Although I have lived most of my life in Helsinki, I have never been that much of a city person. In Marrakech all the exhausts made me feel sick, Casablanca was just too packed, Dubai artificial and Beirut just a big mess. Still, Istanbul with all its cafés and filled-with small alleys to wonder around made me feel great. It has been quite a journey through different countries with both the cities and back country. Blumi likes cities more, where I and Arto are more into the peace and calmness of the nature. We kind of complete the lack of each other by our differences in our opinions. Here is what Istanbul was for us.
As I earlier told you, we arrived to Istanbul at night and the only agenda was to find a hotel to get some sleep after the long drive. The next morning we had to return our rental car to the airport and leave most of our luggage there to make the sightseeing a little easier in Istanbul. Like in many other big cities, in Istanbul the easiest way to get around is the Metro. There are maybe five different lines and two of them are actually trams. We took a metro from the airport and in 30 minutes we were in the city centre. Luckily, Ape had been in Istanbul a few years back, so we kind of had a guide inside our group.
First we went to see the probably biggest tourist attraction in Istanbul, the Hagia Sofia, which was an old mosque that was turned into a museum. It is amazing how they were able to build it in the beginning of the sixth century and finished it in just 4 years. Just next to Hagia Sofia is the Blue Mosque, which is also totally worth seeing.
Next Ape wanted to take as to Taksim, which is the shopping district of Istanbul. Taksim is filled with small alleys and cafes and it really was my and the boys favorite place in Istanbul. We spend the day just walking around Taksim area and sitting in many cafés and just looking at the swarming masses of people.
Istanbul really is a big city with its 15 million residents and you can see this especially in Taksim. The streets are packed with people and sometimes it is hard to get through the masses.
Evening came and it was once again time to find a hotel. Taksim is full of small hotels and hostels, and you can easily find decent priced accommodation. We got ourselves a nice small hotel for 20 Euros a night and the hostels are even cheaper.
We took a short nap in our room and after that it was party time. Istanbul is well known for its party scene and we wanted to see it with our own eyes. We bought a couple of beers and went out to the streets. You really can feel the beat of the city at night time and as Taksim is filled with bars, it is not hard to find some live music or a disco, and basically everything you need can be found in Taksim. We wanted to see some local live music, so we opened our ears and after a few minutes we found a nice small bar with a guy playing a sítra. We didn't find the bar by hearing the music, we heard a guy yelling at us 'come here come here!'. This is very common in Istanbul and other big cities and you don't want to follow these guys if you are not absolutely sure that they will take you to some place nice. They can, and will cheat you and steal your money. So don't follow them into small alleys or so, because there probably is a guy waiting for you with a baseball bat rather than the fanciest disco in town.
We enjoyed the music over a beer for a while and then headed out to find a disco. In Istanbul disco is a disco and night club is a place where you go if you want to pay for everything, including food, drinks and your company, if you know what I mean. We found a disco once again through one yelling guy and he promised us that the place is packed. He even offered us two different sets. One including the entry fee and one drink and the other included a full board – as much as you can drink, I guess. The price wasn't that bad, and as promising as the full board sounded we weren't in Istanbul to get wasted, so we went for the one drink deal. Well, the place wasn't packed, there were just a few guys dancing on the dance floor and maybe one or two girls. First, we thought that had we come into one of the many gay-discos in Istanbul, but probably it was just a quiet night with less of girls out, haha. After the party mayhem in this disco we headed back to our hotel for a rest.
On the way we of course had a couple kebab rolls.
The next morning we started the day a little later and walked to the first bridge that connects the two sides of Istanbul. The bridge is filled with angling fishermen, and we saw many different weird-looking fish and the atmosphere was really chilled out.
It was nice to just slowly walk through the city and see the local lifestyle and not so much the touristic junk. On our way to the direction of Hagia Sofia, we found a nice hotel just next to it to leave our stuff, so that it was a little easier to walk around. As in the one before, the price was same 20 Euros each for the night, not bad.
We went to film some time lapses and found a really crappy restaurant. It seemed that they had no kitchen and after we ordered our iskender kebabs, the guy just went out of the restaurant to get them, probably from one of the kebab stands on the streets, and left us alone in the restaurant. Ape started doing some splits and goofed around and we all laughed hard. After a lousy dinner, we headed back to our hotel to do some writing and I spent a couple of hours talking with the receptionist about the situation in Muslim countries and about some of his future plans to open a hotel chain. He really was a nice guy, not in the gay way of course, haha. Hopefully his business turns out good.
Later Blumi and I went out to film the last stuff we needed from Istanbul, and some bastard stray dogs gave us a hard time trying to be in every single shot that we filmed, haha. Back at the hotel we ordered an airport shuttle to come and pick us up in the morning, because we had really early flights to the other side of the sea, to Greece.
I will let you know how that went in a few days.
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