I have been home for a bit longer than a week, but it has been a PACKED bit of work leading up to my next stop, which is Puerto Rico (for work, I promise), but I’ll do a post about that soon.
Back to Istanbul… Picture it, Ataturk Airport, September 1, 2018. I had left Chicago late in the evening on August 31st, and after nearly 12 hours in the air, I was in the border control line around 4:45 PM on September 1st.
My memories are a little foggy, but I was able to meet Jerrad in the terminal, and we made our way to his flat in the Galata Tower area. His flat that he shared with is boyfriend (now husband), Burhan, was gorgeous in an old building up, five flights of stairs. It had a balcony with a fantastic view of Galata Tower, which is been the location of a tower since Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, and since the tower dominated the general area, it became my touchstone for the entire trip.
After getting settled, we headed out to a nearby rooftop bar called Snog, which was owned by friends of Jerrad & Burhan, and I had my first Aperol Spritz in hand 8pm. I’m noting the time because I didn’t really sleep on the plane, this was my first international flight, and I had never really experienced jet lag, either, but I established the precedent here of hitting the ground running when I travel.
Snog became a regular stop on this trip, and it was a great, chill place to have a cocktail and experience the city. This is also where I experienced my first surprise with exchange rate math. I had been to Canada before, but the exchange rate was fairly 1:1 to dollars at the time, but on this trip,the Turkish Lira was about 7 or 8:1 for every dollar, and when it came time to settle up and the bartender said 144 Lira, of course, your mind immediately goes to $144, but with the magic of the exchange rate, it was really about $24. It was going to be fun to spend money on this trip!
Before I get too far into this, I should say I took about 1,000 pictures on this trip with my, even aging at the time, iPhone 8. Before I started working on this, I went back through the photos to reconstruct my itinerary. While I have a pretty good memory, it is not THAT good. When I am referencing specific times, I am going off the time stamps of the photos. I know…the magic is gone, right?
We ate some dinner, went back to Snog, and by then we had met up with Burhan (I think…foggy memory), but I do recall that around midnight, we took what is basically an illegal Uber to hit up a couple bars. The taxi union is very strong in Istanbul, which is why there there are no ride shares, but Burhan knew a guy. The adventure was already beginning.
Now it is after midnight on September 2nd, and we are descending into a subterranean bar called SuperFabric. I cannot really say what I was operating on by that point, but it definitely was not sleep. SuperFabric was a rather large club with a low ceiling, and we were taken to a raised area next to the DJ booth and with a great side view of the large stage, which had two showers on it. Burhan was able to get us the VIP area, and our very cute waiter definitely took care of us.
The most shocking thing to me so far was the fact that you can smoke in bars in Istanbul, which is not really something I have experience in a very long time. I think you can probably do the math on what the air was like in a low ceiling, basement bar filled with chain smoking Turks. On top of that, they kept setting off indoor fireworks. Yes, fireworks. We figured out that the law must allow this if there is some sort of cake involved, because they would carry around what must have been a fake cake and set of the fireworks like everyone was having a birthday. Chain smoking, fireworks, jet lagged…my eyes were on fire.
I’m not really sure the best way to describe the show, but it was basically burlesque with hot men, hot women, hot drag queens dancing and lip syncing, and I was absolutely enthralled. If my time stamps are to be believed, then the show went on for well over two hours, and at nearly 5am, we went to another bar called Cheeky.
While Cheeky had very cheeky things going on in the upstairs dark area, the absolute cheekiest thing about the bar, a gay bar in Istanbul, of all places, uses the elephant logo of the Republican Party as it’s logo. HILARIOUS.
The photo trail goes cold here. I do know we didn’t stay long at Cheeky, but we did go to get some food. My photos do not pick up again until 4pm when I decide to go explore the neighborhood and up to İstiklal, which is a long retail corridor filled with shops, restaurants, and delightful bakeries and the like. If you’ve seen a photo of Istanbul with a wide street that has a red trolly going down the middle, that is İstiklal.
I spent a few hours wandering around, and when I am in places like New York or back home in Chicago, I usually tend to keep headphones on, but I wanted to absorb as much of the milieu as I could. Plus, for a person who had never really traveled to a county where English is not the predominant language, there was a certain level of peace involved walking around not understanding most of the words being said.
I ended up at Snog for another Aperol and sunset views of the city. There is another gap in the photos, but I did get a kebab at midnight. I must have kept drinking!
However, the next day was my first major sightseeing day. I set out from the flat around 8:30am, and I walked towards the Spice Bazaar all the way up to Topkapi Palace, which is about 1.6 miles/2.7 km. While this is about the distance I walk to the gym in Chicago, this is my first major experience with the hills of Istanbul. There had been some incline walking up to İstiklal, but I had to walk down to sea level, which felt like it was a 45 degree angle. It made me wonder how people grow old in a city like this, because walking down (and back up) those hills was a challenge even for a relatively spry 43 year old.
When I made it down the hill, I made my way towards the Galata Bridge with takes you across the Golden Horn estuary, which is an inlet of the Bosphorous Strait. The bridge connects Galata to the Fatih district, which is the historical heart of Istanbul, encompassing what used to be ancient Constantinople. It contains several of the biggest sights to see in Istanbul the likes of the Spice Market, Grand Bazaar, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, the Blue & Fatih Mosques, and many other attractions.
As a baker, the Spice Market was a Must Do for me, and while I was too chicken to buy anything, I did eventually got back with Jerrad to get some spices, including saffron and vanilla. This trip, I just wandered through. It was an invigorating assault on the senses. I really only explored a little into the Grand Bazaar, which is just absolutely massive and overwhelming. It is definitely on my list to explore more the next time I am there. I also didn’t visit any of the mosques,which I would like to do, but I was in shorts and tank tops for most of this trip, which was very hot. I did not want to be disrespectful, but I also wasn’t going to wear pants and a nice shirt just to go inside.
I made my way towards Topkapi Palace, which is on a, get this, a hill! While I walked towards it, I happened upon a train station, which turned out to be the terminus of the Orient Express. I just thought that was tremendously interesting, but I kept walking up to winding path to the Topkapi Palace, which is a sprawling complex built int he 15th century by Sultan Mehmed II and used as administrative center of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 400 years. It is also wildly considered the setting of Mozart’s opera The Abduction at the Seraglio.
Once I had my ticket, I headed towards the gift shop and cafe to get some water and enjoy the AC for a bit, and then I spent a couple hours wandering around the grounds and taking in the museum. There were several ornate and stunning ceilings in the museum, and I think this must have been where my love of ceilings started. Plus, when you’re taking pictures of the ceiling, you’d don’t have to worry about other tourists wandering into your frame.
Once I had seen enough of the museum, I wandered around the area some more past Hagia Sophia and other places I would visit on another day, and then I started making my back down the hill, across the bridge, and back up that massive hill to Galata Tower.
I think I am going to wrap up Part 2. I really thought I was going to breeze through the whole trip in this post, but since I am only on Day 3, it’s obvious that is not going to happen.
