This Is A Lake - A travel blog

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,...

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...