Touchdown in Istanbul

First thoughts:

1. The traffic lights have countdown timers and the drivers honk within 500 milliseconds of the light changing green

2. Istanbul is really green and a blend of old and new.

3. Taksi drivers drive like maniacs with nothing to lose

4. Pedestrians cross the road like they have nothing to lose

5. The hawkers are amazingly nice even when they try to get you to buy their wares and you refuse

The food establishments are really ingenious too.

Dinner: on the 5th floor terrace of a tiny dimensioned restaurant each floor of which seats about 18 people. It overlooks one of the mosques (actually the Hagia Sophia Museum) which we appreciated all through sunset.


Unfortunately i forgot to take a picture of it before i started eating.... Yes those are fries. Looks like anatolia didn't get it too far wrong. er. They're really creative and inventive when it comes to food, and seem to like doing things like stuffing vegetables with..... even more vegetables. Which is good. Yes good. Stop gagging, Brian.

price: about 13.50 million liras for that lamb shish kebab with turkish bread (naan!) and fries and all those assorted veggies and rice. 1 S$ is about 0.8 million liras. million just adds a whole new perspective to things. A bottle of water? yes please. How much? ok. here you go. 1 MEE-LIOHN DOLLARS. HA HA HA HA HA. *lightning strike thunder crash*

Sights:
The grand bazaar.

Full of shops selling exactly the same things. Wonder how product differentiation occurs? They hawk at you, and go "Korea? Japan? China? Singapoor?" or say things like "kohnyecheewah" which is very admirable. Some of them have rather impecacable english too. Why can't Singaporean sales people be as adaptive? Not desperate enough for survival i guess. There were literally 30 to 40 shops per class of item (clothes, leather goods, porcelain wares, gold jewellery) and they all looked exactly the same. Real wonder how the shops inside manage to survive. The place looks a bit like a map set in a soukh from hitman2. High ceilings with small windows on top, and i'm really grateful it's the beginning of fall instead of in the middle of summer. The weather is quite beautiful and almost chicago-fallesque, around mid 20 degrees celcius. Tomorrow it goes down to 18, and we packed for desert weather, erk.


The mosques are really quite pretty, and amazingly majestic. tomorrow we shall actually get there early enough to go -into- the mosque.

The turkish people are really nice. I think they must see a lot of tourists.

There're tourist police, and loads of taksis. They don't all have drivers who speak english, and some of them seem to take you for a ride (figuratively) but still loads of them.

Wacky cultural difference 1:
Their little men in the pedestrian crossing signs wear hats!


I'm going to have to figure out how to post these things so i don't overflow my geocities bandwidth too fast. At any rate i won't be posting too terribly often, possibly online once more tomorrow and then not again till tunisia.

Oh and security is really tight at the hotel. They screen the undercarriage and boot of the cars coming in, and put everyone thru a metal detector and bags thru Xray things. gee. Also passed the site of the HSBC bombings not too long ago, it just looks like a block or two of bare concrete with no paint and stuff. Like seeing the skeleton of a building in the middle of other buildings which are all dressed up in their formal wear. Sobering.