This Is A Lake - A travel blog

So I woke up today and set the clock forward one hour (again [AGAIN]). Sigh. Today the big plan was the palace of Topkapi! I couldn't have asked for a better day to spend sightseeing: gloriously sunny, but cool, and the crowds were blissfully small. When I walked in, at about ten or ten thirty, I only had to wait in line for my ticket for about ten minutes. When I walked out, at one o'clock, the queue to get in had tripled in size! Good timing! It's hard to overstate just how immense Topkapi is. Although the core of the palace was built I believe in the 15th century, a great deal of the most iconic buildings are additions and expansions from the 16th and 17th centuries. They kept adding new pavilions and annexes, to the point where it became a small city housing up to 4,000 people and covering a huge expanse of land on a hill. Topkapi is a palace built in the Eastern fashion: whereas Western palaces like Versailles are enormous buildings with gardens all around, I've no

Today I woke up, as all y'all did, with the clock set one hour forward, and went down to find that breakfast hadn't even been set yet! That's how I found out that Turkey decided to postpone the hour change to tomorrow, because of today's local elections, and I had in fact woken up an hour early! I had trusted my iPhone to switch automatically, and in fact it did -just not to Turkey... Ah well. I started my day with the big prize: Aya Sofya, the great 6th century basilica, later converted to a mosque, later still turned into a museum. All I have to do to get there from the hotel is go up a slope, walk around the Four Seasons and make a right. It's been a glorious day, sunny, not a cloud on the sky, rather cold but not overly so. There was a sizable queue at the basilica already at about 9:30 or so, but it advanced pretty fast. Unlike at the airport, international queuing law applied and I only had one lady in a hijab push me aside to cut ahead! Progress! Once inside,

-- The streets of Sultanahmet are overrun with cats, who walk up and down the pavement like they own the place (and who's to say they don't?). Some are cute; many look ready to claw my eyes out. The hotel has two or three house cats, all of whom look lovely. -- It's true that the call to prayer wakes you up, as I experienced today at 5:45 (or 4:45... more on that in the next entry), but it didn't bother me much as I went right back to sleep. Honestly I was more concerned about the poor muezzin, who upon hitting the higher notes sounded like he was on the verge of passing out...

I'm in Istanbul! One year after my Japanese oddysey I'm once again out and about, so I'm coming back to the blog to make sure you don't miss a thing! The flight from Orly to Ataturk airport, which takes three hours, went without a hitch. Things got interesting once in Turkey. When I landed I was directed to a little visa shop, where you literally just fork over 15€ to get a visa, and then I made it to Passport Control... where I found a massive queue between my passport and the border guards charged with letting me into the country. Hundreds of people, Disneyland style. As soon as I took my position the cultural differences became apparent, as queuing seemed to be largely optional -groups of ladies in their hijabs and niqabs would just merrily elbow their way straight ahead, regardless of how many people they had to trample to get to the front of the queue. It was like one of those awful nature documentaries, where these ladies were the lions and the French tourists fro

So I had to do the whole bus/cable car/train combination again, and it felt decidedly longer this time around. Eventually I arrived in Namba Station at about noon. I am so proud of the prescience I showed when I booked the Dotonbori Hotel . I had a vision that by this point in the trip I would have neither the energy nor the will to look for a place in a map, or take several subways, so I looked for something that was so close to the station that I could just throw my bags out of the train doors and into my room. And indeed, this hotel is in Dotonbori street, which itself is two blocks from Namba Station, so already that's my transport and the main sightseeing spot all together in one place. It's a pretty nice hotel, too -wifi and LAN, breakfast included, Western style, neko-map of the city, and for those staying longer they have free bike rental. If you check out their website -yes, the front really does look like that! So I dropped off my stuff, rested a little bit, t

Guys! Guys! I forgot to write about this. I found a place that serves REAL hot chocolate in Japan. It was called Café Ciao Presso and it was in Nara Station. Eat your heart out, Paris (that's the second time I use that sentence in this blog). I assume because it was in a station that it must be a chain, but I haven't seen any other since :( Kazuyo had warned me in advance that in Osaka people stand on the right side of escalators, like in London, whereas in Tokyo and Kyoto they stand on the left. This often leads to the humorous conclusion that there must be a frontier somewhere, a fabled escalator that marks the territories of right-standing and left-standing. Well, I found it!! I saw an escalator in Shin-Osaka station where the people going down stood on the left and the people going up stood on the right. That must be it! Foreign travellers in Japan quickly learn that our credit cards only work on 7-11 and Post Office ATMs, which requires advance planning to have cash rea

Last night I took Ekoin's night-time tour of Okunoin, Koya-san's famous cemetery and Unesco World Heritage Site. It was a good idea to leave my own visit to the cemetery until after taking the tour, as I later had a better idea of the history of the place as I walked on my own. It was freezing, of course, but I had thrown on everything I had, so it wasn't so bad. Learning about the history of the place, and about Kobo Daishi, one of the founding fathers of Japanese Buddhism (and also a master calligrapher and poet, we were told), who is believed to still be meditating in his cave, since he locked himself in it in the 9th century. The monks still carry breakfast and lunch to his cave every day. Our guide combined explanations of Okunoin's and Koyasan's history along with a brief summary of the tenets of esoteric Buddhism, which really helped to put some of the sights in context. It was a moonless night, it was pitch black, and in the dimly lit path I suddenly u