This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Here we go! Today the plan was to start from the top and visit Buda Castle! But only after a magnificent breakfast at the hotel, which offers a full breakfast buffet, a bit of a rarity nowadays. We began by taking the metro, which is cleaner and looks newer than many Paris Metro's trains and stations, so well done Budapest! There are several types of transport cards, but they all looked like you need to make a lot of trips to get your money's worth, so we ended up getting packs of 10 tickets, like in Paris. That way each ticket costs about 300 forint, or 1€. Our hotel is on the red metro line (M2), so we went straight to Batthyany Square on the other side of the river (we're staying east of the Danube, in Pest, and the castle is on top of a hill west of the river, in Buda). From there, it's a 10 minute walk to the base of the hill, where a turn-of-the-century funicular connects the top with the street level. There was a bit of a queue and the sun was beginning to glare,

It's travel time again! This time I'm taking up the blog again sooner than expected. I'm going to spend the week seeing Budapest and Vienna! It's strike season in France, so getting from Versailles to Charles de Gaulle airport took over two and a half hours -longer than getting from Paris to Budapest. Trains to Paris only left Versailles once every hour and a half, and when I finally got to central Paris I found out the previous day's announcement that "there's an RER B train every ten minutes" only applied up to Gare du Nord. Up to the airport -only one in five trains is operational, ha ha! Psych!  I saved the lives of an entire Korean family who were hopelessly (and understandably) lost at the station and couldn't figure out what was going on. The father spoke English, so I explained to himthat the trains were on strike, and he went "Ooooh" and relayed this in Korean to his wife and two little girls, who all went "Ooooh". Then

My last day in Istanbul was a day for tying up loose ends. I had already visited all the "greatest hits" on my list, so to speak, and looking at what else to do there were four options: the Museum of Islamic Arts, the Kariye Museum, the Archaeology Museum and a visit to Üsküdar. The Museum of Islamic Arts is closed for renovations and the Kariye Museum looked really far away at two or three tram transfers, so that narrowed down the list of eligible museums down to one: the Archaeology Museum, which is right next to Topkapi Palace, accessible either from the First Court itself, or from Gülhane park. It spans three buildings, the main one being a big Neoclassical construction that houses most of the collection. There's also a small pavilion with blue tiles: I don't know if there was something in the water today, but when I got to the ticket booth the poor man and woman inside were having to deal with an old French lady who kept listing names of palaces and

My entire stay so far had been confined to the same landmass, so today it was time for a change! I hopped on the tram and crossed the Golden Horn, via the Galata Bridge, up to the district of Beyoglu, the modern, cool quarter of Istanbul. But first I went to the palace of Dolmabahçe, which is further up north, just on the seaside. Although both Topkapi and Dolmabahçe were the residences of sultans (the former in ancient times, the latter from the mid-19th century onwards), the two couldn't possibly be more different. Where Topkapi is a shining example of Ottoman splendor at its finest, Dolmabahçe is all Western excess and Baroque garishness. If Elvis Presley had lived in the 1850s, this is the palace he would have designed: gold leaf everywhere, trompe-l'oeil paintings on every ceiling, and lots, lots of Baccarat crystal. The huge staircase in the main hall is outfitted with crystal banisters, not to mention the enormous chandeliers made entirely out of crystal, both hanging an

After the historical, contemplative visits of this past couple of days, it was time for something a bit more vibrant: I went to the Grand Bazaar! I wasn't sure at first whether it was within walking distance or tram distance, looking at the map, so let me save you the trouble: it's a mere 15 min walk from Sultanahmet tram station. It's all the same street until Çemberlitas, the Burnt Column, and then up north for a short while. The entrance to the Grand bazaar looks like that of a pedestrian tunnel, but once inside I found myself in a bustling, sprawling, labyrinthine network of covered streets and galleries. The only way to really appreciate the age of the place is to look at the roof, where aged and faded paintings remain from times past, because there are no walls to be seen anywhere: every square inch of surface is being used to display merchandise. It's like a Muslim Akihabara: just as seizure-inducing, except with touts everywhere. I began by wandering around, get

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,