A day with Turks

We flew from Boston to Istanbul last night, on Turkish Airways. It felt like we got an inexperienced crew on a poorly-prepared airplane, a far different experience from our first trips on Turkish Airways. Nevertheless, I slept pretty well and didn’t mind the long trip much.

Alla wanted to stay in a nice hotel this time and minimize her time on the streets because of recommendations by the Russian Government. A nice hotel sounded good to me too, and we agreed on the Hyatt Regency, which we were able to book at a deep discount on Expedia. The hotel got us in the end, though. And we don’t mind.

I read an article a couple of days ago by a hotel employee who explained who gets the best treatment and why. He stated clearly what I had understood to some extent by experience: If the hotel knows you’re a price-conscious shopper (you bought at a discount rate from a service) they don’t expect you to come back if you can’t find such a good deal next time. I tried anyway. Our Expedia deal didn’t include breakfast, but we had paid up for a view room so I tried to sweet-talk the clerk into giving us breakfast coupons. He wouldn’t give in, but assured us that we’d enjoy an excellent buffet for an additional 30 Euros apiece. He also offered an alternative, an upgrade to a “Regency Club” room at a discount rate not much more than the cost of those two breakfasts.

We took the upgrade and got moved up by eight stories, free supper (“snacks”), free breakfasts and a somewhat bigger room. Once we saw the snacks, we knew we’d done the right thing. It was a perfect light dinner for us on the first night of our big change in time zones, and we enjoyed the company of the hotel staff who attended to us, and great views in a beautiful place.

After eating, we went off to the pool and swam for a while, took a sauna, and came back to our delightful room. Alla brought with her a gift of two lemons, a gift from the tea lady in her side of the spa. When you add everything up, we still saved a considerable amount of money by flying Turkish Airways and staying here, and we’re having an excellent time.

Istanbul Police

We met the tourist cops today, and enjoyed their Turkish hospitality. We didn’t really want to meet them, and I’m sure they didn’t really want to meet us, but they made the experience amazingly pleasant.

It all started with my phone. I put it into a cargo pocket in my pants, imagining that it would be safe there under its Velcro flap. I noticed the phone in my pocket when I got my wallet from a lower part of the same cargo pocket as we bought our entry tickets to a big underground cistern. From then on, I lost myself in the sights and sounds of a huge chamber made long, long ago from recycled columns and stones. In ancient times, people collected water in such cisterns for use of city residents. This one held plenty of water then, but now it’s nearly empty and tourists wait in long lines to get inside.

Crowds down there bumped and jostled each other as we toured on catwalks above the water. And when we stopped to take photos, other would-be photographers pressed in from behind waiting to get their turns at the railing.

I next touched my pocket as we waited in another line, at the Galata Tower. I had no phone. While I may have lost it on the tramway, we guessed that the cistern might have presented the best opportunity since I got pretty distracted when I queued up to take photos. I went back to the hotel and started changing passwords and doing some damage control while the hotel receptionist tried to call my phone. No luck on calling my phone: The SIM card had already been removed, probably as a precaution against the phone-finder software I had installed.

Once I finished my damage control, Alla suggested that we tell the tourist police about the incident just so they’ll have another data point when they think about the security of various sites. I expected them to fill out some sort of a form and send me away with a vague promise to call me if by some incredible miracle they recover my phone. In fact, they spent a lot of time with us, took us back into the cistern to see where I stopped to take pictures, and practically promised to find the phone. I don’t know how they’ll do that, but I enjoyed their sunny optimism, which peaked when a local family brought somebody else's Samsung phone into the police station. The police got pretty excited that the case had solved itself, but it wasn't my phone.

When we went back into the cavern to talk about where we'd stopped, I met several of the undercover cops working the area. Not wanting to give away any secrets, I won’t say where they hung out. Let me just say that I saw at least one of them earlier and imagined him to be just another hustler ingratiating himself to tourists for personal gain. A second looked like a tourist with an audioguide. Security is tighter than I imagined, and I actually enjoyed my interaction with the cops.

Adventures in travel

We’ve been enjoying ourselves here in Istanbul, except for a problem with our first hotel. Today unrolled quite differently from our plans, but we had a great time.

It all started at the Blue Mosque. We got there just before closing yesterday and Alla wanted to go back before it got crowded. The guard told us that they’d be open again at 8:30 in the morning, so we decided to go to the mosque before breakfast and then come back to eat without rushing. We got to the mosque right on schedule, but discovered that they don’t open to the public on Friday morning because that’s when they do their weekly cleaning. We decided, then, to go over to the Hagia Sophia, a rather unique cross between a church and a mosque. They would open at 9 a.m. and we stood fourth and fifth in line. This proved to be highly strategic, because we could enjoy the building almost completely empty. We’ll hit another important site at opening time tomorrow!

Anyway, we made it back to the hotel before breakfast closed and then we went out to find the Yildiz Palace. We discovered at the pier that Istanbul has commuter boats and we could cross the Bosphorus for the price of a trolley ticket. We had wanted a boat ride and did not expect such a bargain. It got us good views along the way and left us at the base of a huge and very pretty park. The locals advised us to take a taxi to the palace, but we opted to walk because we wanted to see the park. Indeed we saw the park, since we had a really hard time finding the palace. Nobody seemed to know quite where it was, and we ended up walking to a couple of other former palaces in the park instead. Finally we gave up and had lunch at one of them with a view over the Bosphorous.

Properly fed and enthusiastic, we set out again to find the palace. We got really good at explaining to people what we wanted to find, because they’d generally assume we wanted to go to one of the restaurants or to a chalet at the top of the park. We, in fact, wanted to go to a museum featured as a benefit of our Istanbul Museum cards. I guess it took us about three hours to find it, and when we got there the museum’s card reader claimed that our cards had expired. The cards still had about 36 hours left on them, and we persisted until the guard relented and let us in to see her museum. The museum didn’t impress us any more than it impressed the authors of my Turkey guidebook, but he had a great time getting there and enjoyed another delightful boat trip coming back home.

We just hope our museum passes work normally again next time. We have other museums in mind for tomorrow.

Sleepless night

We only stayed a couple of nights at our first hotel because the second night’s events drove us to a better place. It all started when I noticed a couple of sketchy-looking people come in while I was down in the lobby using the internet. I didn’t worry much about it because I figured somebody would always be at the front desk, but I thought more about it later.

At around 3 a.m. we woke up to the sounds of a party in the next room. Our neighbors had clearly gotten themselves quite drunk, and had gone from jolly to smashed. I knocked on the wall to let them know that they’d awakened their neighbors. They pounded back, yelled obscenities in English and began pounding the wall with some sort of instrument. Fortunately, the wall did not break, but we decided it would be prudent to barricade our flimsy door with its pathetic lock. Our barricade didn’t look all that secure, and our neighbors continued to rant. Wanting backup, I dialed “O” on the hotel phone.

Immediately, the voices turned quieter in the next room. I asked the guy who answered whether he spoke English, and he said yes so I explained that I did not feel safe because of the situation in the next room. He suddenly did not understand, so he left the room, which we heard through the wall and in the hall, and knocked on the door across the hall. We heard that too. He gave the phone to somebody else and I told my story again, adding that I wanted to know the name of the night manager who had brought him the phone. The translator didn’t want to expose his friend, so he said “It’s just some bastard.”

“Bastard!” the night manager yelled, and made other noises I did not understand but which suggested that he was threatening the translator. The translator calmed him down, much to my relief, and promised me that things would get better. While indeed things got quieter, we did not sleep much. We thought about the fact that we don’t know how to call the police in Turkey, and about the fact that we did not want to spend another night in that hotel.

The night manager was on duty when we came down in the morning, looking somewhat the worse for wear. He somehow did not have the authority to break our booking, and he stalled us until his boss would arrive at noon. Meanwhile we struggled with the fact that we couldn’t find a hotel with vacancy over the weekend, and we had to visit quite a few places to find one in old-city neighborhood. The big boss already knew about the previous night’s events and tried really hard to assure us that we should feel perfectly fine about staying. He told us assuredly, “You’re not checking out.” In fact, however, we did check out. We had to stay three nights in one hotel and then three nights in another, but we’re quite happy about it. The first of the two alternatives has been absolutely delightful, and we expect the same of the other. And we’re sleeping really well.