Once I opened the window it got nicely chilly. The night averaged out to a comfortable temperature. Well, it is easier to sleep when it is too cold than too hot.

At 6am or so someone walks the corridor ringing a bell as a wakeup call. Outside we see the Sea of Marmara. There is a low mist on the sea the same color as the sky giving the impression that the hills in the distance are floating on air. We pass a modern rural area, one looking very Mediterranean, and every once in a while you see a pair of minarets towering over it like a pair of candlesticks. I wonder why Americans are not here in larger numbers. This is a terrific place to visit.

The sink has a little metal label that shows a faucet over a full water glass and an “X” over the water glass. Wash with water but don’t drink it. Breakfast was the cookies we had since the trip to Konya and mineral water. The toilet on the train is sit, not squat.

We are once again dogged by cloudy weather. Some of these views would be a lot nicer in the sunshine. Still I guess there is nothing to be done for it but live with the bad weather. Well, this is the last day.

We pull into Istanbul station at about 8am. Istanbul station is a marvelous old building with stained glass windows. It has a feel of classic Middle Eastern architecture even if it is not a mosque. There is just a feeling of romance about the building.

We buy our ticket for the ferry, a cost of 125,000TL. We get on the boat. I have been told from my reading that this ferry across the Bosphorus is supposed to be something magical. I am looking forward to it.

Most people are unexcited by the trip across the Bosphorus. A few of us stand in the open area. We pass docks with boats loading and exotic buildings in the distance. Once again here and there you see minarets. A student sees that I am a tourist and wants to know about me. Another man joins in the conversation. We are making a short stop to let some passengers off and others on.

Now we are out on the water. Looking at Istanbul is indeed beautiful with its giant mosques. In the early morning there are sleepy fishing boats in the water and faster boats. This is certainly a nicer way to get into Istanbul than to come in by airplane on a gray and foggy day. Unfortunately the ferry ride lasts only a few minutes. We get out and they are selling fresh fish on the docks. The smaller fish glint in silver, and there are some very large fish heads.

Hmmm! This really is not going well. Maybe it is the fish heads. It really was a very exciting scene, but fish heads just aren’t going to convince any one. You are probably reacting the way I would reading about how exciting it is to see a bin full of liver. Well, take it from me. It is a “ya have to have been there.” From there we got a taxi to what was basically the same area where we had been three weeks before.

Drivers are really casual here. As we were driving one motions to our driver to pull up beside and the two start a conversation. He probably wanted directions. I already commented on how close they will drive to people. If a driver in the United States has to drive within two inches of where a person is standing he will stop and wait for the person to move or honk. Here the attitude is, “What’s the problem?”

We leave our luggage at the Alp and take a cab out of the city to the dock were we hope to get a ferry up the Golden Horn, the port of the city. Naturally our cab nearly hits someone getting there. We get to the dock and looking for how to get a ferry we are pretty nearly flooded with touts trying to sell us rides up the horn in their boat. What we find out, which seems to be true, is that the water is low and there are no ferries up the horn. We still have to fight these guys off with sticks, but make our getaway across a busy road. That frightens them off, but nearly does the same to me.

We get bus tickets and while we are waiting for the bus I buy from a vendor a roll of egg bread. The cost is 20 cents and it is fresh and quite good. The Turks do like bread. I am eating the last as we find our bus.

Our first site is the Eyup Sultan Mosque. Eyup Ensari was a friend to Muhammed and one of the founders of Islam who died fighting for the new faith. His tomb was revered by the Byzantine as a mark of respect. When Mehmet the Conqueror took the city for Islam, he was obliged to treat the tomb with more respect than the Christians had. This mosque is considered a very holy day. We see at least two families with little boys dressed in white satin suits with red sashes, cylindrical hats, and capes. They look like they are ready to lead a circus parade. In fact this is one of the special days in their lives. Jewish boys are only a few days old when they are circumcised and at 13 they have the bar mitzvah for which there is a lot of study and commotion. Then on the day there is lot of cheek-pinching by sadistic aunts under the guise of affection. Moslem boys don’t have to study for the event, but they are circumcised between eight and ten. And they do lead a parade of friends and family. I am not sure which is worse. Maybe it is better to get it over all at once the way they do here. The boys I saw did not seem to be very happy, but both had older sisters who were enjoying it immensely.

The tomb has not a lot to see. A tomb that you can see a little of behind an iron grating. There was an ornate chandelier and the room was decorated in blue tile. Women are expected to cover their heads and wear long skirts. Evelyn did not, but had the respect not to enter. I did enter, and I gave her a description. We walked around the area and there are other tombs and other graveyards. Some of the gravestones are pillars with Koranic verses.

Well, once again we were accosted by a group of schoolgirls wanting to test their English. It was all the usual stuff. “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” “What work do you do?” We asked about them. They asked about us. One of them made what I assume was a rude comment in Turkish and the others giggled and hit her.

Our next stop was to be the Kariye Church. Evelyn found it on the map and judged it to be one kilometer, certainly less than a mile. We set off to find it. This was one of those cases where we just walked and walked through non-tourist areas. Really non-tourist. After better than 45 minutes with no sense of getting any nearer, I insisted we hire a taxi. We did and the guy seemed to drive and drive and drive. Eventually we got there and the cost was about $2.

Kariye Museum (Church of St. Savior in Chora) known in the Lonely Planet as the Chora Church was originally called the Church of the Holy Savior Outside the Walls. When first built in 413 it was an outside place, outside the walls of the city. It was garishly over-decorated with mosaics. As the city grew it was surrounded by the city. Under the Ottomans it was defaced for the greater glory of Allah. What the Ottomans did not get to is still more than enough for a church several times as big. I will let Evelyn cover the actual art.

The next order of business was to find lunch. After our little disagreement over the whether walking or taking a cab was a better idea Evelyn suggested I take the lead in finding a restaurant. We walked a couple blocks to find a busy street. We walked a little further and found a nice-looking kabap restaurant. For me lunch was doner kabap and Pepsi. Evelyn had the Iskander Kebap. That is the same meat in a spicy tomato sauce with yogurt on the side.

After lunch we find the bus that would take us to the next site but as we go to get on the bus we see everybody else has a ticket. So we buy a ticket and wait for the next bus of the same type. We get on and they say it is the wrong kind of ticket. They sell us another one. Well, that’s about half a dollar wasted.

I had heard that in Islamic countries that a woman would not sit on a bus next to an unrelated man. The bus filled with so many people I could not see Evelyn across the aisle. I later suggested that we should have used our walkie-talkies. I did get occasional views of Evelyn’s hand, which reassured me that she was still there. Then the bus got so full I could not see that.

We had planned to tour the Dolmabahce Palace. This was the palace of the Sultan, but only late in history when it was no longer really time to have Sultans. This was the time that Turkey was called “the sick man of Europe.” While the state of Turkey was going into a bucket, the Sultan was having this ornate palace built for him to impress the monarchs of Europe. The entrance cost was something like $14 per person. We decided to give it a miss. We could see much of the exterior from the gate and got the idea that it would be of the ornate French “lather on a little more gold” school of decoration.

In front of the gates are guards who are supposed to stand at attention and not react, no matter what. They stand like mannequins. To me it is not clear what this has to do with winning wars. We continued up the street to the Maritime Museum.

At one time Ottoman Turkey was the supreme sea power through the Eastern Mediterranean. Under Suleyman the Magnificent from 1520 to 1566, Turkey commanded the waves. The Christians could not allow that power to continue and destroyed the fleet in 1571 at the battle of Lepanto. The Sultan built another fleet, though never as successfully. Turkey failed to keep its fleet up to date and eventually lost its place as a sea power.

What we at first thought was the Maritime Museum was a small exhibition of art, all on themes dealing with the ocean. One piece seems to have a sailboat on cloth so that a background seems to move in Moire patterns. Pieces were done in a style of 1950s science fiction art. Some were done in bright cartoon colors. One nice piece was an abstract shark.

There was supposed to be a second building of the museum, but it turned out we hadn’t been to either building. The first real building was mostly taken up with historical boats of the Sultans and their harems. From there you went through a garden that featured bronze busts of maritime governors and admirals of the fleet. It has cannons and mines from more recent history. The second building had more recent objects including Ataturk naval mementos, a captured Ottoman standard from the Battle of Lepanto. They had a collection of boat models, medals, coins with maritime pictures, figureheads, water lights, diving suits and pumps, etc. It was a much nicer museum than it first appeared.

We thought it might be a good idea to take cheap ferry twice across the Golden Horn. I would have liked Evelyn to see a view like I had seen that morning, but the ferries were not running. So from there we wanted to get back to the room. Since our room was in walking distance of the Topkapi Palace and the bus claimed to go to Topkapi, we figured we were all set. We asked how to get the bus. A man sold us a ticket and told us we had to cross the street. It was a busy street and we had to cross a “flyover” to do it. It was about a fifteen-minute wait for the bus, and when it arrived the ticket-taker claimed we had the wrong kind of ticket. Evelyn was getting frustrated and started to complain. Another passenger took our two tickets and left the price. It was a small thing, but typically Turkish.

We took the bus to Topkapi only to find ourselves at a bazaar that was nowhere near the Topkapi Palace. We had to take a taxi anyway. The driver was a disagreeable sort who kept making obscene hand gestures at other cars. He also shortchanged us and drove off before we could stop him.

We went back to the room a little tired and a little down. Actually we had not seen the room at the Alp yet. We rested and realized we had to change money for dinner. None of the cash machines would accept our card. We passed one cash machine that had rejected it before. Someone inside the booth waved at us. It was one of the Kiwis we met on the Goreme tour. We went to see if she was having any luck. She said the machine had just been repaired. It still rejected one of our cards. We tried the other and Voila. Magic. We could have a decent dinner our last night instead of pizza.

We tried the Altin Kupa for dinner. The service was just awful. First they served a group that came in after us first, then apparently were taking dishes to the restaurant next door before serving us. After about 40 minutes we finally got our food. I had mixed grill; Evelyn had lamb cutlets. I was irritated and had planned to get dessert, but did not.

Over dinner we discussed what were the highpoints of the trip for each of us. For me it was the collection of artifacts of ancient religions at Ankara. This may be one of the great collections in the world of religions whose country I always wanted to visit, but assumed it was impossible to get to it behind a political curtain as impenetrable as the Iron Curtain. It was a real discovery that there was a country that still had the originals.

Evelyn’s choice was Goreme and there is something to be said for that. Certainly it is the most visually spectacular place we visited. There were two problems for me there. One is that I still have wounds on my head from cracking it so many times. A few times is funny and I should have learned to be more careful. But in the end I began to grow weary of the traps for the unwary. But I have another and deeper problem with Goreme. What happened geologically at Goreme is unique, wonderful, and beautiful. And I can even accept that some historic people might have hollowed out some of the volcanic chimneys for homes. But then the Christians had to deface it for what I consider selfish reasons. And then the Moslems had to come in and deface the Christian art, scratching out eyes of the images, putting theirs in its place. How would you feel looking at Yosemite if it had been totally defaced in a South Bronx style gang war and there was graffiti over everything? At heart I suspect a lot of what is done in the name of religion is trying to curry favor with what people consider to be the powers that be. People willfully confuse the concept of “done in the name of religion” with “good.” That is at the heart of perhaps most of the evil in the world. I see evil done for this motive, evil done for greed (e.g. theft), and evil done for racial intolerance. They are basically a) greed for the next world, b) greed in this world, and c) instinct to preserve ones own genes (a la Dawkins’s Selfish Gene). a and b are the same if you assume life after death. b and c are the same if you take a more biological viewpoint.

As we are leaving the restaurant a carpet salesman sees us and rushes to try to get us to his shop. The Sammons absolutely hated talking to carpet salesmen. The Farises convinced us that it was enjoyable and often did not involve buying a carpet at all. They just want to talk and find out about the world. This one wanted to know what we do. I said that I work with computers. He said this was like Bill Gates. Yes, computers but not Bill Gates. Gates is now the richest man in the world. He is the second carpet salesman we have met who is fascinated with Gates’s wealth, at least after we said we were in computers. Both knew, however, that Gates was in trouble with the government.

Our salesman wanted to know what we made a month in salary. I told him. He was astounded. He said he could live very, very comfortably on that much money. I told him that was meaningless. You cannot earn like in the United States and live in Turkey. Really all he is seeing is that there is a high exchange rate. We do not live all that much more comfortably than he does. It is more comfortable, but our prices are a lot higher. He knew that was true saying that bread is very cheap in Turkey and very expensive in the US. He wanted to know if we each had a car. Yes, but that has been true only for a short time. Over the last three or four months for the first time we have had two cars. Before that we had one car 15 years old. And we own our house? Well, yes, but have a mortgage. He did not know about or understand mortgages.

He also wanted to know about violence in the United States. Five-year-old children had guns, he had heard. I told him it was very rare. Did we have a gun? No, but I know several people who do. Guns are very hard to find in Turkey. I told him it was a good thing. He agreed. I had hoped to buy some candy for my group at the corner store that had offered us credit the first day.

The carpet salesman said we could get I right there, but the woman had been nice to us and I wanted to be nice back. Now it was after 9pm and I was probably too late. Eventually we pulled away. The corner store was on he way. We passed it at 9:20 and it was open. The woman remembered us and treated us like friends. We bought candy for home and some peach candy for me (which turned out to be really good). We had about a million lira left. It occurred to me to make her a gift of what was left. Evelyn thought we might need it at the airport. We didn’t. But we did say good-bye.

We returned to the room to pack. Evelyn went to sleep. I tried not to sleep, but did sleep maybe an hour.