A long day around Istanbul by foot, tram, and füniküler

In a city of 14 million and tourists, Saturdays are not the best time to go exploring. Though I wanted to see more of the city, I shuddered to think of the crowds we might encounter inside the Blue Mosque or the Ayasofya. (Indeed, the longer we travel, the more I recoil from the prospect of hordes of people. I hate crowds anyway, but our travels already have us constantly on the edge of overwhelm; I’d rather skip the Ayasofya than see it in a weekend crush. And before you all jump on me, no, I do not plan to skip it! I’ll get up early some weekday!) Not knowing the city well, I couldn’t think of anyplace we could go that wouldn’t be busy. But in the end I just picked a rather distant restaurant from Istanbul Eats, and we set out in its general direction, with the intention of ending up there around dinnerish. It’s not a bad way to wander.

Setting out

Of course we couldn’t leave our neighborhood without some sustenance. Just a little something…

{as always, mouse over images for my notes, or click to enlarge}

…and another little something…

… Istanbul is such an eater’s paradise! We got up from our table, ready to waddle out, and one of the waiters (or could he be the owner?) shook both our hands and told us to come back soon. We went down the street and turned toward Tophane, our nearest tram stop.

Using public transport

Istanbul has multiple modes of public transport: the metro (subway/underground), trams (overground light rail), buses, ferries, and the füniküler/tünel (a very short underground line). All of these are almost always packed, and since the transit authority puts metro and tram lines on the same map, the system can seem daunting at first. But it’s actually not that terrible to figure out, especially if you have an İstanbulkart, which you fill up as you go and then use to touch-in on all modes of transport (like London’s Oyster, or Hong Kong’s Octopus — what’s with all these O-initialed sea creatures anyway?!). What’s weird about the İstanbulkart, though, is you can’t just pick it up at any station; most of them don’t sell it. Instead, you have to look for it at kiosks around town — and not official kiosks, either, but just random ones, the kind that sell bottled water and phone cards. We didn’t see any kiosks on our way to the tram from our apartment, so we just used 1-lira coins to pay our fare. This is another funny thing: you insert the coins into a machine, and it gives you a red plastic token with a picture of the Maiden’s Tower embossed on it. You then drop the token into the slot on the turnstile, and voilà, you proceed through to the platform, ready for the tram. There was one every five minutes or so, but even so, every single one was packed.

Across the Golden Horn to the Old City

We were going to take the tram to Aksaray, the stop for the restaurant I’d seen in Istanbul Eats, but it was so hot and crowded we decided to just get off at Gülhane and go to the park there. Anyway, we were craving a more nature-y environment.

I haven’t been a very thorough tourist in Istanbul, though I am learning my way around. It comes of having spent so much time on the road in recent months: I just get tired of planning and checklisting. So I wasn’t actually aware that there was anything to see in Gülhane Park; I just remembered a big spot of green on Google Maps. When we walked in, we both sighed with happiness. There, beyond the parked vans and simit sellers, were so many tall, tall trees.

There were also many statues, with which I amused myself, like the six-year-old that I apparently am.

The park was a lovely place to walk or sit, and we saw many couples and families. When we found an empty bench, we plopped ourselves onto it, and I sketched for just over half an hour.

I wasn’t satisfied with how I rendered the light and shadows in the trees, so I thought I’d try a quick second sketch just to get the light/dark values. I did this in about 5 minutes, without my glasses (so I wouldn’t be distracted by details).

As I was finishing up this sketch, I heard Erik gasp, “Is that a parrot?!” Still holding my markers, I said, “I can’t look, my glasses are off,” but he said, “You have to put them back on.” I did. Up in the trees: a green parrot.

(When we got home, Erik looked it up. Parrots aren’t native to Istanbul, but in 1998, a cargo truck carrying parrots got into an accident, and the parrots escaped and successfully survived and bred! I feel so honored that we got to see one!)

 As I said, I didn’t know there was anything notable about Gülhane Park, but as we walked, we saw some interesting-looking walls on our right side.

Finally I pulled out my street map and discovered that the walls surround Topkapı Palace. Oh. Heh. Well, we’ll go there another time.

Along the Bosphorus — and a little geography lesson

At the end of the park, we crossed the street and found ourselves along the Bosphorus.

If you don’t know — and I didn’t, before we came here — the Bosphorus is the strait that separates the two sides of Istanbul: the part that’s on the European continent, and the Asian side (which is on the Asian continent). To the north, the Bosphorus connects to the Black Sea; on the south, the Sea of Marmara, which flows into the Aegean, which flows into the Mediterranean. To throw some more water into the mix, the Golden Horn is a little finger of the Bosphorus that cuts into the European side of the city and separates the Old City from the neighborhoods to the north. We’re staying in these northern neighborhoods, not in the Old City, where most of the tourist sights are located. I’d show you a map, but it’s actually kind of hard to understand the lay of all this without multiple views; you need zoom. Try putting Istanbul into Google Maps: zoom in to see the little inlet of the Golden Horn on the left (dividing Beyoğlu, where we’re staying, from the Old City, which is where it says “Istanbul”) and the Bosphorus in the center; then zoom way out to find the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean, and finally the Mediterranean.

We ended up walking quite a ways along the seafront, even though the sun was quite strong and there was no shade anywhere. There were many fishermen (and their attendant cats), a good number of vendors, and even plenty of sunbathers. We saw guys with big umbrellas and beach-blanket tents; we saw grills and a coffeepot set up among the rocks. It was like a beach without sand — or women; though there were some other women walking along the path, down by the water, we only saw men.

When the heat got too much for us, we bought fresh-squeezed pomegranate juices. The vendor sliced the tops off the fruits and then pressed them in a citrus juicer. The juice seeped down through a mesh strainer set into a plastic cup. “This is so sour,” I said to Erik after I tasted it, “it must be good for us.”

We would have left the unfiltered sun of the waterfront, but even though we walked for ages, the only place we could go (besides onward or backward) was still Topkapı on our right, with tourists streaming out from it. So we kept going, until we hit a little park, and the Sea of Marmara.

At that point we figured we should head back, so we turned inland. It seemed a quiet enough area. We sat on a shaded bench and drank water. I mopped my face with my printed cotton hankie (bought in Toronto for the exact purpose of wiping my sweaty face on long days out when my hands feel dirty!), and consulted our map. Turned out we’d walked 2.5 km along the waterfront (about 1.5 miles), and we were now at the bottom of the Hippodrome, a long public square next to the Blue Mosque and the Ayasofya. So we had ended up at this most touristic of areas, after all! But I was too tired to mind, and we didn’t really have any other options. We walked up the hill.

Outside the Blue Mosque and Ayasofya

The crowds weren’t as bad as I expected, actually. Definitely not even as bad as İstiklal Caddesi on a weekend — and we pass by there almost every day, for meals.

What I disliked, though, was the general feeling of touristy-ness: the many many vendors, the tour buses, the sense that this could be a peaceful place if only it wasn’t one of the 1000 places you have to see before you die (or something of that ilk). It’s the same chaos I hated so much at Þingvellir in Iceland.

Needless to say, we didn’t try to go into the famous buildings, opting instead for a little stroll around the park.

After that, we found a bench in the shade, and sat down to decide where to go next. We weren’t hungry, in spite of all our walking — that was a filling brunch! — but we didn’t really know what else to do, so we decided just to go to Aksaray to hunt out the restaurant.

Aksaray

We hopped on the tram (one good thing about famous landmarks: proximity to transit) and took it past the historic Çemberlitaş bath, the Grand Bazaar area, and Istanbul University, before off-boarding at Aksaray. Woah, this was a different Istanbul.

Not much of an attraction for tourists, I suspect, though it was crowded enough with its own people — all of whom watched us curiously. After a bit I realized I hadn’t written down the address of the restaurant, but not to worry; we were well and truly surrounded by internet cafés. They all looked a bit dingy to me, and off-putting, with all those dim private cubicles, but Erik said internet cafés are all like that (I think I was expecting something more café). At the first one we tried, the man told us, “Internet full.” We had better luck at the second, where the two men running the show gave us very friendly smiles, and brought an extra chair so we could share a booth. Our five minutes or so of online time cost us 1 TL, or about 56¢ US. As we left, we surmised that the area residents use these cafés as their primary source of internet; why else would there be so many in such an obviously non-tourist area?

We still weren’t hungry, so we went to a park to rest before dinner. In contrast to the glittering fountain in Sultanahmet, this was definitely a neighborhood park, with uneven, broken paving stones and kids playing soccer. There was a fruit vendor in one corner, selling bananas (1 TL each); on another side, women in headscarves monitored their children on the playground. We sat in a quieter section and I made a sketch.

It took me about half an hour, and during that time, we were approached by three separate people: first a woman asking for “money, money,” and then a small boy wanting to shine our shoes (my shoes, as it turned out; I hadn’t noticed, but Erik was wearing running shoes), and finally a man selling flat round packages of some kind of waffle-patterned snack (“Turkish lira,” he said several times). Erik said “sorry” to all three of them, but I ignored them and focused on my sketch. It’s awkward, being asked for money in other countries. A few lira is almost nothing to us, but I suspect that giving money in such places would only wreck our peace. And who knows what lies behind these requests? They might be the opening for a scam or further importuning; they might be organized efforts, with the money not actually going to the young child doing the asking. It always seems easier to harden my heart against all, than to pick and choose whom to help, and perhaps end up getting into more than I bargained for. It goes against all our values, to ignore people who approach us, but I’ve learned to think of it as a kind of sign language, with my refusal to make eye contact as an understood signal for “nothing doing here.”

By the time I finished my sketch it was getting dark.

We headed up the street in search of the restaurant, but we couldn’t find it. The street number didn’t even seem to exist. We showed the address to a couple of security guards outside a building, but they were no help. Finally we decided to just head back home. We found a tram stop and got on. This time the cars were nearly empty, and we found seats easily.

Back to Beyoğlu

Once we crossed the Golden Horn and got back to our side of the city, instead of riding the tram back to Tophane, we decided to try taking the füniküler. We weren’t quite sure where it would take us, but it seemed like a fun thing to do. It turned out to be a good choice, because in the füniküler station, they were selling the İstanbulkart! We filled one up and gleefully used it to pass through the turnstiles. No more coins and tokens for us!

The füniküler (this one is also called Tünel) is a funny little two-car train that only goes between two stations. It’s quite old, predating the city’s underground train, and since the distance between the two stations is only half a kilometer, its main purpose is just to save its riders from having to walk uphill! (There is also a second füniküler in another part of Beyoğlu, this one 600m, and we took that one on Sunday.)

When we exited Tünel, we found ourselves at the foot of İstiklal Caddesi, and I thought I remembered the area from our first walk on the street last week with our new friend Z. She’d taken us around to a tiny street that felt — at the time — impossibly difficult to re-locate, but apparently it mapped itself onto my subconscious. “I think I know where we are,” I told Erik, and tripped off into the side streets. One left and two rights later, I pointed triumphantly at the little restaurant on the corner, saying, “See? Helvetia! The one Z told us about!”

What Z had said about the place was that it’s “like eating at someone’s house.” There is no menu, and the dishes change daily. You go up to the counter, peer at what’s in the many glass baking pans, and then tell the man which ones you want.

I selected meatballs, carrots, and okra; Erik got chicken curry and some kind of cold pilav. It was all very delicious and homey-tasting, and cheap, too; our meal came out to about $10 US for the both of us.

And the restaurant was a funny little place, very cute, but rather quaint as it was surrounded by bars and restaurants that vibrated with a “night on the town” kind of vibe. We could see onto those places’ patios from the big open windows. It pleased us to be having our own, quieter, night out.

We walked home on İstiklal Caddesi, which, though crowded, was actually very fun on Saturday night. There were lots of performers out, in addition to the usual roasted-chestnut vendors and sellers of light-up doohickeys. This group was very good.

There was also a little kiosk with a touch-screen. I have no idea what the other menu options were, but we touched the button we’d seen other people do, and were rewarded with a photo to email to ourselves. It was sweet — some of the street vendors saw us hesitating over the camera buttons, and came over to show us which ones to push.

We stopped into this store, and I bought a new sketchbook: spiral-bound brown kraft paper, made in Russia.

We walked a total of at least 11 kilometers that day, even with all the tram and füniküler rides. Strangely enough, even though I was very hot and sweaty, I didn’t feel tired from the walk. It was a very satisfying day.