<3
Last weekend I spent another great mini-holiday at jerakeen's in Istanbul. Having learned from last year's 2.30am arrival disaster, this time I took the entire Friday off from work and hopped on an early plane.
This time the flight actually went very smoothly, but I spent an hour and a half in the passport control queue... I didn't mind so much personally, but because jerakeen was busy at work, she'd sent her driver to pick me up. So the poor guy had to stand at arrivals the whole time holding a sign with my name and being attentive. I felt really bad for him.
I did eventually get through and managed to spot him easily enough, after which he took me jerakeen's company's head quarters (well I assume it's the head quarters, since the CEO sits there) and I got to see her office! I was very excited about that, I'm really weird in that way (too). I'm always really interested in where people work and what they do and I could listen to 'boring' work stories all day. I don't know where my parents went wrong with me.
Because of the whole lateness thing (I can never seem to arrive in time, but I'm firmly blaming that on Turkish Airlines), I missed most of the work day, so we just collected out stuff and headed to the cinema to see X-Men: Days of Future Past! The cinema was in this really pretty mall (a combination of words you don't often hear from me), part of which had been designed in the style of an in-door plaza. It was very pretty, I really should've taken photos.
jerakeen had booked us both our own love seat at the back of the theatre and it was amazing. I'm really bad at sitting still, so being able to twist every which way was brilliant. I also learned that apparently in Turkey they have a break in the middle of movies! When the film suddenly stopped (in the middle of a scene, I might add) about halfway through, I first thought that something broke. Nope, apparently all business as usual.
The movie ended quite late, so afterwards we just headed to the house and went to bed, since we had an early start on Saturday. When jerakeen had asked what I wanted to do in Istanbul, my greatest desire was to get somewhere high up. She delivered in the form of breakfast looking over the Bosphorus. Apparently the food itself wasn't all that good, but I was so captivated by the amazing view that I didn't really pay attention to anything else. Now that's how breakfast should be eaten every day.
View from the Doğatepe restaurant. You can see the Anatolian side behind the Bosphorus.
After that jerakeen's driver took us across both bridges going over the Bosphorus to show me the sights, followed by a trip to Sultanahmet. The traffic there was absolutely insane! jerakeen said it's the reason she never goes anywhere, and I don't blame her. We visited the Spice Bazaar (that is apparently called the Egyptian Bazaar in Turkish) since I'd never been there, but that was mostly a fast-paced walk through the place so as not to be caught by the very forward merchants. I'd have liked to peruse and have a closer look at some thing, but that only leads to getting tangled with someone selling you something.
The Spice Bazaar from the outside. I assume it's just air pollution, but the outside walls looked like someone had tried to torch the place.
Photo from inside the Bazaar. That is some serious bling.
A mosque nearby the Spice Bazaar. Because there is always a mosque. Or, like, five.
We also walked walked across the bridge over the Golden Horn. It was crawling with fishermen, almost literally elbow to elbow, despite the "no fishing" sign. I saw a few of the fished they'd caught, and they were all tiny, but I guess they don't exactly do it to catch dinner (and I certainly wouldn't eat anything that came out of water smelling like that.
Topkapı palace in the distance. I have been there once, and let me tell you that the view must've been out of this world back in the day.
Sultanahmet skyline.
We hopped back into jerakeen's car, and.. it started raining. I was prepared to get devastated, because our next stop was Pierre Loti, one of Istanbul's hills, and the one time I'd try to go there, it was pouring down and absolutely freezing, so basically pointless. Miraculously, though, the rain stopped just minutes before we reached the peak of the hill, and we got to enjoy our cakes and ice cream. Again the view was great, but were sitting under trees that were practically raining down insects on us, so we cleared out of there pretty quickly.
Cafe on top of Pierre Loti.
View from our table.
Our last tourist top of the day was Miniatürk, a park with famous or prominent buildings from all over Turkey replicated in fine detail in miniature. The place doesn't look very big in photos, but it's actually one of world's largest miniature parks, and it took us 2 hours just walking around all the winding paths! It must take double that, if you stop to listen to the descriptions of each landmark (they had this really weird and awkward guide system, where you got a card with your ticket that you could then show to a reader next to each model. That made everything really noisy and it meant that if someone had already started the recording in another language, you had to wait for it to finish before you could start yours. And of course a of kids loved playing with them, just getting the thing to talk and then running away).
The place was really charming and I took about a hundred photos.
Overview of the park with Istanbul in the background.
Step aside, Godzilla.
They had a real working train there!
Such detail.
This was one of the best or the worst, I can' decide. A miniature replica of the Atatürk Olympic Stadium (never actually used for Olympics) that plays the song of your favourite team for some coin.
Not an amazing photo, but I had to include it because Dolmabahçe palace is one of my favourite things in Istanbul.
Neither jerakeen now I knew what these were, but we know what everyone is thinking.
Our final stop for the night was a restaurant called Develi. I't a place jerakeen has been going to since she was young, but even she was surprised that the guy at the door recognised her. The restaurant was one of those places that have just organically grown over decades, so none of the floors or stairs seemed to match, but the roof terrace was very pretty.
We started with meze, with my picking at stuff suspiciously. I developed a love/hate relationship with something green covered in yoghurt, in that it tasted nice but the yoghurt was hella strong. We took our sweet time with the starters like you're meant to, followed by a meat platter for two. There was a good selection of different types of meat, all yummy, but I discovered that I really, really like slow-cooked lamb. The dish's name sounded like 'thunder', but after some googling I've come to the conclusion that it's more likely 'tandır', and I will have to keep it mind.
Develi's roof terrace. You can vaguely see the opposite shore in the distance.
Sunday morning we slept in, jerakeen served me a heavenly breakfast, and we pretty much spent the day lounging around on her balcony and reading. I spent 3 hours catching up on tumblr, than read a new long fic, and I don't think I surfaced for 6 hours or so. When the sun set behind the trees and it started to get chilly, we camped out on the sofa and watched Emperor's New Groove (because I'd never seen it), the BBC mini series Emma (because I'd never seen it), and Clueless (because I had to see it again after watching Emma).
Mmm, breakfast. There's no point in eating breakfast, if it doesn't come like this.
Monday was very much a repeat. jerakeen was out grocery shopping when I got up, so it was just her cleaner there. She tried to offer me sandals when I stepped out onto the balcony, then coffee, then tea. Finally she just brought over the sandals and dropped them at my feet on the balcony. I guess she didn't approve of me going barefoot.
We were supposed to visit the Istanbul aquarium before I had to leave, but in the end I decided I was way to lazy to move from jerakeen's balcony, so there was stayed until it was time to go. There were some heart palpitations on my part when her printer refused to work, and we couldn't get my boarding pass printed. After the clusterfuck that was N and my departure from Istanbul the first time around, I've become highly paranoid about anything to do with Turkish Airlines, so I started to build up a mild panic about having to queue for check-in and miss the window by 3 minutes (again).
In the end, jerakeen sent her driver off with a memory stick to get the boarding pass printed. I don't know where he went (copy shops apparently aren't really a thing), but my working theory is that he drove home and cursed crazy foreigners all the way there (but probably not, he seemed like a really nice guy).
Things at the airport went without a hitch, except that I had to first queue half an hour to even enter, then another half an hour to get to passport control. Nothing weird happened until I got to the actual gate, and suddenly the guy there pulls me aside and asks me if I've printed my e-ticket. I'm like what, isn't the boarding pass my ticket, do I need something else too, I never have before, eep.
He took my passport and boarding pass to a woman standing to the side and started asking me questions about how long I'd been in Istanbul, whether I'd visited anywhere outside the city, how long I'd been living in London, what I did for a living... I tried to act like I wasn't hiding a body or 30 kilos of cocaine somewhere on my person (which should've been relatively easy since I wasn't), but I have a thing about Acting Normal and I was starting to panic a little.
Then a woman joined us and asked me about my surname, which has one letter with a diacritic on it. I never write it with the diacritic when I check-in, because most systems won't understand it and will print a question mark or a random symbol instead, and I've always assumed that's worse. After I explained, they handed me back all my stuff and were all smiles and have a nice flight. I think the whole thing was about the fact that I do have the diacritic in my passport, obviously, and they were somehow suspicious because my boarding pass didn't match it, and the rest was probably just checking how I'd react. Apparently I didn't act too suspiciously, since they let me board.
Then on the way back, I made a personal record. After getting out of the plane, I made it home in one hour!
There was no meltdown coming home this time, which I'm sure both N and I appreciated. All in all, it was pretty much a picture-perfect mini break, and jerakeen is one of the kindest, most generous and lovely people I've ever met.
This time the flight actually went very smoothly, but I spent an hour and a half in the passport control queue... I didn't mind so much personally, but because jerakeen was busy at work, she'd sent her driver to pick me up. So the poor guy had to stand at arrivals the whole time holding a sign with my name and being attentive. I felt really bad for him.
I did eventually get through and managed to spot him easily enough, after which he took me jerakeen's company's head quarters (well I assume it's the head quarters, since the CEO sits there) and I got to see her office! I was very excited about that, I'm really weird in that way (too). I'm always really interested in where people work and what they do and I could listen to 'boring' work stories all day. I don't know where my parents went wrong with me.
Because of the whole lateness thing (I can never seem to arrive in time, but I'm firmly blaming that on Turkish Airlines), I missed most of the work day, so we just collected out stuff and headed to the cinema to see X-Men: Days of Future Past! The cinema was in this really pretty mall (a combination of words you don't often hear from me), part of which had been designed in the style of an in-door plaza. It was very pretty, I really should've taken photos.
jerakeen had booked us both our own love seat at the back of the theatre and it was amazing. I'm really bad at sitting still, so being able to twist every which way was brilliant. I also learned that apparently in Turkey they have a break in the middle of movies! When the film suddenly stopped (in the middle of a scene, I might add) about halfway through, I first thought that something broke. Nope, apparently all business as usual.
The movie ended quite late, so afterwards we just headed to the house and went to bed, since we had an early start on Saturday. When jerakeen had asked what I wanted to do in Istanbul, my greatest desire was to get somewhere high up. She delivered in the form of breakfast looking over the Bosphorus. Apparently the food itself wasn't all that good, but I was so captivated by the amazing view that I didn't really pay attention to anything else. Now that's how breakfast should be eaten every day.
View from the Doğatepe restaurant. You can see the Anatolian side behind the Bosphorus.
After that jerakeen's driver took us across both bridges going over the Bosphorus to show me the sights, followed by a trip to Sultanahmet. The traffic there was absolutely insane! jerakeen said it's the reason she never goes anywhere, and I don't blame her. We visited the Spice Bazaar (that is apparently called the Egyptian Bazaar in Turkish) since I'd never been there, but that was mostly a fast-paced walk through the place so as not to be caught by the very forward merchants. I'd have liked to peruse and have a closer look at some thing, but that only leads to getting tangled with someone selling you something.
The Spice Bazaar from the outside. I assume it's just air pollution, but the outside walls looked like someone had tried to torch the place.
Photo from inside the Bazaar. That is some serious bling.
A mosque nearby the Spice Bazaar. Because there is always a mosque. Or, like, five.
We also walked walked across the bridge over the Golden Horn. It was crawling with fishermen, almost literally elbow to elbow, despite the "no fishing" sign. I saw a few of the fished they'd caught, and they were all tiny, but I guess they don't exactly do it to catch dinner (and I certainly wouldn't eat anything that came out of water smelling like that.
Topkapı palace in the distance. I have been there once, and let me tell you that the view must've been out of this world back in the day.
Sultanahmet skyline.
We hopped back into jerakeen's car, and.. it started raining. I was prepared to get devastated, because our next stop was Pierre Loti, one of Istanbul's hills, and the one time I'd try to go there, it was pouring down and absolutely freezing, so basically pointless. Miraculously, though, the rain stopped just minutes before we reached the peak of the hill, and we got to enjoy our cakes and ice cream. Again the view was great, but were sitting under trees that were practically raining down insects on us, so we cleared out of there pretty quickly.
Cafe on top of Pierre Loti.
View from our table.
Our last tourist top of the day was Miniatürk, a park with famous or prominent buildings from all over Turkey replicated in fine detail in miniature. The place doesn't look very big in photos, but it's actually one of world's largest miniature parks, and it took us 2 hours just walking around all the winding paths! It must take double that, if you stop to listen to the descriptions of each landmark (they had this really weird and awkward guide system, where you got a card with your ticket that you could then show to a reader next to each model. That made everything really noisy and it meant that if someone had already started the recording in another language, you had to wait for it to finish before you could start yours. And of course a of kids loved playing with them, just getting the thing to talk and then running away).
The place was really charming and I took about a hundred photos.
Overview of the park with Istanbul in the background.
Step aside, Godzilla.
They had a real working train there!
Such detail.
This was one of the best or the worst, I can' decide. A miniature replica of the Atatürk Olympic Stadium (never actually used for Olympics) that plays the song of your favourite team for some coin.
Not an amazing photo, but I had to include it because Dolmabahçe palace is one of my favourite things in Istanbul.
Neither jerakeen now I knew what these were, but we know what everyone is thinking.
Our final stop for the night was a restaurant called Develi. I't a place jerakeen has been going to since she was young, but even she was surprised that the guy at the door recognised her. The restaurant was one of those places that have just organically grown over decades, so none of the floors or stairs seemed to match, but the roof terrace was very pretty.
We started with meze, with my picking at stuff suspiciously. I developed a love/hate relationship with something green covered in yoghurt, in that it tasted nice but the yoghurt was hella strong. We took our sweet time with the starters like you're meant to, followed by a meat platter for two. There was a good selection of different types of meat, all yummy, but I discovered that I really, really like slow-cooked lamb. The dish's name sounded like 'thunder', but after some googling I've come to the conclusion that it's more likely 'tandır', and I will have to keep it mind.
Develi's roof terrace. You can vaguely see the opposite shore in the distance.
Sunday morning we slept in, jerakeen served me a heavenly breakfast, and we pretty much spent the day lounging around on her balcony and reading. I spent 3 hours catching up on tumblr, than read a new long fic, and I don't think I surfaced for 6 hours or so. When the sun set behind the trees and it started to get chilly, we camped out on the sofa and watched Emperor's New Groove (because I'd never seen it), the BBC mini series Emma (because I'd never seen it), and Clueless (because I had to see it again after watching Emma).
Mmm, breakfast. There's no point in eating breakfast, if it doesn't come like this.
Monday was very much a repeat. jerakeen was out grocery shopping when I got up, so it was just her cleaner there. She tried to offer me sandals when I stepped out onto the balcony, then coffee, then tea. Finally she just brought over the sandals and dropped them at my feet on the balcony. I guess she didn't approve of me going barefoot.
We were supposed to visit the Istanbul aquarium before I had to leave, but in the end I decided I was way to lazy to move from jerakeen's balcony, so there was stayed until it was time to go. There were some heart palpitations on my part when her printer refused to work, and we couldn't get my boarding pass printed. After the clusterfuck that was N and my departure from Istanbul the first time around, I've become highly paranoid about anything to do with Turkish Airlines, so I started to build up a mild panic about having to queue for check-in and miss the window by 3 minutes (again).
In the end, jerakeen sent her driver off with a memory stick to get the boarding pass printed. I don't know where he went (copy shops apparently aren't really a thing), but my working theory is that he drove home and cursed crazy foreigners all the way there (but probably not, he seemed like a really nice guy).
Things at the airport went without a hitch, except that I had to first queue half an hour to even enter, then another half an hour to get to passport control. Nothing weird happened until I got to the actual gate, and suddenly the guy there pulls me aside and asks me if I've printed my e-ticket. I'm like what, isn't the boarding pass my ticket, do I need something else too, I never have before, eep.
He took my passport and boarding pass to a woman standing to the side and started asking me questions about how long I'd been in Istanbul, whether I'd visited anywhere outside the city, how long I'd been living in London, what I did for a living... I tried to act like I wasn't hiding a body or 30 kilos of cocaine somewhere on my person (which should've been relatively easy since I wasn't), but I have a thing about Acting Normal and I was starting to panic a little.
Then a woman joined us and asked me about my surname, which has one letter with a diacritic on it. I never write it with the diacritic when I check-in, because most systems won't understand it and will print a question mark or a random symbol instead, and I've always assumed that's worse. After I explained, they handed me back all my stuff and were all smiles and have a nice flight. I think the whole thing was about the fact that I do have the diacritic in my passport, obviously, and they were somehow suspicious because my boarding pass didn't match it, and the rest was probably just checking how I'd react. Apparently I didn't act too suspiciously, since they let me board.
Then on the way back, I made a personal record. After getting out of the plane, I made it home in one hour!
There was no meltdown coming home this time, which I'm sure both N and I appreciated. All in all, it was pretty much a picture-perfect mini break, and jerakeen is one of the kindest, most generous and lovely people I've ever met.