Seat of Our Pants » Turkey

Hagia Sofia

Martin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:28:57 +0000

There are very few buildings and architectural monuments that manage to move me emotionally. Istanbul’s ancient Hagia Sofia is a clear exception: a place where history, architecture and religion have clashed over and over again. It is a defining building for this part of the world, and a beautiful one at that.

The current Hagia Sofia dates back to the 6^th century, even though there has been a Hagia Sofia at this site since 350 AD. It is famous not so much for its exterior as for the interior – the way the central dome is constructed represents a revolution in architecture. Walking in, you get the sense of being inside a giant hall in a separate universe, completely apart from the outside world. It was the main church for the Byzantine empire: a central place in the first thousand years of Christian history.

In 1453, the city fell (or was liberated, depending on how you look at it) to the Turks, and Hagia Sofia was converted into a mosque. I have mixed emotions about this: the black and golden shields that hang in there so obviously do not belong in that space (they were added in the 19^th century), and the Arabic script painted inside the main dome look clumsy and out of place. Ironically, the conversion into a mosque probably saved Hagia Sofia, as the church had fallen into a state of serious dilapidation during the last decades of the Byzantian empire. In 1935, the government declared it to be a museum, and I believe this is the best solution for this incredible building. If you want to see an actual example of Islamic architecture, the stunning Blue Mosque is just across the street.

Hagia Sofia is a stunner.

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Hagia Sofia Walk-through

Martin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:19:54 +0000

Sometimes, a picture says more than a thousand words. At other times, it may be necessary to use video to convey our messages. Check out this video below: it’s a walk around the upper gallery of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.

This video is from the ground floor of the same building.

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How We Spent an (Almost) Free Day in Istanbul

Jaime — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:35:15 +0000

Istanbul is not cheap. It’s a bustling metropolis of European caliber price points. But it’s also one of the coolest cities we’ve been to. So how did we handle our day there while managing to stay within our meager backpacking budget? A good pair of shoes, a little imagination and loads of sunscreen.

Before letting you in on our cheap little secrets I’ll get the painful bits out of the way: there are two absolute must-do sites in Istanbul that are not free. There’s no getting around it. You’ll want to see them, you’ll be sorry if you don’t, so plan to spend around $10/person for the Hagia Sophia and $5/person to see the Byzantine Cistern. More on those two in a moment.

Right then! Let’s get to it. We’ll begin our day with it’s most important meal: breakfast. Any decent hotel/guesthouse/hostel will include the cost of it in your stay. Our breakfast was simple fare: an egg, bread, olives, tomato and cheese but it will cost you nothing (above the cost of the room itself). Many of the hotels in the Sultanahmet area have rooftop decks with spectacular views of the Blue Mosque. Delicious, nutritious Turkish breakfast overlooking the Istanbul skyline: Free!

Take time to soak in the morning views over breakfast, but it’s best to set out early. The Hagia Sophia, Istanbul’s jaw-dropping 1,700 year old church-turned-museum opens at 9:00am and you’ll want to be there on the dot. We were lucky and beat the busloads that poured in as we were leaving. As I said, expect to pay around $10/person to enter but take my word for it – it is worth every penny.

Once we had our fill of the amazing Byzantine-era church, we checked out the ancient water Cistern located conveniently across the street. A few flights below street level, the Cistern is a dimly lit colonnaded Byzantine-era water tank. It still holds a pool of water and giant fish, to boot! Again, it will set you back $5/person to enter but you don’t want to miss it.

Istanbul waterfront

A short walk from the Cistern exit is the Bosphorus waterfront, a popular place to grab a ferry. In the interest of saving money, we opted out of the ferry, preferring to spend the afternoon walking. As long as you have a good pair of shoes, walking is the absolute best way to check out a new town. Taking a stroll along the waterfront: Free!

By this time we’d worked up quite an appetite. Thanks to some great advice from @ayearinmotion and @noplacelikeoz, we knew just the spot for a great inexpensive Istanbul waterfront specialty: the fish sandwich. Passing up the more expensive fish restaurants in the area, we found a great little vendor on the far side of the bridge. A fresh caught grilled fish sandwich: $2/person

A short walk up a steep hill after crossing the Galata bridge is Istiklal Caddesi in Beyoglu, a fantastic area recommended to us by @italofileblog. We walked up the hill, but the area can be reached by tram if those legs are starting to tire. Chic restaurants and great window shopping abound here. Exploring the maze-like backstreets of Istaklal Cad: Free!

Our next move was a return to the Sultanahmet area for a much needed cup of Turkish tea and a plate of baklava. We opted to sit on a main road to people watch while divulging in the sweet, crunchy goodness. A little people watching while satisfying our sweet tooth: $2/person

Carpet vendor in the Grand Bazaar

A little pep talk was needed before our next destination. It went something like, “I will not spend money. I will just look. I will not fall in love with anything.” Our destination (which you might have guessed): the glorious Grand Bazaar. Housing over 4,000 stalls, this maze of glittery, golden temptations is something you have to see to believe. Our tip: don’t show an interest or you’ll walk away with the object. The shop keepers are that good. Fortunately we’d already bought our souvenir a few weeks earlier, so we walked away without spending a dime (well, lira to be exact). Spending an hour playing what-would-we-buy-if-we-had-money in the Grand Bazaar: Free!

Blue Mosque Interior

The final site for the day was the Blue Mosque. Our tips: check out the closing times, as it is a place of worship and closes several times a day for worship. They enforce a strict dress code, but have helpful swaths of cloth for those who might need a little more coverage. Donations are welcome, but they charge no entrance fee. Spending time checking out the interior of this enormous Muslim holy place: Free!

Dinner was an exploration of another Turkish specialty: the kebab. This was followed by a cone of (strangely stringy) Turkish ice cream while watching the last of the sunset over the Blue Mosque.

It takes stamina but a day in the the fascinating ancient city of Istanbul is possible for just under $20/person. Thank you Istanbul for the kind of day that makes us know we’ll return (with a long list for the bazaar) soon!

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Turkey: a Quick Beer Review

Martin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:04:19 +0000

Eastern Turkey is a lot of things. What it’s not is a beer lover’s paradise. Licensed restaurants are far in between, and not all towns have a store that sells it. In the name of reader service we did however sample the local brews that we could find. They were all of the same brand: Efes; each pretty much indistinguishable from each other.

Indeed, Efes is the most sold beer in Turkey. It actually ranks as one of Europe’s top 10 selling beer brands. We found it in a number of varieties: bottles, cans, Efes Ice, Efes draft etc.

The taste? It’s like any other international style lager – pretty predictable, with a balanced make-up and just enough hops to make it interesting. A problem in Eastern Turkey was that the beers have often been kept in ice cold conditions for long periods of time, alternating with times of very warm temperatures. Hence, some bottles were a bit on the flat side.

Still, a very enjoyable acquaintance, perfect for washing down the travel dust after a bout with the Anatolian roads.

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How I’m Going to Stop My Wife from Spending All Our Money in Istanbul

S.O.O.P Crew — Fri, 28 May 2010 13:39:33 +0000

We’ve only got a little bit left of our travel budget now, a time in our lives that of course coincides with our visit to one of the world’s premier shopping capitals.

My current plan is to lock her in a cheap hotel room and throw away the key. I mean, seriously. This is heading for disaster! Anyone out there have any ideas on how to live on the cheap in Istanbul?

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Travel Dining: A Tale of Wanting What I Can’t Have

Jaime — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:52:21 +0000

I love food. It’s as simple as that. Catch me a few hours after a good meal and I’ll most likely be thinking about my next meal. It’s a habit that becomes heightened when traveling. Sure, it’s great to see pretty things, explore soaring mountains or wile away on an island beach. If I were honest, though, I feel most in touch with local traditions when I’m eating the local cuisine.

A bit of Dosa in Kolkata strengthened my sense of India. A mouthful of Momos in Nepal broadened my understanding of mountain life. A spicy Vietnamese Pho helped me understand what street food was all about. The list goes on and on.

There is irony in this situation, though. It doesn’t happen right away, but I often find myself longing for food I can’t have. When I’m in Thailand, I want some Nepali food. When in Sweden I’m longing for Mexican food. Perhaps I’m just used to variety. I’m American after all. We don’t have a national cuisine, but we do have food from almost everywhere else. It’s that variety, those options that I start to miss after eating my 20^th plate of the same local cuisine.

Turkish cheese store

Take the delicious cheese that we’ve been eating in Turkey and Georgia as an example. Two months ago we couldn’t stop talking about cheese. We had long, detailed discussions about whether or not cheese is the best food ever made. We were in India at the time, where you can’t find the type of cheese that we were craving. We flew from there to Sweden, where we could finally get our fill of cheese. We left happily satisfied, flew to Turkey to find that it has some epic cheese options too. Yay for more cheese!

Two weeks have passed and the enthusiasm is gone. Because we’re traveling on the cheap here, we eat out only once a day. The other two meals are made up of things we can find locally – mostly bread, cheese and the odd piece of fruit. This makes for a lot of cheese eating.

We came across this gorgeous cheese shop in the northeastern town of Kars. Out of respect for big beautiful rounds of cheese we bought some. It was divine cheese for sure but my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t get Indian food out of my mind.

Kolkata fast food - mmm mmm good!

Such is eating on the road. A long story of amazing food, followed by selfish bouts of wanting what I can’t have.

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Eerie Ride across the Van

Martin — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:02:28 +0000

This insanely beautiful expanse of water is Lake Van – Turkey’s biggest lake. There are a few settlements around the lake, but most of its shores are untouched by civilization. You hardly see any boats out there, just the impossibly blue water, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Pure magic.

Instead of taking the bus around the lake, going from Tatvan to the city of Van, we decided to take the slower but far more scenic ferry across. In doing this, we were unique: these days no one rides the ferry. Only cargo gets transported that way. We ended up walking around on this huge, empty ferry, wondering if we were on board the Flying Dutchman or some other famous ghost ship. We stumbled upon empty saloon after empty saloon, all looking forlornly abandoned.

A more thorough search revealed that there was indeed a captain steering the ship, and a few truck drivers huddling in a nearby prayer room. Still, it felt like we’d chartered our own ship for the crossing.

Not bad for a six dollar, five-hour ride.

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Botched Quest for an Ark

Martin — Tue, 25 May 2010 07:03:36 +0000

I had some serious plans for Dogubayazit. I wanted to chase down Noah’s Ark and see what it really looks like. See, a Hong Kong expedition claims to have found the remnants of the Ark, embedded in a glacier on the mountain. It sounded like a great little adventure. Failing that, at least I’d get to hang out on one of the world’s most beautiful mountains.

Again, there was that one hitch: we’re in the wrong season.

Instead of Ark-hunting, we ended up spending a couple of days taking it fairly easy. We caught up on website development, figured out our immediate travel plans and we’ve formed an addiction to hyper-sweet Baklava with our afternoon tea. All in all a nice little break.

Next up: Kars, famous for its honey and Russian architecture. No Arks there though, not that we know of.

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Turkey – Tourism With a Personal Touch

Jaime — Sun, 23 May 2010 17:56:14 +0000

We don’t make hotel reservations. Rather, I should say that we don’t usually make reservations. I think we’ve made maybe two in the last year of travel. That’s just our style. If a guesthouse doesn’t have a room available, the one next door probably will. We weren’t picky to begin with; we’re especially not picky after India. Sorry India – you know we love you but damn you have some scruffy lodging.

Not worrying about reservations has worked out quite well for us. Every country we’ve been to has a similar tourist industry set-up. There are always at least a dozen (often more) touts waiting for tourists, like ourselves, at the bus or train stations. They were more than happy to drive us to a hotel that had rooms within our price range. That is pretty standard practice in SE Asia and India. We’d become used to such treatment, often cringing when we arrived at our destination. It’s always such a tout-driven circus.

We’re in eastern Turkey now and have left the circus behind. Tourism is handled decidedly different here. Rather than only acting on their own behalf, small guesthouses (the type we like to stay in) work on a referral basis. The proprietor of our guesthouse in Urfa referred us to our place in Hasankeyf, who then referred us to our place in Tatvan. It gives the hotel hunt a personal touch and ended up leading us to an incredibly opportunity: a night spent in a traditional Kurdish village outside Tatvan.

Mr. Mehmet, seen in the photo above, is a veteran tour guide who opens his home to travelers. His village, which is an hour drive from Tatvan, is nestled into the base of Nemrut, the region’s extinct volcano. We unfortunately never caught the name of the place, but it’s home to roughly 200 villagers, so it’s pretty sizable. No one spoke a lick of English but were quick to dispense a wave and a smile, making us feel warmly welcomed.

We arrived in late morning and had a day to kill. There was no internet. There was no television. Just acres of farmland, sheep and (randomly) a plethora of turtles. The day’s plan was to trek to the top of Nemrut, but the wind was howling. Walking at a 45 degree angle is tough on the ankles, so we spent the day walking around the hills above the village (as Martin wrote about here).

Making cheese

The evening was spent with Camile, Mehmet’s wife, who showed us how she makes cheese from sheep’s milk. Fresh sheep-milk cheese, d-lish! We ate dinner with the family, not understanding a word of what was spoken but enjoyed ourselves nonetheless. Bedtime was promptly after dinner, followed by a bright and early 5:30am wake-up when the women began banging around in the kitchen. This is life in the Turkish countryside and for a day we were apart of it.

We’ve stayed in nearly all types of accommodation on this trip. For the most part they were found without making reservations because we prefer to make decisions on the spot. Our home-stay at Mr. Mehmet’s was by far the coolest. Rather than seeing what the inside of a hotel room looks like (we’re very used to seeing that), we got to see how a traditional Kurdish family lives. It wasn’t on my to-do list for this trip, but it’s on there now and *bam* checked off, just like that!

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The Windy Nemrut Dagi

Martin — Sun, 23 May 2010 17:10:33 +0000

Turkey is great. In fact, it is our new favorite destination. The one thing that hasn’t worked out for us is the trekking. We’re here way too early. In just two months from now, the weather will be much warmer and drier, the skies will be fair and all the interesting destinations open for business.

Like the other day, when we decided to try a light trek. Nemrut Dagi (not to be confused to the other Nemrut Dagi west of here), 3,050 meters/10,006ft – a nice little volcano on the shore of Lake Van. The trek itself wouldn’t be much to brag about, as there is a road all the way up to the caldera. We felt that it would be a nice leg-stretcher at least, and probably present some nice photo opportunities.

Well at the mountain, we realized that we could hardly walk upright because of the wind. It was literally blowing so hard that the snot was forced back into the back of my nose, choking me. While that may sound like a lot of fun, it didn’t inspire us to go on. Instead, we found shelter in this dilapidated Byzantine church, where we had a picnic of bread and cheese. After that, we found a spot with no wind where we whiled the afternoon away, petting turtles, hanging out with shepherds and taking a nap.

One of Many Moving Rocks on the Mountain

Next time, Nemrut Dagi.

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