Ethan and Andy: Local Istanbulis

Today was further proof that our travel schedule allows us to tease ourselves by becoming familiar and comfortable right at the time we leave a city. Also, we saw again how much having a local friend helps make the experience.

Today, for lack of a clear plan, we got food at our market, Andy pantomimed a chicken to the deli guy, that was my high point. We next went off to the Prince islands. Since we are doing the "48 hour challenge" (48 hours on 32 lyra or less, we don't want to withdraw more money, it looks like we're going to make it) we walked along the tram lines to the ferry and got our 2 lyra tickets to the islands. Once we got on the boat, we tried to figure out which island we were going to stop on. Fortunately, however, the decision made itself. Everyone is friends in Turkey, and we met a crowd of unexpected but very friendly people. We met Nabil and Fatima. Nabil is an engineering professor from Benghazi, Libya. We exchanged contact info, took some pictures, and had a great chat, his english was excellent. We also met Kareem, an Iraqi. He was a translator for the US army until his son was kidnapped by insurgents (he was successfully ransomed and is now ok) and he left to Egypt, with no help or support from the US after being forced from his home to protect his family. It was a sobering but very interesting experience, unfortunately we got to our stop before we could talk as much as we would have liked.

The most important figure, however, was Ahad, "Information #1". He was a local, our age, who just graduated university and worked in a bank. He was friendly and helpful, and although we only had about 20 words between us that could be understood by the others (Andy and I had 3 turkish words, Asad had a small but useful english vocabulary) we became friends. We could share music and movies, and he talked us out of the island we were planning on visiting so that we could accompany him to a beach. It was filled with Turks, we went swimming in the beautiful blue water in an isolated cove, and made friends with the others splashing around. Our "meeting" consisted of yelling "Merhaba!" (means hello) repeatedly, and gesturing to get our message across. There was a set of brothers there, the oldest about our age, and by the end we had learned the word for brother and were applying it to ourselves, they enjoyed their American brothers and we had underwater sumersault and backflip competitions. We also met some Turkish girls: Elif and Nazan, who were very nice and chatted with us for a while and taught us some Turkish. They accompanied us back (with Ahad) and we were lucky to have guides, because we discovered that the last ferry back to Europe had gone (we were there about 5 or 6 hours). We took a ferry to the Asian side and once again, we ended up on the wrong continent. We took a tram-ferry combination that worked out ok and bid our new friends "Gule Gule" (bye bye!). It was a fantastic day with fantastic people and it makes us sad that we are leaving now that we know which areas the locals like. Oh well, there's always next time. Andy and I are officially well-seasoned travellers now, and I feel that we are ready for just about anything, which is good, because we are tackling the public transit route to the airport tomorrow. Istanbul was definitely the most foreign place we have visited, but we eventually got to love it too. And now we can stay with Ahad when we come back.

Cheers!