Istanbul-June-2022

 Wow, what a town! Right from the minute I stepped off the plane and walked through the airport I could tell this was going to be a good one. Clean, efficient, no crowds, nobody trying to run you over as you wait at baggage claim, wait is that my bag I see amongst the first off the plane? What did I tell you about this being a good one?

I asked the woman at the foreign exchange counter what I'd get for my dollars but her response was too shocking to print here. So I got some cash from an ATM, called an Uber, smiled to myself when I divided the tariff by the exchange rate, and off we went, to Beyoglu, one of the nicer neighborhoods in the European half of the city. 

Driving here feels like home. Thanks to my Google Fi (if you have plans to travel abroad, do yourself a favor and get this) phone service, I was able to follow along as we negotiated the turns and interchanges for the better part of 45 minutes. 

My Airbnb turned out to be everything I dreaded - the pictures always lie! But a funny thing happened when I reminded myself how much I was paying for this. I'm a cheapskate and proud of it. Beauty, as the big man wrote with his quill, lies in the eyes of the beholder. I started to appreciate the fact that this was an actual room with walls, a bed, a window and even a closet. So what if the socket dangling from the roof was missing a bulb? A table lamp provided soft lighting.

I decided to eat my first meal at the place recommended by my host. It was a short climb from where I was staying. Hilly neighborhood, I thought to myself. Ever the optimist, I found a bright side to this: I would be walking down these slopes after my meal, which is a lot better than if I had to do a post-prandial ascent. 

The food was excellent - probably the best chicken soup I'd had in a very long time. Together with the bread they put out, this could have been a meal by itself. I'd already ordered another dish so I dug in and was determined to prove to myself that I hadn't gone overboard in the ordering dept. I had.

On the walk back I noticed a couple of stray cats who ignored me as they went about their business. My host had a dog so I counted that as another blessing as I'm averse to the feline species. Stray cats, while not ideal, were better than cats in the house. 

Later in the day I ventured out to discover a bit of the city. Public transport in Istanbul is the crown jewel in the city's  services. Between the buses, the trams, the trains and the ferries, you can pretty much get to any place by stringing together a couple of these modes -  if one doesn't take you all the way to your destination. And they all work off the same prepaid card (appropriately named istanbulkart) which makes getting around a breeze once you figure out how to top up your card (this is the tricky part - locating the english option amongst a slew of languages can be frustrating). 

Thanks to Fi, my google maps was working and it wanted me to walk 6 minutes to the tram station, of which 4 minutes was climbing down 200+ steps (I counted). Hilly terrain, remember? Was my airbnb perched on top of a hill?  I seemed to be descending in elevation no matter which direction I walked in. Kinda like those gradient descent algorithms except I was the one doing the crunching. As I climbed down those steps, watched this time by no less than 9 cats, some hard facts started to dawn on me. 

Fact #1: Istanbul is a city built on several hills (7 I believe is the official number) so no matter where you go, you will be traversing an incline. I don't care how great the public transport system is but if you do decide to use it, there will be some walking, er climbing, involved. In some places the inclinations are so steep that they don't even bother with roads and simply use stairs to connect one street with the next one below. If you have a bum knee or a weak ticker, you might want to play it safe and take an uber. I pretended I had neither and huffed and puffed my way through.

Fact #2: Istanbul loves cats and they are frickin' everywhere! Yikes! I wondered if all those bygone generations of sultans had been born again as cats. Sort of the islamic version of reincarnation. In which case my progress through the streets of Constantinople was being monitored by royalty from the Ottoman & Byzantine empires. I couldn't help feel a tad self-conscious. Should I walk like an Egyptian? 

Black Cat Awaits My Descent

Fact 3: They make it real easy for you to practice islam. There's a mosque on every corner and if there isn't, there will be one soon. A dome and one minaret are standard issue for any mosque with the more important ones boasting two, three, four, even six minarets. 

The only guided tour I signed up for was to visit the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofia. These two imposing structures face off against each other and while the first was suitably impressive, my vote goes to the second for its stunning architecture especially when you consider its age (built in 537AD, it served as a church for a 1000 years before it was converted into a mosque for the next 500 or so years and then into a museum in 1931, which is what it would have been today if Erdogan had not redesignated it back as a mosque in 2020 ). 

The Blue Mosque

The Blue Mosque gets more foot traffic judging by the strong toe jam odor that hangs in the air. Our guide was a school teacher who did this on the side to augment his income. He told me that his income had dwindled to a third of what it was some 15 years ago. I fact-checked his numbers and sure enough was surprised by Turkey's whopping 80% inflation rate! 

Hagia Sophia (Exterior)

In keeping with the 'no human idols' rule of mosques, The Blue Mosque is striking in its barren interior. Contrast that with the artifacts inside the Hagia Sophia some of which were obscured when it reverted to a mosque. If I were a religious man, I'd probably connect with the almighty a little easier surrounded by artifacts, but that's just me. 

Hagia Sophia (Interior)

The Bosporus Strait, which separates the Asian and European parts of the city, gives Istanbul a panoramic feel that does wonders for  your soul (and your pictures). You can hop on a ferry and just keep going back and forth between the two continents like an absent-minded empire builder of yore. 

European Side With More High Rises

Asian Side With Lower Slung Profile 

Or you could be a little more targeted in your approach and take the ferry to the Princes' Islands - a series of islands of which BuyuKada - literally means 'big island' - is the most popular. I did that and spent several hours biking around the island, gorging on the seafood and topping it off with ice cream. I have spent many a day pursuing less satisfactory things in my life. 

The food tasted every bit as good as it looks here. And the prices were ridiculously low thanks to the almighty greenback.

I got my fill of the city during the 5 days I spent there. The taxi that my airbnb host had ordered to take me to the airport, showed up at 5:30AM just like they said they would. At that hour of the morning we had the roads to ourselves as we cruised to the second of the two international airports - this one on the Asian side of town. Istanbul was a lovely city to visit I thought. The people were friendly even though they mostly kept to themselves and barely noticed you. The food was of a quality that made you weep. 

In a few hours the city would ramp up to its normal level of hustle and bustle, transporting the hordes up and down and across and back again, on the trains and trams and buses and ferries, in a seamless display of what urban living should be. And yet if you consider what economic destruction the fascist regime had wrought over the past 20-some years, you couldn't help but think Istanbul was like this beautiful but neglected woman, all decked up and nowhere to go. Never before have I seen first class infrastructure just idling its time away. 

If one could transport this place to another part of the world, say Bangalore which complements Istanbul in so many ways, can you imagine what productivity gains could be had? I would of course leave the cats behind. They just wouldn't get along with the stray dogs that roam the streets in namma bengaluru!