Istanbul Turkey

Postcards from:

Before entering Africa
California
Prague Czech Rep.
Istanbul Turkey
Ankara Turkey
Konya Turkey
Antalia Turkey
Side Turkey
Demre Turkey
Cirali Turkey
Fethiye Turkey
Kayakoy Turkey
Marmaris Turkey
Rhodes Greece
Athens Greece
Enter Africa by Egypt

Istanbul Turkey: Fresh oranges. I liked the color and the vendor wanted his picture taken.

Istanbul Turkey: The orange seller and friend who insisted on being in the picture with his friend the vender. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Entrance to the first Internet cafe I tried in Istanbul. The people there were very cooperative, but we had lots of technical problems with downloads. Never did get around to testing the USB interface. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Inside entrance to the Internet cafe. Many of them are in little offices on the second, third or fourth floors of obscure buildings. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: A street seller and his goodies. They got interested in my loitering around their stand and motioned for me to take their picture.

Istanbul Turkey: Colorful seafood display in one of the outdoor cafes.

Istanbul Turkey: A quick peek inside a pharmacy. Exasperated staff watching my every suspicious move.

Istanbul Turkey: Fishermen on the bridge across the river.

Istanbul Turkey: on the bridge at sunset.

Istanbul Turkey: Bootleg software being sold on the street by some of the dozens of vendors.

Istanbul Turkey: Meet the chef for a bunch of guys enjoying a mess of tiny fish. Without language, they invited me to join them. I reluctantly tried one of the miniscule fish and found it tasted delicious. Ah, the simple things of life.

Istanbul Turkey: yep, even in Istanbul.

Istanbul Turkey: Typical meal in Istanbul: before (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Typical meal in Istanbul: after. Actually, there were several times when all I wanted was something my taste would clearly recognize as real food. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Kids everywhere love chasing birds. It must be a characteristic selected by evolution for success in hunting.

Istanbul Turkey: Street sellers. An umbrella seller like this guy got me to give him way too much money with his fast talking and quick hand maneuvers.

Istanbul Turkey: artistic cobblestone walk along the outside of the old wall.

Istanbul Turkey: Interesting pattern in the cobblestone sidewalks.

Istanbul Turkey: Near the Blue Mosque.

Istanbul Turkey: The old wall inland from the Golden Horn. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: part of the old defense wall that surrounded the city in ancient times.

Istanbul Turkey: more of the old wall.

Istanbul Turkey: part of the fortifications along the old wall.

Istanbul Turkey: At the train station.

Istanbul Turkey: Some of the shops.

Istanbul Turkey: Hotel manager and desk manager at the Prince Hotel I used for most of my stay in the city are very friendly guys with whom I negotiated a manageable room rate for an extended stay. As the hotel is newly opened, they were interested in my assessment of the facilities and services: everything great I assured them.

Istanbul Turkey: Serif Yenen, publishes a Turkish travel book and leads tour groups. Here he is showing me a unique Turkish dish.

Istanbul Turkey: Backpackers wander the streets of the city along with the natives amid the towering spires of countless mosques

Istanbul Turkey: Visitors enjoy the grounds around the Blue Mosque

Istanbul Turkey: You see these guys everywhere. Lamb and pork cooked this way called kebab is absolutely delicious... by itself or in a walk away sandwich. The cooks often are characters! (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Typical street scene in Istanbul. This guy is trying to figure out what I am photographing. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: This was a very friendly and helpful lady I met in a drugstore located in one of the few ultra modern malls. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: My main Internet access near the Prince Hotel. They ran the Internet cafe as a side line to the travel bureau. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Window displaying bargain travel offers at the cyber cafe I used a lot. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: An atypical scene around the tourist area of Istanbul. (Pencam)

25 January 2001

Greetings from Istanbul Turkey

There are so many mosques with their multiple minarets in this town, anyone uninformed about the significance of those tall, skinny and pointy towers might well conclude this area suffers from a lot of thunderstorms. It makes me wonder if all the electron spitters poking up out of the ground aren't significantly altering the ambient electric field over the city.

Fortunately, the "lightening rods" always are accompanied by the beautiful architecture of an attached mosque. They are everywhere! (BTW, every time you see a word with an "i" in it, I have had to alter my brain's function to hit an unfamiliar spot on this Turkish keyboard. I'm worried because it is beginning to feel almost normal.)

Istanbul will forever remind me of the many hours I spent here trying to figure out how to get the images stored in my PenCam digital camera uploaded to a public cybercafé computer and from there to my photography storage host, ofoto.com. Making it work the first time has been a major struggle; learning what is and is not possible with this tiny stick of technology.

To begin with, most of the 20 or so Internet cafes I've checked so far have had older machines without USB ports. I realize it could get worse in some of the places I'll visit in Africa. So I checked out the computer street on the Asian side of the city looking to buy a USB card to carry with me into the Dark Continent. Here there are several 6-7 story buildings with dozens (hundreds?) of small shops crammed into them and on certain days several dozen more guys set up shop along the street in front of the permanent buildings. I made two purchases: a PCI-USB card ($41) and a CD-ROM containing an illegal copy of Microsoft Office 2000 ($1.54). I already own a legal copy of Office 2000, but it is an interesting souvenir and I'll carry it with me as a backup. I noticed that everyone on the street selling bootleg copies were using the same serial number. So, we know Bill sold at least one legal copy here in Turkey.

The lack of USB support should have prepared me for more challenges. I needed to download about 5mb of software to deal with the camera. Every Internet cafe supports multiple terminals on a single 56K modem and the phone lines often are unreliable. Downloading large files can be frustrating when everything stops half way through the process and you have to start over, or when you discover the file you have just spent 45 minutes capturing is corrupted and is useless. A wise techno-genius friend of mind suggested I burn a CD-ROM with everything I might need along the way, but I figured rough handling on the trip might make that impractical… need to rethink that possibility.

Costs of access have dropped in the two years since I last visited cyber cafes in Istanbul. Now, they get anywhere from 600,000TL to 1,500,000TL (about 90 cents to 2.25 dollars per hour). All of them seem to encourage smoking! Turks chain smoke everywhere, including-especially in tight little crowded Internet Cafes.

Istanbul has lots of banks: one or two in every block and most of them will not cash American travelers checks. Right next to each bank is a cell phone store (only a slight exaggeration). It's an epidemic. Everyone carries them. I saw a clutch of junior high school girls all chatting away on their phones while ignoring their friends sitting right at the same table in a Mac Donalds restaurant the other day. People walk down the street deeply engrossed in phone conversations, oblivious to other pedestrians and the swirling traffic threatening to run them over.

The two rolls of 35mm film I sent back to the U.S. for processing and posting on my ofoto.com site have not arrived there yet. I'm hoping they didn't get lost in the international mails. If/when they do get through, I'll send a second Postcard with a link to the higher resolution picture page (They did finally get posted in an album on the now defunct Kodakgallery.). We'll see. (Also, I finally got the Pencam processed and in an album on the now defunct Kodakgallery.) For the time being the picture part of this postcard will need to be this amazingly beautiful commercial site (Wish I could take pictures like their's).

Breakfast in the hotels is always the same: boiled eggs, olives, lunch meat, cheeses, tomatoes, cucumber sticks, bread, jellies, cold cereals, artificial juices, yogurt, several kinds of bread and rolls, tea and instant coffee. The upscale hotels like the Hotel Prince where I stayed part of the time add scrambled eggs, dried figs and apricots, and sometimes real coffee.

Things are generally cheap. A Big Mac costs 1.6mil TL (about $2.40 ). Good leather jackets can be had for 20 to 50 dollars. I rarely spend more than 7-8 dollars on any meal, sometimes with beer or wine.

When you hear the tinkling melody of the ice cream truck here in Turkey you know the LPG gas deliveryman has arrived - no ice cream, though. Most things are more like what we know in America than different. It is just one big connected world of commerce anymore.

I'll end this postcard now before the mailman comes.

Peace,

Fred L Bellomy

Istanbul Turkey: Fresh fruit on display by a street vendor - notice the improvement in resolution of photos taken with my 35mm film camera.

Istanbul Turkey: These fishermen enjoy a "fish fry" of tiny swimmers. Using universally understood gestures they invited me to join in their feast at the end of an alleyway. I tasted one of the sardine size fish and found it a gourmet delight! No wonder these guys seem to be enjoying themselves so much.

Istanbul Turkey: Good prices and selection attracted a crowd of shoppers in the middle of an underpass.

Istanbul Turkey: Bosphorus Ferry leaves the dock.

Istanbul Turkey: Typical street scene in the Taksim area. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: the tram atop a hill at Taksim on the outskirts of Istanbul.

Istanbul Turkey: There are those tram tracks again through the Taksim shopping mall. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: The old wall inland from the Golden Horn. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Another mosque at twilight.

Istanbul Turkey: another section of the old wall.

Istanbul Turkey: The ancient wall erected for defense still still stands after all these years, but even here at this historic site people leave trash.

Istanbul Turkey: The old wall inland from the Golden Horn. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: On the grounds of the Blue Mosque.

Istanbul Turkey: I tried to isolate just one of those tall skinny towers to better assess their function. The little walkway halfway up must be for maintenance purposes. You can clearly see how they end with a sharp point at the top; so necessary for a good lightening rod system. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: This is the famous Blue Mosque. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Far shot of the old wall around Istanbul with a street vendor in the foreground. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: The old wall inland from the Golden Horn. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: A prominent statue at the top of the Taksim hill: one of four sides. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Main gate into Istanbul University (Pencam)

End

Istanbul Turkey: Here is the author checking out another cluster of lightening rods. There must be a thousand of them. The mosques are beautiful and always near those tall pointy things. They keep aircraft from bumping into them with something like a fog horn. Five times a day loudspeakers project an awful warbling human voice-sound. It must be for low flying planes because nobody on the ground pays any attention to the sounds at all. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Balloon seller up in Taksim shopping mall. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Typical store window. Note the prices of everything are in millions of Turkish Lira. Nothing costs less than a million (about a dollar and a half).

Istanbul Turkey: This is the famous Blue Mosque. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: A flower sellers display.

Istanbul Turkey: an interesting sculpture along one of the shopping streets shines in the night with reflections from street lights.

Istanbul Turkey: Crowds shopping the street merchants.

Istanbul Turkey: Sunset crowds as the workday ends.

Istanbul Turkey: Elegant fabric for sale.

Istanbul Turkey: Passengers leaving the Bosphorus ferryboat.

Istanbul Turkey: A street seller and his goodies. They got interested in my loitering around their stand and motioned for me to take their picture.

Istanbul Turkey: Fresh bread on the delivery cart.

Istanbul Turkey: Chickens being roasted.

Istanbul Turkey: Baklava and Turkish coffee; the real Turkey... before.

Istanbul Turkey: Baklava and Turkish coffee. After... Yum, yum.

Istanbul Turkey: Funicular climbs the hill to an upscale shopping area in Taksim.

Istanbul Turkey: On the grounds of the Blue Mosque.

Istanbul Turkey: Fountains like this one are found all over the city as a convenience to Muslims who must wash five times a day before prayers.

Istanbul Turkey: The old wall inland from the Golden Horn.

Istanbul Turkey: another section of the old wall.

Istanbul Turkey: one of the several entrances to the ancient wall.

Istanbul Turkey: The old wall inland from the Golden Horn. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: more of the old wall.

Istanbul Turkey: Kids playing in a downtown park tucked between highrise buildings.

Istanbul Turkey: Entrance to the children's playground park.

Istanbul Turkey: The old wall inland from the Golden Horn. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Fountain in one of the downtown parks.

Istanbul Turkey: night sellers set up in one of the underpasses.

Istanbul Turkey: One of the many mosques here. Note the multiple lightening rods always built near the places of worship. The God of Islam is an harsh one and you just never know when He might take a notion to toss a few million volts at someone pressing their forehead on a rug. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Have no idea what this might be. Looked pretty near the Blue Mosque, so I shot it. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: More lightening rods. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: A better view of the construction of the lightening rods with a mosque in between. Notice the little platforms at intervals up the columns. That's where they put the high wattage loud speakers... and I do mean loud! (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Typical crowd scene near the ferry terminals. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: There's one of the ferries now. They come and go every couple minutes. (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Typical street scene: family out for a stroll? (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Typical store window in the tourist area. Note the prices of everything are in millions of Turkish Lira. Nothing costs less than a million (about a dollar and a half). (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: Istanbul University campus (Pencam)

Istanbul Turkey: More street vendors near the university. Notice the pile of bagels called simit (see-meet) in the foreground. They are sold everywhere and are delicious... and apparently safe to eat as I never had a bad reaction to any I bought. (Pencam)