Bosphorus is Istanbul
• a little to the right of Istanbul you see some islands and a little further right a teeny little peninsula sticking out.  Anadolu Medical Center is little to the left of that peninsula. The Suadiye district, where I plan to stay whenever I get out of here is across from those islands, the Prince Islands, where rich people have “summer houses” and hang out in their yachts (of course).

The Hospital

There is an office here – the International Services section – whose function is to attract people like me. They do get a few Americans, but most of the clientele comes from around the Black Sea – Romanians, Bulgarians etc. Also Azerbaijanis and a smattering of  Arabs.  Right now the halls are alive with the sound of a bunch of cute little Iraqi Kurdish kids who are getting sponsored heart repairs from some international agency. The pride of the hospital (other than Dr Cicek :) is the Oncology Department (cancer) that attracts a lot of Brits for some state-of-the-art procedure they don’t even have in Britain.   It’s pretty clear that they haven’t had that many Americans come over by themselves and do what I’m doing. I guess the Americans mostly go to India because … what where all the other Americans go.  With my usual perversity I ended up making the out-of-the-mainstream choice, and I’m glad I did.

It turns out that the people I dealt with in America – WorldMedAssist and Janet – basically just interfaced with the International Services office to get me here, which I could’ve done directly of I had known then what I know now. But I would have never heard of this place without them, so they deserve whatever finder’s fee that was factored into my $1,800.

Anyway, Asli, the very nice woman who runs International Services has been super-kind to me. She decided to treat me to a day on the town on the day between pre-op day and operation day, which was just wonderful! So on Saturday morning, good ole Erhan the driver picked me up at my room around 9 AM, and by a mere 11:30 we had satisfied all the hospital red tape and had escaped the bubble!

We started out doing official touristy things, but thankfully we realized that neither one of us was particularly into that, so we just instead cruised around pretty parts of the city and hung out, which is what I do BEST!

• We cruised west along the Asian side, to the permanent traffic jam crossing the Bosphorus to Europe (exactly two bridges to get between Europe and Asia, so I would expect constant traffic!), and made our slow way to the Sultanamhet district, home of the major tourist attractions.
• Erhan has connections, so we got to park with the limos and buses.  Back in the days of Byzantium, this was the Hippodrome.
• First stop the Blue Mosque.  I didn’t feel like standing in line, taking off my hiking boots and all that, so we just cruised the perimeter, checking out Moslem tourists, which I found very interesting.
• Next stop was the only tourist attraction for which we did actually stand in the (short) line – the Basilica Cistern – click on this for the picture of it, and you’ll see why I wanted to see it.  When you’re there it’s super easy to imagine you’re a Byzantine getting out of the heat in 500 AD.  Those Roman engineers (and successors) were amazing.
• 50 yards away is the Hagia Sophia, which I really, really do want to see, but not today, I just ain’t got it today.
• Having made our good faith attempt at tourism, Erhan suggests we stop at the cafe on the square and get a Turkish coffee, which we do.  It ok, but I’ll stick with espresso thank you.   As the hospital cafe, regular old espresso coffee seems to be the drink of choice.
• We walked allll the way over to the other side of the square and decided to have lunch at the extremely inviting cafe under the trees near the mosque.  We had turkish lamb and a ubiquitious turkish yogurt drink called ayran.
• We retrieved the van, and started our long drive back.   I didn’t realize how much more coastline we were gonna see, so I asked Erhan to stop along the water.  At the last place they had those old school coke bottles, so I got a coke.  This place had stupid old coke cans, so I was sad. Erhan ran into some homeboys – the stadium for his football team (Besitkas) was across the street.
• Back into the traffic stream to return to Asia.  To the north of us (off to the left) the Bosphorus takes a turn and gets very narrow, ridiculously so for what large bodies of water it connects.  There was a large ship in there that looked like it was touching both sides.
• Our plan is to take the long way back driving along the water, so we take the first exit in Asia, loop around and stop at a little community park, where the kids are jumping off the ledge and swimming in the straits – another Coke!
• We make our way through a lot of busy suburbs, crowded with Saturday traffic, we’re in no hurry, it was kinda fun.
• We come to another relatively quiet waterfront area, a couple of miles of wide concrete stairs facing the ocean.  Every few hundred yards there is a little shack and the steps are covered with rugs and pillows for a hundred feet.   We hang at one of these, order … what did we order?… oh, tea this time, and Erhan buys some sunflower(?) seeds from a vendor that he determined that I should learn out to eat the right way.
  I was also starting to feel like the Hobbits, when they are talking about “second breakfast” and “elevensies“.  As we know, hobbits are appreciators of fine lifestyles.
• drive by Suadiye Hotel – rockin neighborhood
• stop again, just talk
• drive back

Sunday, May 24

I have a very nice room. Not quite as nice as pictured on the website, but pretty darned nice. I have my own bathroom and shower, and one of those fully articulated beds that they can adjust any which way. There is a plug close enough that I can use my European adapter and plug in the laptop in bed.

I have a big windo that faces west, looking over some kind of cultivated fields and beyond the fields low hills where one day there were tanks driving around!

• Romanian tv – very sweet little travelogues in the Romanian mountains
• Al Jazerri (sp?) which is mostly just dudes in robes talking all day
• Dubai tv – also dudes in robes, but mixed up with these funky little folk music hootnannies that I quite like.
• Georgian tv (they have a strange alphabet)
• TWO azerbaijani channels – they play a lot of Mexican soap operas subtitles in … whatever they speak
• BBC channel in English
• Coupla German channels, one in English half the time.
• the Fashion Channel, which appears to just be supermodels flouncing up and down the runway 24/7
• and oh yes, about 8 Turkish channels

The oddest is the Georgian channel, they have some of the usual game shows and talk shows, but mostly it’s angry people yelling at each other, marches on the street where the drivers yell at the people, and folks march up to buildings carefully holding their containers of eggs and throw eggs at the buildings.  Political unrest indeed.

NBA is strange experience, it’s the TNT feed with the sound turned down and a coupla overweight Turkish sports nerds yakking about the game as they sit in a studio in Istanbul and watch the feed with you.