A Brief Little Post About the Dolmus

And by brief, I mean here are a few photos of what I think are the most fascinating forms of transportation in the city, the Dolmus (pronounced DOL-moosh). Dolmus is Turkish for "stuffed" and most that you see driving around are quite full. I think it may be related to the word Dolma as they kind of look alike. I think they look like pickle jars. Most that you see look like the examples here. Some are new and fancy looking. Some are older models like these that have been spiffed up by their owners, with modest hubcaps and mudflaps all around. Some are in worse shape than any of these. As I've mentioned before, it is my goal to ride in one, but I'll pick a flat route as some of their brakes sound a little suspect.

I even found a little primer on the how-to.

Here's a quick photo tour of Emirgan Park, a lovely and large (by U.S. and definitely Turkish standards) 117 acre park right uphill from the Bosphorus (I'm trying reference the Bosphorus in every post I write ;-)) and relatively close to us.

It is known for its three Pavilions which have been restored and serve as restaurants and cafes. They are all built in different styles and are painted in lively colors. It is a very popular picnic spot and there are hundreds of tables throughout the park. The odd thing for me is that people congregate on the paved picnic areas and stay off the grass. They have trails and small fences set up that lead me to believe that you aren't supposed to be walking or sitting on the grass. For that reason, little bean doesn't spend as much time getting to crawl around. Anyway, I love it and it's rare in both its size and how nice it is kept up, so we return again and again.

An Ottoman style (but recent) fountain.

The Yellow Pavilion was built to emulate a Swiss chalet.

The pond and fountain below the Yellow Pavillion. The design on the post here is the city crest of Istanbul.

One of the many play areas. Avast! Who be lurking in yonder porthole?

They are constantly keeping fresh flowers in all the beds. We missed the masses of tulips that were in full bloom in April and May, but these crappy flowers are okay to look at, I guess.

The squirrels here are friendly, but try to get into your stuff when you're not paying attention.

R.O.U.S.

The White Pavilion in the background, a giant tulip with a Nazar Boncugu in the foreground.

This container ship was the largest ship I've seen plying these waters. It let off a blast of its air horn that was LOUD way up here in the park. I saw a regular sized boat try to make its way across the wake of this thing. It looked nauseating. Later, when I was walking down by the seawall, you could see water splashed all across the roadway from this thing's wake. Impressive!

I have moved from the Rose City to the City of Tulips. The word tulip gets its name from the Turkish word for turban - tulbin. I always thought tulips came from Holland, but they are actually from the Asian steppes and were only cultivated in large scale in Holland.

A lovely little treescape. Any park with this many trees is a Very Good Park.

Here are a few more pics of the lovely Halas 71. I think it would make a lovely retirement home. For me and my family.

Halas 71

This lovely is moored down the hill at Istinye Harbor. Apparently she is available for hire for private gatherings. If only the bank account would allow it.

Here is some history on her.

And here is the official website.

She's a little bit frumpy looking in most of these pictures, but is so delightful in real life.

Let's Go For a Walk!

Hey, let's take the boy and go for a walk. This is a nice two hour (5 km / 3 mi) walk up some hills, across a busy street, down a quiet road, through the park, exiting onto the Bosphorus, before heading back uphill and back to the complex. Let's go.

Gecekondu. These are ubiquitous in so many neighborhoods. They vary as to the "craftsmanship". This is a rather poor example. People live here though. These will suffer the most damage should any sort of mild earthquake happen.

Still working on completing that second floor. I don't know how the zoning laws apply, but this is directly across the way from the new fancy fancy building that is being constructed. Will it be torn down? Will they just orient the new building to avoid looking at this one?

Finally going downhill towards the park. This road is very busy with cars racing down and trucks and buses straining their way up. That green bus is a dolmus, a privately-owned minibus that serves more indirect routes than the city buses. This is a nice, new example. Most of them struggle to climb the hill and have frightfully squealing brakes on the downhill. It is my goal to ride in one.

After the turn-off from the busy road onto the small tree-lined road that leads to the park. Ignore the dumpster please.

It is a lovely road, but the sidewalk disappears in places and is taken over by trees in others requiring you to walk in the street around some blind corners.

The map of Emirgan Park. I'll have to put pictures of an Emirgan walk up sometime. It is a lovely, lovely park. We entered through the top and are headed for the bottom exit.

After leaving the park. Hey, there's the Bosphorus!

The shore road is extremely busy and full of cars. There are no pedestrian crossings. You have to wait for a big enough gap between cars or wait until traffic comes to a standstill before running across and squeezing in between the barrier (under the planter in this photo).

A boy on the Bosphorus. He appreciates the sights, sounds and smells, but there is nowhere for him to crawl around.

Here's a poor video of the Bosphorus.

Blue and Green water. So lovely. There is always a nice cool breeze along the water. Sometimes there are vendors selling roasted corn on the cob or simit, a ring of bread covered with sesame seeds. From here, we turn left and head north back to Istinye.

From the harbor, you have the option of staying on the flat streets and going  by the grocery store and up Interminable Hill to the lower entrance of the complex or taking the less scenic, but safer and more gradual climb back to the upper entrance of the complex. This is the latter option. So from here, you've seen everything, except in reverse. Thanks for coming!

Weekend the Thirr'd Part II

Saturday was such a resounding success that we decided to take a REAL excursion the next day and try to see the main part of this city we live in. This required going beyond Istinye Park Mall and finding the Metro station. A few problems: Istanbul has a terrible public transportation website, and the station, although open for over two years, doesn't appear on any maps that we could find online. Google shows some south of here, but then they mysteriously stop.

We had heard it's a nicer walk through the Istanbul Technology University campus so we crossed the road and walked toward it. We walked a bit through there, but then it spits you back out on the busy road. So we continue on the sidewalk until it ends and becomes a merging lane of traffic. So we cross into the MEDIAN and walk further until we see we can't go further on that side.

The other side continues until you have to cross an offramp and an onramp for the busy road we were on. No problem. We then descended into a BP station and went looking for the station, which was supposedly close to the Sheraton that we could easily see. We walked a half mile cross the new busy street, decided to take a detour into a children's store for a hat and cup for the boy and take advantage of some air conditioning. We checked out and I asked about the Metro. We headed back toward the BP station (on the other side of the divided road now) and no Metro. Then we noticed it was on the OTHER side of the divided road and the far side of the busy road. The divided road has fencing barring any jaywalking so that meant walking the half mile back past the children's store, the half mile back to the BP station and then using the decrepit pedestrian bridge to cross the busy road.

Once you enter the Metro, it becomes a different world. It's quiet. It's clean. It's cool. We hop on our train headed to Taksim.

Sidewalk Conundrum. More common than you would think!

Taksim is a busy transportation hub of Metro, underground funicular, buses, cabs, dolmuses, a historic tram and thousands of people. And it was hot.

We went down the short, but busy Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Avenue) where the historic tram runs it's course of only one kilometer. The street is packed with shops, restaurants and ice cream stands where you get the famous ice cream trickery show.

Thee Historic Tram, with hitchhikers. 

I remembered from quickly glancing at a map before we left that there was a restaurant right after the bend in the road. It was a nice, quiet alleyway and there was the restaurant, Ficcan. The boy was asleep by now and the servers helped us lift the stroller through the tiny place to a corner in the back where he could continue to sleep. I later found out their specialty was a Circassian meat pastry dish. Leslie had the potato version of it and I had Cupra (sea bream). My fish was good. My Efes Pilsener was good. It was time to go.

Alleyway where we found quiet, lunch.

We started the trek back home and I was feeling up for being the guinea pig for the ice cream show, even suggesting to Leslie that she could film it if she desired. I went up to an ice cream seller and he matter of factly scooped up the ice cream and handed it to me. No show. And it was expensive for what it was. 7.5TL or about $4. For comparison, you can get a fresh loaf of bread and four pieces of baklava at the bakery down the street for about 5TL. Oh well, it was cold and good.

On the way home

We stopped at a Turkcell store further up the road, looking for the modem that would allow us to have robust, non-pilfered internet at home, followed by a stop by the Turkcell store at the Sisli Mall, but to no avail. We continued home on the Metro, decided to take a cab home from the station and were home in no time at all. The cab ride was CHEAP. No more crossing interstates to get to the Metro for me. It took us an hour and a half to locate and get to the Metro and five minutes to ride the cab home. There is the concern of no carseat for the boy, but what to do? I guess I won't be doing it too often and there's always the option of the bus, which I will figure out at some point. Or the Dolmus...

Cafe Teras

Cafe Teras is the place across the pool from us supplying our wifi connection that we've been pilfering since we've arrived. Thank you Cafe Teras. We had not been there until last night, when we decided to go just to see what they offered and to give back a little for the whole wifi thing. They have bilingual menus, food, drinks, desserts and a server who didn't speak English, but gave the boy some nice love. He came out and gave the boy some big smiles and said nice things to him in Turkish, at one point calling out the chef to come and say hello. They then took turns holding him and talking to him some more. This is the normal situation we encounter everywhere we go. The boy opens so many doors for us, we owe him a lot.

Oh yeah, the cafe...

They have all the essentials, and by that I mean beer and coffee. Beer is the ubiquitous Efes Pilsener, which is decent, but not great. Coffee comes in Turkish variety and "filtre kahve", the kind I'm used to. "Used to" being a stretch as we've been drinking instant since we arrived. I can't wait to have a nice strong cup of coffee sometime. Our french press and grinder should show up later this month and we have two partial bags of Stumptown in the freezer, so I'll get my wish.

Food-wise, they have sandwiches, pasta dishes and other hot plates and salads. Leslie ordered risotto, which was good, but a bit underdone. I ordered salmon, which was amazing. They get all their salmon from Norway and it's not the farmed junk they send to the U.S. It was cooked perfectly, skin still on and crispy, served on a bed of spinach and red peppers. The cafe isn't cheap by Turkish or American standards. Our meal came to 65 TL ($35.50), but there was also one glass of wine and a tonic water on there so maybe it is cheap by American standards.

They also have two big TVs, one of which plays endless fashion show runway walks and the other plays sports. I tried to inquire about the UEFA Euro 2012, but he had no idea what I was talking about. I was hoping they would be showing the games because our TV is still not hooked up (nobody sells a simple male-male coaxial cable here!) and they really don't have any sports bars in our neighborhood. I'm sure there are some cafes by the harbor, but that's a bit of a trek to see Poland v. Greece.

Weekend the 3rd

Weekend the Thirr'd

This city is slowly expanding in my mind. I used to live in a tiny one kilometer radius, but every day, every time I go out, it grows and becomes more than what it was the day previous. Every interaction with someone, whether it's those that are completely enjoyable or one of those that seems to deflate me for the next few hours, give new life to and make this city more alive and complete in its personality. I thought I would happy staring out the window at the passing ships, but that's just eye candy. It's smiling at someone talking to the boy, pinching his cheeks and giving him a "Mashalla". It's a thank you after a simple act like buying a loaf of bread or a few pieces of Baklava.

Today started like most weekends. No rush to be anywhere or do anything. Two cups of Cafe JoJo (what I call the instant 3-in-1 coffee! cream! sugar! together!) coffee we've been drinking, my new all-time favorite breakfast of granola, sliced bananas and peaches, yogurt and a bit of milk all together, a hot shower in my new favorite shower of all time.

We made plans to go to the mall and get our internet taken care of. I can't explain the difficult process because I don't wholly understand it. Apparently we get a special code, travel to a Turkcell store in one of the malls nearby and give them the code and receive a modem. Then, several weeks later they turn on our internet and we're good. Going to this mall also required finding the Metro station closest to us and navigating our way down (easy enough, it's all on the same line).

We also had plans to go to the outdoor market nearby and pick up fruits and olives and whatever else looked delicious. They sell quite a few disparate items and only once a week on Saturdays. Our neighbors took us last week and it's a fun experience. Everyone is eager to unload their wares and is friendly and helpful.

We also wanted to find a sun hat for the boy that would fit his sweet noggin.

So we skipped the first two and went to Istinye Park Mall to look for hats and check it out. It is big. It is fancy. Security guards check your car before letting you in the garage. Just like the Carrefour down the hill, you pass through metal detectors before entering. You know, just in case. They do have terrorist groups around here.

The mall is…a mall. It has fancy stores and average stores. It's okay, I guess. It was air conditioned and not too crowded for a Saturday. That's what Americans look for in a shopping experience, right? Even still, I found plenty of lovely suits and shoes I wouldn't mind wearing. And the coolest Turkey soccer…I mean, football kit with the ubiquitous evil eye on the inside collar. All the children's stores were next to one another. I made the mistake of waiting in line forever to buy the boy two cute shirts and found nicer ones at the non-busy store next door.

The good news is they have several cafes that might serve up a delicious americano, which I haven't had since leaving the States. The bad news is, I wanted to be able to order food using my twelve words of Turkish (that include table, house, bathroom, dog and red - not what I wanted for lunch), so we went to (sorry world. sorry body) McDonalds. And they still couldn't understand me. Or I couldn't order a number 7 value meal without the server pulling out the "point it out on the shiny menu here". It was food. It was calories. There was no ice in the soda and no salt on the fries.

The other good news is that the mall might be a good alternate option, besides our living room, to hang out in during the rainy months. The other bad news is there are no crosswalks on the walk there and you have to run to cross the street on more than one occasion dodging cars, buses, cabs, dolmuses and scooters. No fun.