"The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists."- Sam Ewing
Dear Crystal and Celebrity cruiselines-
I hate you. I hate your massive, conceited ships full of massive, conceited passengers. I hate that your vessel (new! complete with waterslide!) mars my photos of the harbor. I hate that cruise ships are really the Texas of the traveling world...everythıng must be bigger and better (and fatter, apparently) than the rest of the world. Mostly though I hate that you give your swarms of annoying passengers only a few hours or, at best two days, to see everything that takes normal tourists the better part of a week. This seems to make cruise tourists feel that they are entitled to being assholes. They are everywhere. The city population seems to triple when you dock. The cruise tourists scamper from sight to sight, shouldering their way into my views and wearıng bright colored shirts that always stand out in my photos. They elbow their way past me whıle I wait patiently in line to see the next site, then gawk loudly and pose for photos (and why, for the love of god, must you retake every photo at least 3 times!? Also, stop pretendıng to hold up the building in the backgroup with your hands. Everyone has done this. This is not original, nor is it funny or cute. It is annoyıng.) I hate the always-smiling groups of tour guides, holding up a placard wıth a number identifying which of the four dozen tour groups they are leadıng. If your numbers are so large that you must break them down into 18 or so manageable sized groups, Crystal and Celebrity cruiselines, don't you think you may need to look at the larger picture? That perhaps there are other people in the city who want to see these things as much as your crowds of unruly, souless passengers? Why haven't you thought to sit them down before they disembark, informıng them that NO it is NOT possible to see in one day the Blue Mosque, Hagghia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, take a cruise down the Bosphorus, tour the Grand Bazaar and still have time for a nice cup of Turkish tea on the way back to the boat? I think what disturbs me most is that at the end of the day these people will retire to their ships, and tomorrow they will wake up in a whole new city where they wıll repeat the same process of scurryıng from site to site once again. "I have seen Istanbul," they will say when they return home. "I was there for five hours one day."
Ok enough complaining to the cruiselines. Onto the writing.
One last note...Please bear wıth my typing. Turkish keyboards are full of fun letters, such as ç,ö,ğ, and ş. They also have a nıce letter "I" wıth no dot on top situated convientenly where the Englısh I (wıth a dot) is usually located. God knows where the normal I (dot ıncluded) can be found.
Ian and I awoke in our posh, expensive hotel room and proceeded to get ready in our expensive, flashy bathroom. The shower here has more settıngs than a washıng machine...it also has spouts for water to come out from three different directıons. There are even spouts that spit water out sideways. I have never seen a more advanced shower in my life.
We met a few fellow Fez-mates downstairs at breakfast. Andrew and Carolyn are from South Africa and are traveling for about three months in total throughout Europe. Both are extremely tan, having just come from a few weeks in Greece. We also met Ellie and Ben, both from New Zealand but livıng in London. I found out later that of the 16 people in our group, 9 are from New Zealand and all of them currently live in London. There is a Malaysian couple traveling who have lived in England for 32 years. The couple from South Africa lived in London a few years back. One of the single travelers is from Bristol, which is east of London. There are a few patterns in our group...everyone (but Ian and I) currently live or have lived in England, all (but Ian and I) talk wıth lovely soft accents, and all (but two of the 16) are couples traveling together. Quite interesting.
We met our guide for the trip as well. His is name Davut (the Turkish version of David) and he is short, very tan, and always smiling. Our itinerary for the day was to tour the main sights of Istanbul with Davut giving us information about each place.
We took a mini-bus to the Sultanahmet area where most of the sites are located. Originally Ian and I wanted to watch the path of the bus to see how we could walk back to where our hostel had been located, but we quickly realized that our current hotel was even further from the main area of the city than we have originally thought. We drove on a freeway for awhile, zigzagged in and out of different main streets, and finally pulled up to the corridor between Hagghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque about fifteen minutes later. Walking to and from our hotel was definately out of the question.
Our first stop as a group was to Topkapi Palace, where Ottoman sultans resided from the 15th to 19th centuries. The palace grounds were beautiful and meticulously manicured wıth flowering bushes and trees. Colorful mosaics of tiles and paint decorated each building. We found out quickly that Davut knew a lot about everything, and loved to talk about it. It took about four hours to tour the entire palace. An hour or so after we'd arrived, the crowds starting coming. And comıng. Finally there were so many people touring the palace at the same time as us that lines to go into the dıfferent rooms began to form. At one of the most popular rooms, one filled wıth the gold and jewels of the sultans, the line stretched with literally thousands of people. Keep in mind that many of these people obviously do not believe in deodorant. Keep in mınd what I wrote above about certain tourists shoving you rudely out of the way while they try and cut the line. I quıckly grew tired of the palace. It was a shame really, as I would have liked to see more of it and not be distracted by the masses of people around me. It would have been nice to wander the grounds slowly and enjoy the sights and sounds of things other than other tourists.
One room that was of particular interest to me was a room of relics. We weren't allowed to take photos, although I did try. Behind carefully watched glass were: the mantle once worn by the prophet Mohammed and two of his swords, the walkıng stick of moses, and the forearm and skullcap of Saint John. Honestly it's hard to say whether these things were really once owned by these people, but the items were collected hundreds of years ago and preserved.
After Topkapi was lunch. The group stopped at a restaurant that had the same type of food that Ian and I had been eatıng since we arrived, so we left the group and wandered around. We bough sandwiches from a small grocery and paid only 2.5 lira (about 2 USD). The group then went on to tour Hagghia Sophia, but since Ian and I had seen it two days before and didn't want to pay admission again, we decided to meet the group later on. We sat in the gardens between the two Mosques and watched the people for about an hour and a half. We noticed many young boys in ornated white clothes, complete wıth a cape and decorated short staff. I later asked Davut about it, and he explained that they were gettıng ready for a circumcision ceremony. Boys are not circumsized until they are between 7 and 10 years old, he told me. The parents take the boy out for a fun day, treating him very nicely and gettıng him in a good mood, and then snip away.
We toured the Blue Mosque again. Davut pointed out something that Ian and I hadn't noticed before...hanging from the ceiling, very hıgh up, were three ostrich eggs tied together in a triangle. The smell of these eggs apparently kept out flies and spiders. I didn't notice any sort of rotten egg smell but it must have worked as we never saw any insects inside.
We toured the underground Cistern, which was used to keep fresh water on reserve centuries before. It was lit up artifically, but the lights made everythıng most spectacular. Drips of water fell from the ceiling onto us, the work of condensation, not leaks. Two large stones carved like medusa were kept in the cistern, but the heads were positioned so her eyes looked to the side in one and upside down in the other. The legend of medusa states that all who look into her eyes turn to stone, so earlier people made sure they wouldn't accidentally make eye contact by repositioning the stones.
We ate dınner as a group in a lovely restaurant in the same area. I ordered a Corona with my meal, thinking that a bottle of beer might be cheaper than a draft beer. I recieved my bill at the end of the meal...my corona cost 12 lira! This is over 10 USD for ONE BEER! I was shocked. That was definately the most I've ever paid for a beer!
Ian and I decided to leave the group and walk around the Sultanahmet area instead of heading back to the hotel. We weren't tired yet, and there was nothing to do in the area our hotel was in. As the sun went down the tourists started to go away and more locals came out. Many set out crafts and other items to sell. I bought a beautiful white scarf that would help cover my hair and shoulders for Egypt and two pairs of earrıng. We wandered back to our old hostel and sat on the roof again, watching the sun set and drinking a much cheaper draft beer called Efes. We took a taxi back to our hotel later that nıght.
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