Istanbul
Trip Start
Jun 09, 2008
1
15
19
Trip End
Jul 04, 2008
Istanbul,
Turkey
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Turkey is in Near East, or West Asia. It was sure that the atomosphere was different from that of European countries. Istanbul is located at between Aegean Sea and Black Sea
Sultan Ahmet Camii
. It was a beautiful city and worth visiting. I had no plan to stop by there at first, but my boring journey in Eastern Europe, particularly in Serbia and Romania, changed my mind. That was why I didn't have a guidebook again. Fortunately, there was a tourist information near the entrance of the Istanbul train station, although the staff was unfriendly. Anyway, I got a city map and started sightseeing.The first destination was ... not decided, because when I asked the TI staff member working alone in the small office about the popular attracions in the ciity, she told me everything shown on the map with pictures were attractive. But, in fact, there were more than ten pictures. So I looked for a crowd of tourists and followed them. As a result, I visited three popular plces, Topkapi Palace, Sultan Ahmet Camii, and Aya Sofya, but missed Yerebatan Sarayi, which Mr.Takeuchi, a Turkish lerner from Japan, mentioned later. All the museum and mosques were elegant with Islamic taste and I felt nostalgic for old backpacking in Southeast Asia. There were a lot of retired Japanese tourists indicating how popular the city was. After all the visits, I remembered something very famous in Turkey, Capadokia. I didn't know where it was and how I could get there. So I dropped by a TI near Sultan Ahmet Camii. The staff told me to take a tour and not to go there by myself, because I needed a car to visit a lot of sites scattered around the area and it was better to stay there for a few days
Aya Sofya
. So I headed for a travel agency and talked about it. They gave me a good offer, but unfortunately I was worried about limited days to spend in Europe. That meant I had to take a ferry at Greece to Italy by the end of June and to take a flight at Rome on the fourth of July. I reluctantly decided to decline the offer. I should have well-prepared enough days.There was a market near the train station. It was more similar or close to an Asian market than Eurpopean one. I saw a lot of baked corn venders, although I din't understand why. Out of curiosity, I bought one in front of a mosque and tasted it in the park nearby, but it was not spcially good. There were also some shoeshines near the mosque, placing gorgeous shoeshine foot stools in a rank. From the opposite side of the street, I could cross the river to the east side of Istanbul by the bridge on which a lot of anglers were fishing.
In the evening, before leaving Istanbul, I gave a begger a Turkish coin. I had never done that before, but if I had left Turkey with the coin, it would have been useless and if I had put it in a donation box in the airport, the coin would have gone to someone I had never met. So I thought my behavior might be the best. Anyway I took a train to Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
