Istanbul: Where East Meets West

  Istanbul, Turkey
Thursday, January 18, 2007

They say Istanbul is a city straddling the west and east, both literally and figuratively. When you come by train from Ankara you end up on the Asian side because there is no train bridge or train tunnel to the European side. So the journey will always end with a boat trip across the Bosphorus. The best thing with sharing a train with a tour group is you can always follow them if you are not sure where to go when you get off. They are probably heading to where you want to go. This worked for us - we all followed the guide to the ferry, bought tickets and hopped on. The guide was Turkish but spoke Korean which probably made the guy a millionaire.

There are many sites to see in Istanbul so it is good to get the biggies out of the way first. Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque are both in our neighborhood so we started there. Blue Mosque is still a functioning mosque that graciously allows visitors to come and gape at the elaborate designs when there are not prayers going on. All the Christmas/New Year crowds from Europe have by and large returned home so without any lines to speak of the visit goes rather quickly.

Blue Mosque

Hagia Sophia sits across a park from the Blue Mosque, a Church turned Mosque that was finally turned into a Museum by the first elected president, Ataturk, to settle the debate. This place got to charge admission and is under a constant state of renovation, peeling the plaster off the walls to reveal the best of the mosaics underneath. An interesting mixture of Islam and Christianity under one roof. When it was a church it was the headquarters of the Byzantine church, the Eastern half of the Holy Roman Empire, the half that flourished when Rome collapsed. Until St Peter's was built in Rome in 1626 it was the largest and most fabulous church in the world. Losing it to the Muslim Turks was a big blow to Christianity at the time. In fact, some of the Crusades were ordered to protect Constantinople (Istanbul's former name as we all know from the Barenaked Ladies song). Unfortunately the crusaders sent were terrible and they ended up sacking Constantinople and stealing all its treasure instead. I suspect that a lot of the saints bones that "magically appeared" in western Europe were brought by these soldiers. It wasn't long after that the Turks came in and took over for good.
Back to Ataturk, we do want to say a few words about him. He is someone we had heard of but didn't know much about until we came to Turkey. The best way we can describe him is as a cult figure/national hero/beloved Father of the Nation. His photo is everywhere, in every shop and on every street. There is a statue of him in every city and town. He is on the money and countless buildings and schools are named after him. People have said that he is the reason Turkey would even be considered for the EU as opposed to ending up like their neighbors to the East, Iran and Iraq. Anyway, if anyone is thinking of visiting Turkey, make sure not to diss this guy while you are here.

Wandering the streets of Istanbul in some far off neighborhoods gave us a few insights into Turkish culture. We stumbled upon a soccer match at a local small field, between to neighborhood teams. Julius is never one to miss watching a live soccer match so we stuck around to see what it was like. The crowd was about 300-400 people, which was impressive for these neighborhood teams. Also, the crowd was crazy with loud cheering, booing and throwing paper all over the field. Things got even more interesting when the fans broke out the fire crackers which they would light and toss onto an empty part of the field. No one seemed to phased and the playing continued. All of a sudden when a call was missed by the ref (in the fan's opinion) the firecrackers started getting tossed at people, first the refs, then coaches, then the opposing players. We realized then why eight police officers were present at the game. They moved in and we moved out, not wanting to see what was going to go down.

We befriended a Korean mother and daughter traveling through Turkey together. It was one of those things where we sat next to each other at a restaurant then ran into each other at the hotel, "Hey, weren't you in that restaurant?" then had the same plans for the next day, etc... We went on the Bosphorus cruise with them then visited Ortakoy, a fun neighborhood north of the main city. We asked her if her mother was nervous traveling with just the two of them (she had only traveled before with a large tour group). She said that her mother liked traveling with her because when she (the daughter) was off traveling her mother stayed at home and worried about her. Now she could know she was ok and she only had to worry about her brother in Korea.

We were able to find a mass to attend in the city. The Catholic churches are all centered in Topkapi neighborhood where a lot of the European expats lived in the last centuries. One had a website in English so we went to their English mass. We weren't expecting big crowds, we are in a country that 99% Muslim after all. However, we totally forgot to factor in the immigrants living in the city. Immigrants are not as visible as they are in the west, but they were certainly at this mass! We came early and the place filled to standing room only, about 300 people. Looking around we assessed that the congregation was about 70% Filipino (mostly women) and 30% Nigerian (mostly men). The choir was all Filipino and the readers were all Filipino. It reminded us of our friend's parish on Beacon Hill in Seattle. We chatted with the Nigerian man sitting next to us after mass and he said that there was another church in the city that had a bigger variety of nationalities (especially different Africans).

Kebab Spit

Perhaps we could have found some Tanzanians there, but their mass was at the same time and already finished. We talked to him a bit about living in Turkey as an immigrant and he said that all of them there have their eyes trained on Western Europe. They are all trying to figure out a way to get there because there is not a lot of work in Turkey. We didn't want to tell them that there is not a lot of work in Western Europe either. When they hear that we live in the states they look at us with envy and say that the US is where they eventually want to end up. Everyone has a friend, uncle, cousin, sister, etc in America and they have work and a "good life". One man from the Congo that we met on our travels joked that the US is the "end of the line", the final stop on the immigrant train. Once people manage to make it there they never try to go anywhere else and never come home. Part of that is that the US still is seen as the "land of opportunity" compared to any other country (your kids become citizens, you can work as many jobs as you want). But the flip side is, until you have a green card or citizenship, there is a good chance that US will deny you entry if you go home to visit then try to come back (especially if you overstayed your visa). Visas for people in developing nations are incredibly tricky to get since 9/11, so no one takes the risk of leaving.

From Istanbul we caught a plane to Dubai on Singapore Airlines (my vote for skinniest flight attendants with the cutest outfits). We had the pleasure of flying on the new Boeing 777-300 planes which have about 30 on-demand movie channels. I watched Little Miss Sunshine and was guffawing so loud Julius was getting embarrassed. We said goodbye to the cold as we would not feel it again until China.

Check out all our photos on Smugmug (most captioned) to see all that we did in Istanbul!