May 1, 2024 Wednesday

Quiet morning in the hotel room

We woke up at a reasonable hour for a brand-new time zone. John woke up before I did, which is usual. He likes to read his news on his iPad early in the morning while I sleep.

The hotel had a hot water maker in the room, and I made some tea from a stash of tea bags I’d brought with me. John had some kind of hot coffee. I don’t remember how he made it.

We hung out in the room for quite a while, and I didn’t mind. I had tea and wrote in a travel journal I brought. When John finished with his iPad readings, I wrote some more on the iPad.

Electronics

We decided not to bring laptops, so we brought only the iPad. When I write about a trip while we are taking it, it’s nice not to have to handwrite the whole thing. Part of the reason you get some of the details I write about in these posts is that I’m writing it while we are there. I did write in a journal while John was doing his morning readings on the iPad.

We bought a keyboard for John’s iPad to bring with us for me to use. I was very happy with it. When I finished an entry, I emailed the iPad writings to myself because I couldn’t figure out how to save them. It turned out it autosaved, but it never hurts to have an extra copy.

While waiting in the hotel room for Becky to call, I worried that we were waiting for her to contact us, and she was waiting for us to contact her. Is there a word for that? I wasn’t terribly concerned, but it was there. I enjoyed our quiet time reading, writing, drinking hot beverages, and watching the world out of the large windows.

World watching

I also spent some time staring out the large window in our hotel room. A building across the street and to the left of our building had an outside elevator leaning against the building underneath the next-to-the-last floor. The story I told myself was that they’d done some construction work in the office or apartment and had finished. They were moving all the excess construction materials and equipment out of there. I also thought maybe someone was moving out, but never saw anything that looked like furniture going down the elevator. Having been in a couple of elevators here in Istanbul (the hotel and both Becky’s friends’ apartments), I understand why they would use a large outdoor elevator. The people elevators I experienced in Istanbul are quite tight.

John asked if I wanted to get something to eat, but I couldn’t get into the mood to face the fact that I was in a foreign country without a guide. I do better with a guide. So, no. We ate trail mix from the gift bag that sweet S had brought us. I was happy not to go anywhere until Becky and S contacted us. At about 10:30, S called and said she was leaving to pick us up in her car. Getting that call alleviated my concerns about who was supposed to contact whom.

Cold in Istanbul on May 1

We went outside, and it was cold and windy. Luckily, I’d worn a turtleneck shirt and jeans with my windbreaker, which wasn’t enough for me in that wind. John had on a long-sleeved t-shirt over his golf shirt. I took the elevator back upstairs to our room (on the 11th floor) to get my coat.

At that time, I thought I’d lost John’s windbreaker. I searched everywhere I could think of for it. I thought I’d lost it in all the transferring of it from bag to bag. As it turned out, I found it later in Becky’s bag, but when I couldn’t find it, I was annoyed with myself.

John, upset about losing the windbreaker, vowed never to take it anywhere again if we could find a replacement. We’d had difficulty finding the one we had as a replacement the last time we lost it in a restaurant in Italy.

I got my coat, and on the way down to the lobby, I thought I’d take the stairs. That’s how I discovered we were actually higher than 11 floors. I found a floor below floor 1, labeled A, with a restaurant on it. The next floor down was the lobby, labeled “L.” I wondered if they were trying to avoid a 13^th floor, but later saw there was a 13^th floor. Maybe it’s just a Turkish custom not to start floor numbering until you get to the floors with rooms on them. I didn’t stay in enough Turkish hotels to test that hypothesis.

Back to the lobby

When I finally found the lobby, John had come inside to wait for S and warm up. I thought it lucky I’d made it upstairs and back before S arrived. I wore my coat and gave him my windbreaker, which helped, though it wouldn’t zip over his chest and belly. He has broader shoulders than I do. I was pleased it fit him at all. You can see how warmly we were dressed in the photo below.

S was there soon after I returned to the lobby in a beige compact car. She’d moved one kid seat booster from the back seat for me. I let John sit in the front. His motion sensitivity is better in the front, and I don’t mind riding in the back seat. While driving to her apartment building, she told us that learning to drive in Istanbul was an adventure. You have to be aggressive and not be afraid of backing up.

Meeting S’s family

Her apartment building had a parking lot, where she parked. Then, she took us up a tight elevator to the second floor, where their apartment was. She introduced us to her family: her husband, E, and their three boys. The oldest was 6, the middle one was 4, and the youngest was 2. He had a runny nose. More on that later. Becky and Kevin had met them when they all worked overseas for the same organization and before kids.

S said that she thought the problem with the traffic the day when we landed was that the government shut down the city and said no travel between districts. It was the day before May 1st, which is traditionally a day for protests. The government didn’t want to say no protests were allowed but thought maybe keeping people from traveling would cut down on the protests. What it did was shut down most of the city. The traffic was caused by people wanting to be somewhere else before the city was shut down. Also, some of the sights that S wanted to show us in the city were closed for that day. As it was, we saw them the next day.

Anadolu Hisari

Instead of the tour they’d planned before the May 1 shutdown, they took us to a fortress called Anadolu Hisari, or the Fortress of Anatolia. According to Wikipedia, it was built in 1393 and 1394. It is at the narrowest point of the Bosporus River in Istanbul. Two fortresses were built on either side of the river: the Asian side and the European side. We visited the Asian side. The European side, which we could see across the river, seemed larger and was undergoing renovations.

I bought tickets for our family.

I was able to use a credit card (thank goodness they took credit cards). Also, they weren’t terribly expensive. We walked all over that place and took lots of pictures.

John and I talked about the fortress being “old shit,” as he likes to say. The US doesn’t have as many sites that are that old. I looked up the oldest city in the US and found out it is St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565.  Even older, though, is a Taos Pueblo dated 1000 AD. We have been to Mesa Verde, which was inhabited from 500 to 1300 AD, so the US has seen old shit, too. Why Mesa Verde isn’t considered a city when you look up “oldest city” is interesting. Evidently, it isn’t considred a city if the colonizers didn’t establish it. Just saying.

Lunch

After that, we ate lunch at a restaurant. At this one, we went upstairs and sat at a long table. There were five of us and five of them. I bought us lunch, thinking it was the least I could do to repay them for taking the time to show us around. Here’s a photo of Sam at lunch.

Visiting more of Becky’s friends

In the afternoon, Becky’s other friend, K, came and picked us up in her van. She’d invited us all for dinner.   K and her husband J have five kids and they need a large vehicle to haul around the family. They had also met Becky and Kevin while working overseas for the same organization. In Turkey, K and her family lived on the other side of Istanbul from S. The drive took about thirty minutes

Before dinner, Becky and K sat in their living room and chatted. She and Becky joked about their Ikea furniture as Becky recognized some of the pieces.

The kids went outside and played on the basketball court in their apartment complex. The boys enjoyed hanging out with both sets of new friends. John and I chatted with Becky and K or listened to K and Becky talk. Sometimes, I felt like a bit of an interloper/eavesdropper, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it.

For dinner, K had made a large pot of rice and a second large pot of chicken stew to go on top of the rice, which was very tasty. With their seven and our five, we had a large crowd of 12 at the dinner table. The conversation with all the various ages of kids was interesting.

When we finished dinner, there was nothing left in either of the pots.I noticed after everyone else was finished, her boys went back for seconds. Ah, boys and their appetites. After dinner, we hung around and chatted a bit more until K took us back to our hotel. Then, she took the boys and Becky back to S’s apartment.

It had been a lovely day, and I was glad to return to our quiet hotel room to rest up for another busy day on May 2.