January 27th, 2009 
Turkiye 
They are only pre-boarding but everybody is lining up. They want to be among the first to board. I am not sure the advantage unless it is to grab overhead compartment space. In any case the boarding procedure is snafued.
The problem seems to be that they had automatic ticket-taking machines like the ones that work well in Japan. These don’t work quite so well since they required a human to show people how to feed the ticket in and then remind the user to pick up the stub.
Our plane that was supposed to take off at 1am was still loading at that time. About 1:15 we had a Lufthansa innovation, the safety talk was done with computer animation to make it look like a puppet show. That way it is not surprising that the figure is smiling when he puts on an oxygen mask. A puppet cannot do anything else. It always looked unrealistic when a human put on one of those masks. It always looked unrealistic to have a happy smiling human slip on an oxygen mask to narrowly avoid death. Of course I am joking. We all know nothing can go wrong on one of these planes. But I would have felt better if they had not lost the picture on their safety tape.
The tape concluded we are now ready to take off. But 30 minutes later the plane still had not. I slept. I did feel the takeoff, but my eyes were closed. The plane was taking off about 45 minutes late. I slept another half hour but woke up when they started handing out beverages and “a snack” if you can call a half ounce of mini-pretzels a snack. I had an orange juice, no ice.
The dinner seemed slow in coming, but it was certainly better than what is usually considered airplane food. There was a salad with a nice piece of smoked salmon; the bread had sweet butter; then there was chicken on macaroni in tomato sauce, but it was longer spirals of macaroni. For desert there was a piece of cherry cake and some cheese and crackers. Everything was made fairly well.
Well, after dinner I got maybe a couple of hours of sleep. I woke up in time to see the last ten minutes of the in flight movie, The Rainmaker. I had seen it once already, but it has a fairly rousing conclusion from the moment that Roy Scheider is on the stand. The one problem with the story is that is awfully similar to Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. It basically is the same defense of lawyers. I don’t necessarily like a lot of what goes on in the legal profession, but there are some good films that defend lawyers, starting with Inherit the Wind.
We are now over Cork in Southern Ireland according to the map they put up. Another hour and we land in Frankfurt. I am looking forward to Istanbul with a mixture of three parts excitement to one part dread. It will be a challenge. We have to do things like find a hotel in a country where we do not know the language. I take that back. It will become three parts excitement to one part dread. Right now it is three parts dread to one part excitement. But that will change. Most people don’t travel because there is too much dread and not enough excitement. But as I tell Evelyn, any place you don’s see by the time you die, you never get another chance. I have some idea of the variation of thought patterns that Americans are capable of, but not that humans are capable of.
Evelyn is sleeping on my shoulder and I try to type in the half-light without disturbing her.
They come around with breakfast. It is choice of a Danish or what sounds like a cappicola sandwich. More for health than for cowardice I take the Danish. We have passed over London and are now crossing from Dover to Calais.
I am also wondering if we are going to be able to travel like this in two years. I usually do not believe in Doomsday prophecies. I am betting that the Year 2000 computer problem will be bigger than most people think. There is only a relatively small part of the population guessing how serious it will be. I am just not hearing experts looking at the situation and coming away skeptical. There are lots of technical people concerned, there are a few trying to tell the general public, and the public is ignoring the threat. Well people were frightened of atomic war and it has not happened. People feel safe. The difference is that we did not have an atomic war scheduled for a specific date and time.
We landed in Frankfurt at 8:39. Evelyn and I both found we were nodding off toward the end of the flight. It is actually a fairly short walk to our outgoing gate with no security checks. Another nice touch is a selection of international newspapers you enter each plane. I got a copy of the Herald Tribune. It seems to be a collection of the international news from the New York Times and the Washington Post. I look at the price. For the US Military in Europe it casts $1.20. It cost 300,000 Turkish Lira. Yup, that confirms what I had heard. A quarter million Turkish Lira to the dollar. Turks get used to large numbers early in life, I think.
Well, there is the call for our plane. We are to go downstairs and board a bus. I wonder where the plane is. I didn’t choose airfare to ride a bus, of course. Had I wanted to ride a bus, I would have taken the bus from Newark to Istanbul. The German voices are so pleasant, even in German. I wonder why they are played so nasty in those old war films. “Ladies and gentlemen, please proceed around to the front of the machine guns.” I wonder what it must be like that in all the good adventure films, like The Guns of Navarone, your countrymen are the bad guys.
On the plane we met a nice couple who were going to Turkey on an Elderhostel tour. We talked to them about places they were going this trip and places we had been.
It is funny. I can remember when I was in elementary school I knew I was going in for science and especially math. The teacher would show us slides of her trip to France and I would be bored. I wasn’t the traveler type. There was more fascination in what life was like in a drop of water than in France. I little suspected I would grow up with this hobby of travel and telling others about what I saw. I would probably go to far more countries than my teacher would. But not France so far. When we are old and tired we will go the easy places like France. First it has to be places like the Amazon and Turkey and India. Travel writing came as a complete shock to me. What happened there was when I worked for Burroughs and got a job offer from Bell Labs, Burroughs sent me to see if there was work I would have liked to do in Pennsylvania where Burroughs had some labs. My supervisor wanted me to report certain things from the meetings. Evelyn wanted to know other things. In order not to have to explain three different accounts of my trip, I wrote just one comprehensive account for myself and gave copies to other people telling them to pull out what was relevant to them. It struck me that account was a nice souvenir of the trip so I did it for other trips. But it was mostly for me. A friend was going to Britain, where I had been, and wanted to know what I had enjoyed seeing there. I gave her this illegible trip log and told her it would not all be of interest, but if she skimmed it she would find the parts that answered her question. She read it cover to cover and gave it to her husband to read cover to cover. It never had occurred to me that for anyone who had not traveled with me there would be much interest at all. But I started circulating my logs to friends and family. Big steps forward were the addition of an HP 200LX that allowed me to type the log as I went and Usenet and the Internet to make the logs available. The 200LX do a lot more for me than that. It keeps track of the sites we will be seeing; it tracks time past. I have programs for the phase of the moon and when sunset is. It is an amazingly useful tool.
Evelyn is sleeping and I just took the first picture of the trip, the ground from the plane.
I am a little afraid of what I put in this log since the Turkish government strikes me as being sensitive to criticism. And I am a guest in their country.
Lunch, which was at about 10:50am was a salad of ham slices, cottage cheese, and a cherry tomato; an omelet with mushrooms and a little potato pancake, German yogurt with an American flag decoration. It said “Fruit guaranteed to be from the US;” and something called “raspberry extra jam” on a croissant. Not quite as high a quality as dinner last night. The yogurt was some unidentified fruit and seemed to have nuts.
I slept more after lunch and we landed about 12:35. Now I had been expecting that anything to do with the Turkish government would be officious and very suspicious of strangers. I had considered not bringing my vitamin C because I could end in a drug hassle if I could not prove it was just vitamins. I went to the trouble of encrypting files in my palmtop about Turkish politics so that if they were examined nobody would see that I was carrying opinions against the Turks. So here it came. First there was buying a visa. The piece had gone up to $45, but otherwise no hassle. The man in line stamped my passport. Then to the area where we pick up luggage, except of course we carry all of our luggage. Here it comes, the inspection. A few people had to open suitcases but nobody bothered with us. Perhaps we have honest faces, but I would have thought the backpacks would have made us look suspicious. For whatever reason, Turkish security was hassle-free. We got out and changed some money and got a taxi for the hotel. We asked to be taken to the Berk Guesthouse. The driver said that he knew where it was but called it the Berak Guesthouse. The driver tried to tell us that if we did not have a reservation we were not going to find a room unless we let him find a place. “Every place you go. Full! Full! Full!” We were unconvinced, and it turned out rightly so. There is a season like that in summer, but not the spring. My mother didn’t raise no children who were foolish enough to believe taxi drivers.
Driving we passed a lot of remnants of old Hippodrome wall preserved, with a fence around them to protect them. The Hippodrome was an old Roman racetrack and if you saw Ben Hur you know those old Romans took horse racing seriously. Turkey is a place aware of its past. You see also minarets all over, but they all look pretty much the same. Minarets have a uniform design in Istanbul. They look like pencils with balconies that all look much alike.
Evelyn mentioned to me that I should not call this an Islamic country. Yet as we drove it is clear that there must be something along those lines that should be said. There are two kinds of country you can visit. There are religious countries where the government is brought to you by the same fine folks who bring you the religion. There are secular counties where the government has nothing whatever to do with religion. Of the religious countries there are two types. The religious leaders can be the same as the government leaders, but so what? England is that way. Supposedly the queen is the head of the Church of England. Iran is the other type: “Our political leaders are all of our religion and by the way, Mr. Visitor, you are really supposed to be that religion also.” Secular countries also have two types. One says something like he US says: “We are all kinds of different religions and none control the government, even if we do shut down on December 25.” Then there is the one that says “We are all pretty much the same religion, but we try not to let that affect our government.” That last is Turkey. The vast majority of the country is Islamic. In that sense it is an Islamic country. But the government does not check the Koran to find out how to govern. The Turkish police do not enforce the Koran. Catch me if I say this is an Islamic country. I mean that by majority demographics.
The taxi driver played on his radio American rock. I don’t know if he liked it or if he thought we would. Most of the music you here on the radio here has an Arabic sound.
We got to the Berak Guesthouse and discovered it was almost the same name, but definitely the wrong place. We had to hassle and show him the name on paper. He had never heard of it. But we discovered it was just about a block or two away. We had pronounced it like burr with a “k” at the end. He pronounced it like bear with a “k” at the end. The reason for the coincidence that they were so close is that if you stay near the major tourist attractions you stay in a relatively small area called Sultanamaht after the Sultan who built the Blue Mosque.
So after the little confusion about the name we got to the Berk. I went up to see the room. I never really know what to look for in a room, particularly in a new country. It is never easy for the traveler to know if his hotel room is a good deal or not. In Tokyo we got a really good deal on a room that was about $90 a night and was about big enough that we could spread two pads on the floor for us to sleep on and no private plumbing. On our Southeast trip $55 was really overpriced for a room with two beds and cable TV with remote, a radio, and really good plumbing with free shampoo. By US standards the room here is pretty Spartan for $50 a night. One bed, a chair, a sink, a private bathroom, but with plumbing so primitive that you throw out rather than flush toilet paper. (I knew some places had the toilet paper deal, but this is the first I visited and it is hard to get used to.) I think travel is definitely worth the expense and with the exception of airfare can be done cheaply even to places like Japan. But it also reminds me again and again that in the late 20th century life in America for most people is incredibly comfortable. Our slums are incredibly luxurious compared to how most people in the world lived 100 years ago. I guess it is a matter of what you get used to.
We left our luggage in the room and went out to scout the area. One reason the hotels are so expensive and all together in one group is we are right near the Blue Mosque and Saint Sophia. We stopped at a corner shop for a cool drink. There is easily available Coke and Doritos. We got a local drink at 150,000TL (sixty cents). It turned out to be cherry drink. The brand name is Cappy (but it is really Coca-Cola) and it tastes really good, like liquid cherry pie filling. Prices, incidentally, are quoted in thousands. The woman in the shop said the price was “150″ and that was what the can was what was written under the can in the cooler.
Near the mosques there are a lot of touts hanging around, who are medium aggressive. They come up to you and try to get you to come to their shop or try to sell you postcards, but they do take no for an answer. There are not as many as there were in India and they are mostly just near the really touristy areas. Also if you appear to be lost locals passing will without being asked stop and try to help you.
A lot of things you see are in a blue and green color scheme. Those were the colors of two political parties and they are sort of the unofficial colors of the country, though the flag is red and white.
What can I say about the city? This is the city of the “once-beautiful.” Buildings are of nice design but are not well maintained. Buildings that in many different eras were new and nice-looking are giving way to the ravages of time. Houses are much the same. We walked around and could have gone in the mosques, but I preferred to get caught up on my log before we did too much. So we headed back to the room, stopping at the corner store to get bottled water for the room. We got a big 1.5 liter bottle and a half liter bottle. It cost 200,000TL, (I will use “TL” as “Turkish Lira”) well under a dollar. Evelyn had just had her small bills present but had stuffed them in a pocket and could not find them. The woman behind the counter suggested we just pay her tomorrow. We almost took her up on her credit offer, but we found the small change. The woman probably figures that if American came this far, they are honest. She also generated good will. I will probably pick that store first for buying snacks.
I told myself I wanted to read up first. I did not actually do that, though I did make up some flashcards to get some of the language down.
Evelyn fell asleep and I worked on my log. I wrote a program on my palmtop to act like flashcards, but it was not as good as the real thing. I also scouted the bands on my short-wave but found little of interest though I did find the BBC.
About 7:15 we went out and found a restaurant. For about 2 million we each had a dish and a yogurt drink call Ayran. My dish was kiremit shish. It was called claypot chicken and cheese. It really was chicken pizza without the crust. Evelyn had yogurtlu kebap. That is lamb over yogurt drenched bread.
There are really three parts to Istanbul: Stamboul, Bayoglu, and Uskudar. Take a postcard sized piece of paper and draw in the two diagonals. You have four triangles coming together at the center. The lowest triangle is the Sea of Marmara. Continuing clockwise you have Stamboul, Bayoglu, and Uskudar. Separating Stamboul from Bayoglu is the Golden Horn, a long narrow bay and a port. Between Bayoglu and Uskudar is the Bosphorus. The palace and the great mosques are in Sultanahmet, the region toward the point of Stamboul. It is there we are staying and that is really the tourist section of Istanbul.
Going back to the room we crashed. Slept through most of the evening. At midnight I woke up and worked on my log, but then went to sleep officially. This is a noisy neighborhood.
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