We didn’t hear any prayers during the night, and so we took the chance to sleep in a little later than usual. Heading downstairs one of the lights on the landings was burned out, and with no other light around I slip and fell on my ass as we walked down the stairs. Luckily it was a minor fall, and it didn’t come back to haunt me later. We did advise the hotel staff that it might be a good idea to change the light before somebody more fragile than I slipped and fell.
After breakfast we walked across town to the harbor. There we caught a cheap ferry ride to the Asian side of Istanbul. We sat outside along the water since it was shaded from the morning sun by the bulk of the ferry, and we were joined by a local family with a cute kid smiling and making faces at us. The view from the ferry was very nice and it was refreshing to be on the water instead of walking around everywhere. After about 15 minutes we arrived on the Asian side, and we initially took a wrong turn and ended up on the grounds of a religious university. After backtracking a bit we found a shopping area with plenty of stores to look through. We were really surprised at the prices – things were about half the price that we were paying over in the historic (touristy) district. It would be cheaper to ferry over here for dinner every night. We worked up a thirst walking around in the sun, so we stopped at a place selling bubble tea. It was a little different than the regular bubble tea with tapioca balls. This place you could choose exactly what flavor the little gelatin balls would contain. We ordered a pineapple/yogurt drink with passionfruit bubbles in the bottom. It was an interesting texture – loved it.
We continued walking through town, and especially enjoyed the street markets with rows of spices, meats and fish, vegetables and fruits. We had ice cream from a stand that seemed pretty temporary, and I tried a strange yogurt drink from a guy selling them from a truck. We were still full from snacking so we skipped lunch and instead took another ferry to the newer downtown of Istanbul, back on the European side. As we crossed this time we passed some more of the harbor where some enormous ships were docked. The scale of the ships was completely different from what we had seen so far. Once we arrived at our next dock, we caught a funicular train up a hill (glad we didn’t decide to walk it!) and emerged right at the center of Taksim Square. This was the epicenter of the protests against the Turkish government a couple of months ago, and it had given us a scare since at the time we weren’t sure if it would be safe to go or not. As it turned out, we had nothing to worry about. The place was emptied out, clean and safe. There was no sign at all of any demonstrations, but we did notice a giant Turkish flag hanging next to a huge poster of the president. Rubbing it in?
While I took pictures Kuniko wandered into the shade to avoid the heat of the sun. As she walked through the edge of a park I followed to catch up and saw that she was being trailed by two young Turkish guys. They were calling out to her, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying and it appeared that Kuniko couldn’t hear either. One walked on ahead, but the other got pretty close to Kuniko before his friend saw me coming. He backed off quickly but they stuck around to see what we were doing. They made kissing faces at me while I watched them, and eventually we got our bearings and moved off. Everything was cool.
I bought a small cup of lemonade at a nearby stand, and I made the tourist mistake of ordering it before asking how much. The guy took the liberty of doubling the price to two euros. That’ll teach me. I noticed that most stands had no prices posted so they could adjust them as necessary based on the customer and the demand.
From there we walked down a long shopping street that felt a lot more like Beverly Hills than Istanbul. There was a lot of money on that street, and I could see how sensitive the government must have been to the demonstrations considering they were happening right next door to the high rent district. Again the men were very aggressive and they gave us lots of looks, but generally people were very friendly. At the end of the street we found a train station where we could catch a train ride back to the area around our hotel. The train ride was quick, and I guess we probably could have walked – I didn’t realize how close things were.
We took a break at our hotel and then set out to find a restaurant for dinner. We were running low on Turkish lira, and didn’t want to change much more money since we were moving on the EU after this. We found a street near our hotel lined with restaurants that seemed to serve the youth hostel crowd. One restaurant said they would take credit cards, but they made it seem like they were doing us a favor by accepting them. We drank lots of ice cold beer, had some decent (but not exciting) food, and watched people walking by. Cities like this are great for people watching – there is a such a variety that I found myself never losing interest. After drinking all the beers we thought we’d do a little bit of shopping before we headed back to the hotel but suddenly realized we were low on lira. The last thing we wanted was to be asking the street market sellers to accept Visa, so we went on back and headed to bed. Lots of mileage today, and we were pretty sure our feet would be sore the next day.
