Matthew's Abroad Adventures: Istanbul

Well, I went on this trip from December 6th through 10th and wrote it awhile ago but I never got around to posting it:

So worth the massive amount of money and sleepless nights of work to make up for it. Colin convinced me to stay in a hotel instead of a hostel because they’re cheaper than hostels in Western Europe, so we stayed in this amazing place where you could see the Blue Mosque (100 yards away), the Mediterranean, Europe (it was on the European side of Istnabul) and Asia across the straight. Pretty incredible. There was also a booking error because we were supposed to get a sea view but they accidentally overbooked all those rooms, so to make up for it we got the penthouse suite of this amazing hotel for about $20 a night…. ahahaha. Anyway, the Hagia Sophia was even more amazing than St. Peter’s and the coolest building I’ve ever seen. The scale is just completely massive (way bigger than the central part of St. Peter’s that Michelangelo built) and built about a millennium before it…. So so so cool.

The stereotype of Istanbul being this crazy mix of East and West is really true. It was both way more Western and secular than I thought it’d be. Women wearing shawls were a rarity and the most I even noticed the Muslim influence was when the calls to prayer came over all the massive loud-speakers; like I said, we were REALLY close to that mosque, but I think you can basically hear them all over the city. But the thing is that hardly anybody pays attention to them, there was hardly a trickle of worshipers that came to worships, a lot like Catholics in Spain, actually: everyone is “Catholic” but hardly anyone is religious.

Anyway, like I said, Hagia Sophia was awesome and it’s Muslim competitor, built a thousand years later after the Ottomans conquered the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Emperor was really upset that that church was still the coolest thing around, so he built the Blue Mosque. Gotta say, the Hagia Sophia is still cooler and way more impressive. That said, it was still amazing and the artistry was incredible.

Anyway, we went to what Turks call “bars” a few times, which are basically your average hookah bar but way cooler, they’re all plastered with Persian rugs from floor to walls to ceiling and they only offer hookah, oriental tea, chess and backgammon. People just sit around drinking tea, smoking and playing board games… like a lot of people… really. Oh yeah, sometimes there’s live music for you to play chess to. We were listening to a group when the musicians caught our eye and my immediate reaction was, “Oh dammit. He’s going to try to get a gig from me or try to play me a song for money or sell me his guitar or something,” because that’s how it basically goes when Turks see Westerners and it’s hard to avoid being solicited for something. We tried to pretend to be Spainish but they all knew in the spoke Spanish too! Crafty little bastards… Anyway, the musicians finished their set and just came over and talked to us for a half hour about random stuff and then asked us if anyone knew the words to “Hotel California.” Colin and I had no idea but David volunteered and sang like 5 songs with them (so much for the Turkish music they had been playing before) including Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero,” but he left out words and made up lyrics all over the place. The Turks (neither the people in the bar nor the musicians) were none the wiser, stopped playing chess and went crazy. So much fun. There’s a good club scene in Istanbul too, but we didn’t get too into it because it’s Western and not different than that of any major Western city.
Anyway, we saw this traditional Turkish “dance” performance which was symbolically interesting and unique but hell if that wasn’t the most boring thing I’ve ever seen. They just spun around in one position for an hour. Why not just 5 minutes if you’re only going to do ONE move the entire time… We went to the grand bazaar which is the biggest market in the world but we liked the little market in our neighborhood better, and you can get much better prices. Other than that, just did a bit of sight-seeing: there’s an old, gigantic cistern, built by Justinian when it was Byzantine to house water for when the city was under siege every 5 minutes, that they just opened up and was way cool and the Ottoman temple had a lot of neat relics and whatnot (lots of treasure, armor and Mohammed’s cloak!)

Oh yeah, and Istanbul is an awesome place to be self-indulgent: baklava and Turkish delights in Istanbul are perhaps some of the tastiest things I've ever had, and we went to a Turkish bath, the only true-to-history knockoffs left of old Roman baths left(brought over by the Byzantine's) where you lie naked on heated marble in these epic, stone halls and burly men beat you into a pulp, go into ridiculously hot rooms with even hotter marble and poor cold mineral water over yourself from the faucets everywhere. Best thing ever...

Oh yeah, and I went to the other side of the city to touch Asia.