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Istanbul Day 4: Miscellany

Last full day in Istanbul, last full day of the holiday. I’m (again!) intending for this to be a more relaxing day than previous days, let’s see how that works.

I again sleep until my 8.30 alarm, not bad when I passed out before 10 last night!

The weather has definitely degraded even further this morning; the forecast is for it to be wet, and while it hasn’t yet started to rain the air does have a cold damp feel to it. Hoodie weather, for sure.

I skip the hostel breakfast and get going, I’ve got a few more food things to check off the list yet! This morning I’m looking for “menemen” LINK, a Turkish take on scrambled eggs – eggs, tomato, some spiciness. The first place I call at doesn’t have any but they’re able to direct me to a place that does. Success, and it’s really very nice; I might try to whip up something like this at home.
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My morning plan is to make my way a few miles west to the ancient Byzantine walls of Constantinople. They run north-south across the full width of the peninsula, approx. 7km in total. I’m hoping to walk along most of them, taking in a couple of other sites along the way.

The route to getting there should be pretty simple – there looks to be a train from one of the main stations in the tourist centre to a stop pretty close to the south end of the wall. When I get to the station, though, the person at the ticket desk tells me no, no trains to Yedikule. But your map and timetable says that there are? No. No. OK. Fair enough then.

I dig through the transport map to figure out alternatives; luckily there was one, the Marmaray stops at a station a little further along the coast, that’ll do. I pay my fare and am soon out in relative suburbia. A 15-minute walk takes me to within sight of the walls; pretty big, although very collapsed at this point. I can see my first point of interest, besides the walls – Yedikulen Castle, one of the fortresses built into the wall.

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The guy at the makeshift ticket desk seems to think that anyone coming to visit here is in not quite their right mind; he’s definitely incredibly amused as I hand over my TL10. It’s definitely not a tourist hotspot, although I can see signs of a couple of other visitors around.

The castle was very very different from any that I had previously visited. It was refreshing (and almost terrifying in places) with how raw, or unsanitised it was. There were no guard rails on steps or walls, bits of it were crumbling away. The towers were climbable but the inside stairways were not lit – I was literally using the flash-light on my phone to navigate. All in all a very worthwhile experience, worth the trip out all by itself.

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From there I headed north along the walls; I had spotted a way of getting to them from the top of the castle, literally a hole in a wall!
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I walk for a couple of km alongside them, too crumbled to attempt walking along the top just yet.
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Eventually I come to a well-maintained section and get on top.

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They start to get a bit more run-down again, this bit in particular was a bit scary as losing my footing would have me drop 8m to the road below.
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Oh dear, I’ve encountered a problem; a bit further on I’ve found a gap of a few metres. I may be crazy sometimes but I’m not jumping that! :-)
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I backtrack a bit and manage to find a (dangerous) way down that had actually been blocked off from access from below. A couple of schoolchildren are watching my clambering from across the street, presumably waiting for me to fall. To their disappointment I make it down safely.
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Onwards along the walls, the other site I want to see is near the northern end – the Kariya Museum, apparently one of the best examples of a Byzantine church. It’s a bit of a walk, probably an hour or so, and through a bunch of not-very-interesting places. I pick up some sustenance along the way.
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I find it, pay the entrance fee, I’m out in less than ten minutes. Seriously? That was it? Parts of the church are under renovation so maybe they add a lot to it. Hmm. Anyway, some nice (and ancient) mosaics.

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I’m done out this side of town now so I head to a nearby metro station and attempt to board. I had pre-bought some tokens yesterday to avoid having loads of change in my pockets. And… nope. They don’t work, the turnstile rejects them. The way the attendant looks at them seems like he’s never seen anything like them before. He’s saying stuff but he has no English and me no Turkish so I go and buy a token.

Quick aside on transport in Istanbul. You know when I said in my landing post that it seemed well integrated and tokens were valid for transfers etc? Yeah that wasn’t true at all. On day 1 it’s entirely likely that I somehow fare-dodged because I did have to transfer and definitely only bought one token. Now with this latest development I guess that tokens bought on the Asia side aren’t valid on the Europe side – at least that’s the only thing I can figure it could be. Apparently there is some kind of rechargeable transport card but it’s far too late for that now!

Anyway, there is a side-benefit to this rubbish. I have to transfer to a different tram line to get back into the city, and near this station there’s a well-reviewed museum that I didn’t think I’d have time to go to. Well, here I am, let’s do it.

The museum is called Panorama 1453 and it’s a record/history of how the Ottomans captured the city of Constantinople from the Byzantines in 1453. The audio-guide is very reasonably priced and extremely interesting, but its main attraction is a 360° panoramic view of what it would have been like to be there when the invasion was under way. It looked very good and realistic, and was technically quite impressive too.

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It’s 1pm and the Bosporus Cruise is at 2:30pm – time to get myself back to civilisation. I buy myself another tram token (sigh) and 40 minutes later I’m sitting in a restaurant ticking another food item off my list – gozleme! Gozleme is like a light pancake dough topped with <anything>, folded, sealed and cooked on a pan. I had mine filled with, of course, potato. It was very tasty, and definitely something I could knock up myself at home. All of the restaurants that were offering gozleme also seemed to have, in stereotypical cater-to-tourists fashion, an old woman sitting in the window hand-making-and-rolling the dough (although in this case she was making some kind of ravioli-like thing).

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The Bosporus Cruise I’m going on is a 2-hour round trip up and down the Bosporus run by the state ferry company. It’s unguided but that doesn’t really matter as I’m doing it mainly to see some of the things up-river that I already know are there. It costs a ridiculously small amount – TL10. The weather has properly turned for the worse now and it’s quite windy/cold/rainy; the ferry is quite nice though, and the inside areas are pleasantly warm. I do venture outside to take some photos, though!

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Ruins of a fort that was built for the 1453 invasion
Ruins of a fort that was built for the 1453 invasion
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Sheltering by the engine

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That was good fun, despite the weather. Better visibility would’ve obviously been ideal but I got what I wanted out of it, and with that the last sightseeing of the trip!

One stop left while I’m out – back to the Spice Bazaar to get something to bring home with me. The array of spices on display is huge, as you’ve seen from previous days’ pictures, but I decide to just get a single spice and one that I wouldn’t ever buy at home – saffron. Here’s the 2.1g of Iranian saffron I bought; I have to say I felt a little bit like a drug dealer when packing it into my bag!

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Back to the hostel, pack, vegetate a bit and then out and up the hill for my last meal in Istanbul. I’m quite tempted to go back to the restaurant I went to the first night, as it was awesome, but I decide to check out some others instead. The first, both Google- and TripAdvisor-recommended, was nearly impossible to find, and in fact I had given up until I found its address in TripAdvisor. It turned out to be a very hipster-y place – it’s entirely unmarked from the street, it’s at the top floor of an apartment building in a pretty small area. While searching for it I had seen a few people go into the elevator just inside the door of an apartment building but obviously I assumed they were, you know, going home or something mad like that. Not so!

When I do get in they are, of course, incredibly busy but they’re good enough to seat me at a table for 10 that is reserved for later. I go for the chef starters plate followed by chicken skewers – both delicious, with the hot pepper thing being the highlight I think.

From the bottom, clockwise - fried aubergine, green beans, hot pepper, baked lentil mix, fried chicken.
From the bottom, clockwise – fried aubergine, green beans, hot pepper, baked lentil ball, fried chicken.
Yummy
Yummy
I'm apparently amused getting back into the elevator
I’m apparently amused getting back into the elevator

 

And of course, there must be dessert – I’m after another go of Turkish icecream so I head to a place I had earmarked earlier in the day. It was a bit of a weird set-up – there were a lot of different types of food counter, but you had to go to the till to pay first, then take the receipt to the various counters to pick up the food you wanted. Felt a bit chicken-and-egg, but I managed to procure myself what I wanted:

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A note on Turkish icecream. Aside from being absolutely delicious, it turns out that it’s probably not technically icecream at all – there’s no cream in it. It’s made from milk, sugar, a flour made from orchid tubers which is illegal to export, and mastic (a gummy resin). The result is something that is very sticky and resistant to melting. And delicious. Always delicious. Here’s that stickiness being demonstrated – those strands would’ve stayed like that for hours if I hadn’t eaten them.

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Back to hostel, bedtime, alarm set for 6am to get to the airport for my 9am flight.

The next morning (technically day 5, although there’s not going to be too much to it!) I get up as planned, catch the tram and then metro to the airport, and board on time. Holiday definitely over now. In-flight-service breakfast to finish it off doesn’t seem quite appropriate, does it?

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