Istanbul, Turkey – 08/23

(Michelle) How many of you are singing the “Istanbul was Constantinople” song in your head as you read this entry… I know that at least my brother is.
We took the morning bus out of Goreme to Istanbul. The bus left so early that we were the only people on the street at sunrise, just us and the pack of dogs that rushed us from around a corner. I almost fell over from the sheer force of several of them leaping on me, but fortunately they were just hungry for love and not human flesh. It was supposed to be about an 11 hour bus ride, but Istanbul traffic added an extra 3 hours. The terrain is quite different here than what we saw along the southern coast, as now we are headed back northwest from the middle of the country. There are a lot of flat open yellow plains, which may look dull from the picture, but were interesting to me in just how long these yellow plains stretched.
Now that we have had two full days of driving through Turkey on a bus, we have driven through a lot of small towns. I would be curious to find out more about the social structures in these areas. From the bus view, you would see a group of 4 or 5 men sitting in front of a shop and then down the street you would see 2 or 3 women sitting in front of a house. Never did I see men and women sitting together in any of these towns at any time of day.
We checked into the Big Apple Hostel in the popular tourist area of Sultanahmet. While I don’t have enough good things to say about the staff at our hostel, our first two nights there were not so comfortable. We had booked a four person room that it turns out we were to share with another couple who arrived just before us. There were two bunk beds in the room and they took the two bottom bunks. While perhaps they were not thinking about it or only thinking about it selfishly, TJ and I think the proper bunk bed etiquette if you are with another person is to share one set of bunks (one top and one bottom). There are numerous reasons for this that I won’t go into. Of course, when we are done with this trip we may have no other use for these opinions, unless I write a book about etiquette in shared sleeping environments (see blog entry for train ride leaving Romania on 8/11). These were really tall bunk beds and the only tiny fan in the room didn’t really provide any air for the upper bunks. It is really hot in Istanbul in August.

(TJ) This was the longest bus ride ever topped of with 3 hours in Istanbul Traffic which is absolutely terrible. For a city of its size the road system is utter chaos and crap, not to mention that they only just started to build a subway system in the last 10 years. For a city of 12 million people and not to mention one of the oldest in the world it is pretty unreal that they are just now getting around to improving things for the commuters. On the bus ride we had plenty of time to observe the Turkish country side and small towns. One of things that I saw in every town as Michelle also mentioned was that people were just sitting around in front of stores. What are they doing? They don’t seem to be working at all - are there this many people unemployed in these towns? I guess I probably will not find out the answer, just seemed strange to me.