Istanbul (Part 3 - The Asian Side)

We had decided to split our time in Istanbul with 4 days on the European side, and 3 days on the Asian side. We love exploring the public transportation in cities, and after walking countless miles seeing everything on the first side, we were excited to try out the metro. To ride the city busses, subways, and trams in Istanbul you need an Istanbul Card, which were able to buy at the train station. After buying the card and preloading some money, we swiped into the train stop...which was actually the wrong one. After some help getting oriented, we made it to the correct train station and took the subway under the water and all the way over to our new neighborhood (it was still actually a 15 minute walk to our hotel). Note that each subway ride was ~70 cents (10 lira), but you could recoup some of that money each time at a scanning station if you did not take the subway from end to end on the line.

The Asian side of Istanbul, in our VERY limited opinion, was much more modern and felt like more of a "living" area. While it still had some cool older monuments, especially near the water, our neighborhood (Kadikoy) had swanky restaurants, grocery stores, and modern clothing stores. Following the trend of a lot of major cities, any blank brick wall is covered with paintings or graffiti. After dropping our things off we hit one of the coffee shops (between coffee and tea, our bodies were like 50% caffeine at this point) and grabbed a hot dog for lunch (Nicole needs at least one hot dog per city to keep in balance). From there we winded down the hill from the Kadikoy neighborhood to the seaside Moda neighborhood, which ends in a large open park. It was a beautiful day and people were out walking their dogs, jogging, riding bikes, playing cards on set up tables, playing tennis and basketball, etc. This started one of many of our discussions of how cool it would be to stay a little longer in Istanbul....like maybe forever. We took the subway back up to the area near Maiden's Tower (a defense tower built on a tiny island just of the shore) to watch sunset, and finished the night with a meal of a kebab platter and lachuman (something like a really, really thin pizza).

We spent most of the next day recovering from all of our walking, and planning ahead for our next places in Turkey and beyond. That evening we headed to the mosque to partake in some Ramadan festivities. Ramadan had just started a couple of days before. Similar to Lent for you Catholics out there, it is a time of reflectiveness, prayer, and self discipline as a means to become closer to God. One of the big aspects of Ramadan is fasting: devout Muslims do not consume anything from sunrise to sunset for the entire month. This includes water, coffee, and smoking (in fact, really religious people will not even swallow their saliva during this time). To circumvent the hunger, the people will wake up early to prepare a large meal for breakfast just before sunrise, and eat a feast well into the night for dinner. At the call to prayer at sunset, a light meal consisting of bread, soup, and rice is consumed to take the top off the appetite before the later feast begins. Many of the mosques and courtyards have trucks and tents set up to provide this lighter meal, called Iftar, for free. Devout Muslims, those that have fallen away, and even tourists like ourselves are all welcome to participate. So we hopped in line and and grabbed a plate. Typically, in better weather (Ramadan actually changes dates every year), there are big tents and mats covering all of the parks and it is a social and festive meal. Because of the cold though, people tended to grab their meal and run home to the warmth of indoors. We ate our food on the curb and enjoyed watching the people who lingered around. (Also: we got baklava again to finish the night!)

Our next day started with another big breakfast and followed with complaints about being overstuffed again. Luckily, we knew it was going to be a big walking day. We decided to head back to the Old area to do some shopping at the Grand Bazaar! The Grand Bazaar is the largest covered market in the world. It consists of 66 "streets" and has dozens of more spilling around it's exterior. It has many Turkish rug shops, some places for sweets, a plethora of jewelry and gold shops, and others for souvenirs. The biggest draw, though, appears to be for clothing, handbags, and watches, all of which are spectacular knock-offs of designer brands. The quality of these goods is excellent and for some things the only real way to tell that it isn't real is by the logos that are a little different, or stitched weird, or in the wrong place. However, after seeing the poor counterfeits in other countries, we decided this would be a good place (especially with the cheap prices!) to replace some of the travel clothing that we had been reusing for 8+ months.

Haggling at the markets, especially at the Grand Bazaar and Spice Bazaar, is one of the most fun things to do in Istanbul if you have the fortitude for it. On it's surface, the markets can be intimidating with all of shouting salesman trying to lure you in. Here, especially, the salesman are on point. Many of them came speak multiple languages (some as many as 15!), and they are great at picking up your accent and knowing right where you are from and what pitch to use on you. Our normal technique in a market is to talk to each other in Spanish so that we don't get US prices, but they see right through that here. However, if you can make it through all that, and stick to your guns, pretty much everything is 1/2 or even 1/3 of the starting price thrown at you. We spent all day debating prices on shirts and jackets and even a new bag or two. We heard time and time again about shop owners' family members in the states ("oh yes, I know Nebraska" was very common, but definitely not sincere). Sometimes we threw our arms up in the air at an outrageous price, but more often the owners did it to us with our lowballing, but it typically always ended in a laugh. We took breaks for coffee and tea, and ended up with way too much stuff, but all of it at good deals (okay, not all of it. Kyle got suckered into paying $10 for some Turkish delights...right up there with what would be one of our most expensive meals in all of Turkey).

We finished at the end of the market with some pide, a football-shaped pita bread full of pizza-like ingredients, and then we took the subway back to our hotel on the Asian side, with our backpacks bursting full of stuff we absolutely had no room for. We decided to forgo the baklava that night...but still ended up at a dessert shop and followed that up with a quick beer at a pub (just to confirm that they are, in fact, a real thing to do in Istanbul). With noticeably heavier luggage, we took the airport shuttle (only 46 lira, ~$3 - BUT MAKE SURE YOU GET ON THE RIGHT ONE...we were about 30 seconds away from leaving on the bus to the wrong airport), and were off on our way to the Cappadocia region!

Levi's shirt count: 406