When I woke up I was remembering a crazy dream. I had been tasked with teaching an 8 hour class with no preparation whatsoever, on the topic of how to prepare PDF files. The crazy thing was that the dream went on in real time, and I remembered teaching the whole first hour or so. Maybe I went to bed too early last night.
We showered, packed and checked out of the hotel – we were leaving too early to get our breakfast – and then walked out and around the corner to meet our taxi. It was marked as “Pink Taxi”, and the driver asked our names and then loaded our suitcase in the back. He was a really friendly guy, and it was a very smooth ride through the city and then out to the airport.
Along the way Kuniko spotted a rainbow, a smaller version of the Statue of Liberty, and everywhere we looked there were apartments and office buildings under development. It seemed to us that Pristina was a fast-growing city. As we approached the airport I was surprised to see how large it was.
As we moved through the different stages of departing the country, it felt like lots of kids were looking at us. Maybe it was just us, but every time I looked up at some family passing by the kids were watching us. Weird. It was also a strange feeling to be passing through an airport – usually our trips having us moving through a lot of countries by air, but this was our first flight in about two weeks.
When leaving the country at the immigration desk the officer said something to me that I couldn’t hear/understand, so I was leaning forward trying to hear it and she repeated herself, and again I couldn’t hear, and then finally I got the message – “Scan your boarding pass here”. This was a new process in our experience, but by the end of it both me and the officer were grinning about how silly the situation was.
Kuniko had done some research on the airport, and she had heard there was no toilet paper available. She had meticulously prepared some backup tissue and wet wipes for each of us, but when I finally used the restroom there was indeed some TP left on the roll. Still, it is good to be ready for anything.
While waiting I had some coffee and Kuniko had tea, also a big wedge of “fli”, a layered potato and cheese pastry that looked great but tasted sort of blah, perhaps a food that is made to fill stomach space rather than wow you with flavors.
We waited in the sunny airport, watching a lot of families walking around. Since the fli wasn’t great we ate some of the chocolate that we had been carrying around (for more than a week!) and spaced out. Eventually we got the call to board. The trend of lots of kids continued as we waited down the boarding tunnel.
Behind me a large older guy was really close, and kept edging closer and closer. Eventually when we turned the corner to the go through the plane door he sort of slid ahead of me, ending up between Kuniko and myself. I thought that was odd – Kuniko and I had been talking and I couldn’t believe he was that caught up in his thoughts to miss that we were together. I couldn’t resist calling ahead to Kuniko (in English) and telling here that this guy seemed to be in a big hurry and maybe we should let him pass. The guy heard and told me that he wasn’t in a hurry, and then let me pass him to be with my wife. The flight attendant was watching carefully to see if there would be any trouble but hopefully that guy will pay more attention to his environment in the future.
The flight itself was really smooth, and only about 70 minutes long. They did a lunch service, and we saw that there were bottles of wine on top of the service cart, so when they asked us if we wanted something to drink we said white wine, and the flight attendant did a double take. I am sure that we were absolutely the only people to have wine on that flight – but hey, vacation is vacation! Unfortunately this time our Turkish Airlines lunch sandwich wasn’t as good as the last one – I still can’t get over how delicious that simple melted sandwich was.
We landed at Istanbul airport on time, and then a long taxi to our gate. From there we had to walk a very long distance to get to central immigration and enter the country – and there were long lines waiting in front of us. We managed to get into a good line and got past pretty quickly, and we were the first people from our plan to reach the luggage carousel. Two suitcases were on the carousel but that was it, with our flight listed as “bags incoming”. We stood there and waited for almost 20 minutes, with no other bags coming out, until finally our bag popped out and it was all over. That whole plane full of people and apparently we were the only ones to check luggage to Istanbul.
Our walking wasn’t finished yet. It was about a 15 minute walk to get to the airport train station on the M11 line, and then we went down four sets of escalators to reach the ticket gate and platform. The ticket system was a little complex – we had to buy an Istanbul Card and top it up without knowing how much the train ticket price was – sort of non-intuitive. But in the regular city metro we could use our own credit cards to pay at the gates, so this Istanbul Card was a problem only for the airport line.
We lined up for the train, each of us lining up on one side of the train doors so that people would be able to get out of the train first. Surprisingly many people lined up right in front of the doors, blocking the exit of the current passengers which is like Train Riding 101 basic knowledge back in Japan. Then when the train pulled in everyone started cutting in line and any semblance of etiquette was out the window.
I steered our suitcase towards the bench of available seats, and as I did a guy sat down and then tried to hold a seat for someone else – but nobody was there to take it. Kuniko already had a seat and so I sat down in the empty seat. Just as my butt hit the seat a lady showed up from the other door, apparently the couple had spread out to try to get a better chance at a seat. But in the end we stayed put and the lady took her guy’s seat. It was cutthroat on the Istanbul metro!
Luckily we had a seat since the ride from the airport to the next metro transfer was about 30 minutes. The train was pretty standard in design, made by Hyundai Rotem. One thing that was unusual was the amount of warning signs against breaking rules – no music, no food, cameras are operating, etc.
Finally we reached our transfer station, Gayrettepe. There was no scanning of our card upon exit. A guy trying to be helpful urged us to tap on a transfer box, but we had plans to use our credit cards from here and kept going. From there it was a solid 15-20 minutes walk to the M2 transfer station. Again with the escalators – 3-4 times we had to go down, and by the time we reached the platform we missed the train and had to wait only 6 minutes for the next one. It was only 4 stops to our destination, Sishane station. While on that train a family of YouTubers got on, all wearing the same t-shirt and with dad filming the car interior (and passengers!) which seemed a little rude. We also noticed the pattern on the train doors had a hidden design that looked an awful lot like the Chinese symbol for Korea – maybe an Easter egg from Hyundai?
Back up many escalators and we found ourselves right in front of our hotel, The Continental. The guy checking us in spoke in a very mysterious way, subtly building the drama so that when he finished we were expecting something more. We went up to our room (#502 – same as in Tirana!) and were pleased with the view. There was a great view of the skyline and Galata Tower, along with the strait and the mosques in the old town on the other side. Wow!
We definitely needed a drink after all this travel and walking around, so we walked down the street near our hotel looking for a likely place. The sun was hot, and so we ended up choosing the restaurant that was adjacent to our hotel, called “Big Chefs”. The waiter who seated us was very polite and he checked carefully to make sure we were in the shade, there was an empty chair for Kuniko’s purse, and then made a nice gesture of dispensing the wet towelettes. Behind me the couple sitting there had a cute cat sleeping under their table – Kotor is not the only city with lots of cats on this trip.
I had some Tuborg beer, we had three different white wines by the glass, and a plate of crispy manti – everything was great. It was good to relax after having been moving all day. After our second glass of wine we were both feeling the bliss of travel. This was our second time in Istanbul and we had big sightseeing plans – just a couple of places we might want to visit. This stay was sort of forced on us by Singapore Airlines, who rescheduled one of our flights, but it felt nice to just relax in a place we know and not having to worry about fitting in a bunch of stuff.
Upon paying the bill we had some trouble figuring out the tipping – each country had different culture about it – and finally I think we ended up not tipping with both us and the waiter confused. We decided to walk around in a different area, and found ourselves having an early dinner at Comedus, a wine bar that I had identified as a possible destination. The staff recommended two different red wines by the glass (that were excellent) and we had salmon bruschetta and also a pastrami sandwich that were really well made. The music was good, and again we were sitting on a terrace enjoying the view of the historic avenues of Istanbul.
Still later we walked over towards the Galata Tower, a dramatic landmark that we used throughout our stay to figure out where our hotel was. The street leading up to it was full of shops selling kebabs and touristy goods – it was packed with people. The line to climb the tower was impressive as well – everyone was here to go to the top. We stopped at a market to buy some kefir and water, tea and cookies for souvenirs. We also went to see the Cat Museum of Istanbul but it was not free as listed on Google Maps. It looked like a bit of a trap so we contented ourselves with petting some of the cats lying around nearby.
We had one more stop for food and wine, at a touristy restaurant right under the tower. We had Turkish Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, and also some sort of European style egg rolls in a pepper/tomato sauce – yum! This was a lively stop – a huge family was sitting next to us, with all the kids bored out of their mind. Cats walked to and fro under all the tables, hitting up customers for food. A lady near us with an impressive chest got a lot of attention from the restaurant staff. After one guy came by they all sort of came by with one excuse or another to service their table.
Finally we went back to the room to rest up. Kuniko was tired out and feeling slightly feverish but I was excited by the sunset over the skyline, and the illuminated mosques in the distance. I went out on my own to take lots of photos, and then came back to head to bed early. We left the curtains open to watch the tower lit up in the distance, starting to flash a light occasionally which looked like Morse code. What a day!
