İstanbul
At 6am our bus reached the outskirts of Istanbul. The guy on the next seat (the one who liked looking at Helen) pointed out several yellow and blue flags hanging from tower block windows. With the aid of the newspaper sports page he explained that his football team - Fenerbahçe - had just won the league and that he was their ‘biggest fan’. By the end of the same day I was Istanbul’s biggest fan.
I was won over completely: the Beyoğlu area with its nice wide pedestrianised shopping street surrounded by café-bar filled backstreets reminiscent of Barcelona; the touristy old town softened by tree filled parks surrounding the main attractions (Aya Sofya, Blue Mosque,Topkapi Palace) and grand wooden clad Ottoman houses directing attention up away from the nippy carpet sellers down at street level; the huge Bosphorus and Golden Horn rivers separating the hills of the old town and Beyoğlu. It was definitely the rivers that did it. I could have sat all year watching the sun set behind the hills topped with the silhouettes of giant mosques and the busy boats scurrying underneath (almost as fast and furiously as the deadly on-land yellow taxis).
In an email to my Mum I started waving my Istanbul flag:
“We’ve only just arrived but already I reckon this is my new favourite city! Maybe not as much going on as Paris or New York but as full and funky as Barcelona or Berlin. And more exciting visually than any of the above. The posters in London said 29 quid on Easyjet - you should make the trip. You could visit the old pudding shop again, they’ve got black and white photos of the 70’s backpackers heading East on the hippie trail. Sadly no pics of you though, I checked.”
By the second week both of us were slightly distracted by a half-baked attempt to write an article for TimeOut Istanbul but we were also starting to notice that apart from the pretty road to Bebek, we couldn’t really find many perfect bars or views other than the ones we had found on the first day.
In an email to Gordon:
“Its weird there aren’t more folk back home talking about visiting Istanbul. Mind you, the beer isn’t much cheaper than London and for a city of 16 million the centre of town sometimes feels small. Still, what a centre - looks like the place Natalie Portman lives in in Star Wars”.
The lovely Vanessa from TimeOut told us she had heard that 60% of the people in Istanbul hadn’t even seen the Bosphorus. Seems the shiny new central tram line doesn’t quite reach the millions of folk (from all over Turkey) living in the tower blocks that stretch for 30 miles in every direction at the edges.
The middle of the city feels like a separate town in its own right. A town not quite big and busy enough for us tourist types to manage to go unnoticed for long, but definitely a town whose looks and feel put it top of my league of favourite cities (the European league that is, still putting together the World Cup contenders).
JL
15-30 May 2007