Let’s go over my very fast-paced yet eventful 18 hour trip to Istanbul last month.So months of planning and years of daydreaming about Constantinople finally came into live action.
As found in the comments by our guide Hamid, “Looks like we are, truly a private group”, we were 10 people only (compared to other larger teams) who first got off their Touristanbul bus at the greater Grand Bazar complex. Hamid led us roaming around the university outdoor briefly. Then we started walking for the Bazar itself.
We will talk about Hamid later again. Should have taken a photo with him.
I liked the fact how frequent black and white pigeons and cats were on the streets around. And the bazar is somewhat grand in its entirety. Many doorways in and out that you might get overwhelmed when keeping track of your route.
Since we were on a very tight schedule, Hamid offered us only 30 minutes to take a look around by ourselves. Needless to say, we didn’t buy anything fancy (btw, some baklava and other sweet shops were worth checking out if bought in bulk); just started exploring.
My intrusive thoughts proposed that we pay a visit to the spice bazaar too in the meantime. We headed out only to return from halfway as soon we found it to be risky in terms of timing and Hamid will be super annoyed this time (two senior white citizens were already disappointing him walking super slow, taking photos here and there with their giant cameras). Maintaining the group stuff, you know.
While returning, we came across a random doner kebab place and without a second thought jumped right in. Pricey but the amount was more than okay.
Walking around grand bazar can sometime get very disturbing, specially if the local street hawkers can spot you as a foreigner (which is pretty easy). They will keep nagging and nagging and nagging to buy stuffs from them at a discounted rate. Kindof গরিবের নিউমার্কেট/গুলিস্তান!
Spice bazaar, see you sometime later.
Soon after grand bazaar, we moved towards the famous mosque duo complex. The Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque are located in opposite sides of that huge walkway compound that also happens to be the home of some ancient obelisks and tombs. Anyway, this one is all about the Blue Mosque from outside along with its beautiful interiors.
It was so exciting to see the whole mosque interiors with my own eyes specifically since I’ve seen it before, but with the eyes of Ezio Auditore, the well-known protagonist of the Assassin’s Creed series in its Revelations installment.
Hamid was, as usual explaining the history of it in brief, but the visitors seemed more interested in the Islamic rituals that they had seen inside. So at some point, he started explaining (as if the audience were kids) how we say our prayers, what are the timings and kiblah direction (and why so) and so on. That was a fun thing to watch being the only other Muslim guy in the group. Ops, there was someone else too: Noshin apu, my PhD labmate and trip companion.
Surprisingly learned that the whole complex was once used sort of as a race-course. The obelisks there have some great histories related to horses, according to Hamid.খাম্বার ইতিহাস কে মনে রাখে ভাই, hence forgot it kinda consciously.
What followed next might look very common if you have played Ubisoft products in your life. The one with those ancient water basins reminded me of Prince of Persia lmao, not to mention those fast travel tunnels in AC.
And then comes the saddest part, one of the reasons you won’t want to take Touristanbul package. They don’t take you near Hagia Sophia much let alone show inside. And getting into Hagia Sophia is probably restricted after evening, so yeah. Even if we decided to ditch the dinner, time wouldn’t have allowed at that point. Big miss no doubt.
So basically বাইরে থেকে ফটোশুট করেই চলে আসতে হলো। দুঃখজনক!
So this is where our free ‘Touristanbul’ ends, and the solo trip starts. From Hagia Sophia, we walked to the dinner place (included in package) at SultanAhmet square. In fact, the restaurant was just by a tram station, something we needed for the later part of the evening.
This is where we, the members of the group came to know each other a bit. There was a solo traveler from Japan, who chose Istanbul as a layover during his longer plan for the Europe tour. There were two white photographer friends, and one Chicago native, mostly accompanied by the rest of the group: a team of Serbian friends.
Talking about dining, you can see the foods offered. They first served a bowl of veggie salad (greens and tomato) with baked beans. After a while sticky, aromatic rice with roasted beef kebab came in. As usual, it was minimalist yet delicious to say the least. Hamid took our signature way back when we started, since we were not returning back to the airport with the group. What follows after finishing dinner was extreme sports.
Next destination: Taksim square. For that, we headed out to the tram station to catch a ride via T1 line to its last stoppage- Kabatas. But hey now we needed a metro pass, the famous red card of Istanbul. So far all good, however, things were about to take a slight turn when none of our credit cards seemed to get accepted in the card machine. A random Srilankan guy appeared out of nowhere, started helping us and other tourists for quite some time (about operating the machine, how much Lira to top up, etc). After a few trials and errors, idk somehow one of my cards got accepted finally, one that I never used internationally until that moment. Phew! We had already started generating backup plans, with possibilities of being robbed by Uber drivers and getting mugged by strangers at night, lol.
Finally, we got off from the tram at Kabatas. And was completely blown away by the amazing night view at the Bosphorus shore. Little did we know earlier, we were about to ditch Taksim square for the moment. Spending some time by the shore left no confusion over for us. We wanted a cruise, at any cost.
Here it goes- the most impromptu part of our trip: a cruise on the Bosphorus.
The cruise operator guy behaved somewhat welcoming, so we didn’t bother the 25$ (without dinner) per head ticket. We were offered only drinks, and taking our glasses we directly went to the rooftop. Man oh man, I can still feel that chill breeze down my spine, that lasted for the following couple hours.
Really liked the atmosphere overall: lighted up shores with vibrant nightlife, seagulls flying left and right, the sound of the waves and distant sirens; on top of that it was a damn full moon. Was shocked to hear beautiful Adhan at that late time of the night. It makes me immensely sad now that I think about it: technically it has been the last ‘proper’ Adhan I’ve heard since I left home.
It was getting quite shivery as time passed. I got down to change and put on my jacket. That’s when I got to take a look at the dinner lounge at the ground stairs. People were enjoying food accompanied by traditional, folk music and dance performance. Funnily enough, the performers were using the changing washroom spot as their green room backstage. That was some awkwardly astonishing few minutes, mostly because the last time I entered backstage green rooms was in the 2018-19s. Quick little déjà vu right there.
Anyway, they went upto the Bosphorus bridge point and then took a turn back from there to the Kabatas station shore. We spent rest of our almost three hour long cruise time on the rooftop as well.
Now that we got off from the ship, we had one more place to cover: Taksim square. Locals had already told that there runs a funicular to Taksim (it’s probably one way). So we again got to use our red metro cards for one last time. A quick underground ride of 2 minutes and we reached Taksim square.
