Istanbul, Turkey – 08/24

(Michelle) The first order of business in Turkey was to obtain a visa to enter China. We heard it is really difficult to get it in Russia, so Turkey is our last chance (you may recall from our Budapest entry that we did make a weak attempt there, but that did not work out for us). Our first thought was to try a travel agency or visa support agency as opposed to going to the embassy ourselves, due to our language issue of not speaking Turkish or Chinese. We found a Chinese travel agency and they said they could do it for $225 each but we also had to go to the U.S. embassy to get some special form. This seemed odd to us, as everything I have read about getting visas has indicated that it is between you and that country’s embassy and the U.S. embassy has nothing to do with it. Whatever, fine, so she explains to us really high level how we can get to the U.S. embassy. We take a tram to a bus stop and then we got the bus the girl mentioned, but I thought I should try to confirm it with somebody on the bus, since she only gave us the bus number and not the direction or the stop we should get off at. I look up the word for U.S. Embassy in Turkish and show it to the bus money collector (in almost every bus we have been in outside of the U.S. and Western Europe, there are two people on every bus, the driver and the money collector) in hopes he can confirm we are going the right direction. Two middle school aged kids say in English that they can translate (cute!) and they tell us that the collector says we need to get off and get on bus number XYZ. Ok, we get off and then we look in our guidebook again. Lonely Planet usually marks on a map where the Embassy is, and as we look at this map, it doesn’t feel like we are headed in the right direction if we take XYZ. So we get on this mini bus headed in the direction we think we need to go. A girl on our minibus has been living in L.A. for 7 years and is very friendly and chatty with us. She finally asks us what we are planning to do in the Taksim area (which is where this minibus is headed), so we tell her we are looking for the U.S. Embassy. She says that the U.S. Embassy used to be in the Taksim area but it moved many years ago (how about an update on that one, Lonely Planet!) out to this other place. Her and another girl speak to each other in Turkish and then hand us a piece of paper. They wrote on it exactly what we need to show the bus stop guy (Taksim has a huge bus stop area) to determine the correct bus and the name of the stop we need to get off at. That was so nice!!
Finally we are on the right bus (we learned later that all of the buses we had been on or were told to go on except the minibus to Taksim could have been the right bus, but we didn’t realize that until much later). It turns out that the embassy moved from being in the heart of the city to roughly the distance of Evanston from downtown Chicago and the main road up there along the water is only two lanes. Istanbul has by far the worst traffic I have ever seen in my life. We must have passed by at least 2 car accidents which brought the two lanes down to one (for both directions of traffic). So while it was a lovely ride north along the Bosphorus, it was also real hot, long, standing room only bus ride.
We get off the bus at the stop we were told to get off at and then realized that we didn’t know where we should go from there. After scanning the area for a few minutes, Eagle Eye TJ spots an American flag off in the hills. We could tell why they moved the embassy way out here once we saw it… they created a FORT to protect this place. So we stroll over to the entrance to learn that the embassy is open to the public Monday-Thursday, but not on Friday. It is Friday today. Awesome…. As we walked away feeling somewhat defeated (4 hours after we started the hunt for the visa) we started discussing the price from the travel agency, $225 was a lot higher than what I remembered seeing online and maybe we don’t really need this piece of paper from the U.S. embassy. Perhaps we should just go to the Chinese embassy ourselves. The security guard at the U.S. embassy was able to give us directions there. So about another 30 minutes further north on a different bus we arrive at the Chinese embassy to realize that they closed about 45 minutes before we got there.
At this point, we were starving and needed to eat before heading out of “Evanston”. In the Sultanahmet area, where our hostel is, every restaurant, hotel receptionist and carpet salesman speaks English, but up here, tourists don’t come by too often and there was no English menu, no English speaking waitress, no pictures on the menu and our Lingo translator does not have Turkish in it. For the first time on our trip, we had to blindly pick something to eat having absolutely no idea what we were ordering. It actually went ok. We ordered Midye Dolma and Midye Tava. This turned out to be fried Muscles and stuffed Muscles. Later on we read in “Time Out Istanbul” that Midye Dolma and Midye Tava were among the top 20 cheap eats on street stands. I’m glad we tried them in a restaurant instead of on a street stand.

That evening we saw a light show outside the Blue Mosque that had something to do with the Whirling Dervishes – you can make out a green laser whirling dervish on top of the Blue Mosque in the photo…

(TJ) More fun on Istanbul roads and public transit, interspersed with slaps to the face at the intended destinations. GOOD TIMES!