On Thursday evening, we had our final Roman group dinner at Pierluigi, one of the best restaurants in Rome according to Lisa. We had tempura vegetables, orecchiette pasta with broccoli in a creamy tomato sauce, thin rare beef with arugula and the most delicious potatoes with rosemary, and tiramisu for dessert. The potatoes were probably the best I've ever had in my life: I was sitting next to Lisa, and she said that it was probably because of the excellent extra virgin olive oil they use.
We took our last Roman group photo and ate our last gelato. We headed home to get a good night's sleep in anticipation of the early morning to come.Friday morning felt very early. We got all of our stuff together and lugged it down the stairs and across the Ponte Sisto (photos saying goodbye to the bridge necessary) and waited for our bus to pick us up. It was very late and we were all getting antsy, but it showed up eventually and we all piled on for Fuimicino airport. No major difficulties at all in the airport. We were taking a smaller plane with a smaller airline, so we had to take a small bus from the terminal to the plane and climb up one of those stairways. Seating was a free-for-all, but Kristin and I weren't able to get seats near the front, which was depressing. I wasn't overly impressed with this airline; although supposedly the flights are cheap, the plane is old and they don't serve any free drinks, not even water! Which is really terrible. But most of us just slept through the flight and we arrived at the smaller of Istanbul's two major airports at just after 3pm local time. Customs and visa checks were no problem, and except for one person all the luggage came through fine as well. The airport was almost entirely empty. (We did find out later that three people lost valuables - two people lost their hard drives and Kathie lost some jewelry. The teachers are placing in claims and complaints to the airline. They think that it probably happened in Italy, since we got our baggage so promptly in Istanbul).
We met up with our tourguide (Mel) and bus driver on our beautiful air-conditioned bus and set out on our hour-long trip to Bogazici University. Traffic was not bad until we got to the bridge from the Asian to the European side of the city, but even then there were things to look at, like the vendors who walk along between the stopped cars selling Turkish bagels called simit. We were all tired when we got to the university, but we perked up when we saw the dorm rooms. They're very nice; two suites of two rooms of four girls each, and one suite of two rooms of guys. They have air conditioning and a refrigerator, and are all-in-all at least as nice as the dorms at UW. Supposedly Bogazici is the best university in Rome, and only elite students come here.
We left for dinner at 7pm and walked for 20 minutes to a restaurant called Gunaydin, where we had an elaborate dinner planned. I had no idea what it would be like going in, and boy was I in for a shock! I would like to post the pictures that I took of every course, but as there are 18 of them, I think it would completely overload my post. You'll just have to see them later. But I will say that this was by far the best meal that I've had on this trip, and one of the best meals of my entire life. We started with bounteous appetizers (which I perhaps should have consumed less readily), followed by great stuffed eggplant, shaved lamb, chicken, beef, and lamb kebabs, fresh fruit, and a pistacchio-filled baklava-type dessert. For those of us who wanted it, there was also coffee and tea to finish it off. It was SO MUCH FOOD, but I had to try all of it. The chicken was perhaps the most noteworthy - the most tender chicken I have ever had. The glazes were all great, and the spices were like nothing I've had before. SO GOOD. I was absolutely one-hundred-percent stuffed, but very very happy as well. We came back to the dorms and crashed.
This morning (Saturday), I took a shower using my bedsheet as a towel (there are unfortunately no towels that come with the room - whoops), and then we headed out to the main road to find a bakery. We stopped at the first one we found and I sampled my first Turkish breakfast food, simit stuffed with cheese. Slightly bland, but refreshingly filling after Italy's massless cornettos. Professor Kasaba lectured us for half an hour on the plan for the day - sights from the Byzantine period of Istanbul's history - before we departed on the bus. We got our first view of the old city, and disembarked to walk down the main street from Byzantine times. All kinds of shops catering to tourists lined the street. We got to see a column erected by Constantine - called the column with rings because it is ringed by laurel-wreath decorations - and stopped to see the remains of the Theodosian forum (which was a great disappointment - all that is left is a pair of columns and nothing else, very unexciting). We walked back towards the central area near the major mosques, stopping at a bar/cafe place on the way. It was hazy with hookah smoke, but the apple tea was absolutely delicious, kind of like hot apple cider but tea-ish. We finished our morning with a look at the Hippodrome, the remains of a great circus that once stood here for all kinds of races. All that's left are a huge Egyptian obelisk (dating from the 15th century BC), a bronze column thing from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and an old brick obelisk of mostly unknown origin. The rest of the hippodrome is now a park, peopled with tourists and vendors selling simit and water and fresh-roasted corn. It's very beautiful, but completely unlike Rome; very green, which made me slightly home-sick.
We had a group lunch at the Istanbul Culinary Institute, run by one of Professor Kasaba's friends. The lunch was...unexpected but good. If I hadn't known that we were in Istanbul, I wouldn't have guessed that this particular meal was Turkish. We started with cool yogurt soup with wheat; then a parsley salad with carrots, a tomato slice, a beet slice, and a vinagrette; next chicken with fresh pasta-stuff and a bit of tasty reddish-looking sauce; and finally a lemon gelee, very sour with an interesting not-solid consistency but still yummy. The yogurt soup was different and innovative; the parsley salad took me a moment to appreciate. It was again a very filling lunch, but quite the adventure. I would have chosen none of the dishes on my own, but they complemented each other very well (other than being highly acidic).
In the afternoon, we got to spend two hours at the Grand Bazaar, a labyrinth of 4,000 shops and 64 streets and 18 gates, one of the oldest shopping centers in the world. Catherine and I stayed together most of the time (being alone is probably not the best idea), and I was completely overwhelmed. There are lots of shoppers (tourists and Turks), and lots of vendors shouting and hailing and sweet-talking you, trying to get you to recognize them and come to their shops. It's quite intimidating, and ignoring people takes practice. The bazaar is a place where no prices are posted and you have to haggle in order to reach a price. I am not very good at haggling. Vendors are very self-assured and aggressive, and I'm relatively timid and conciliating. Oh well; if I had to spend time here, I think I would get better at it. I picked up a few souvenirs, and Catherine bought a nice lamp to hang in her room. The bazaar had all the Istanbul souvenirs that you could want: ceramics, jewelry, leather, silks, scarves, bags, other textiles, trinkets, and more. Frequently lots of vendors sold the same items (Resat mentioned that in Ottoman times commerce was rigorously controlled), but depending on haggling and how much the vendors liked you the prices could be very different. You could easily spend hours and hours haggling, but two hours was plenty for a reticent shopper like me. We all reconvened at the bus and headed back to the university. Tonight, we're on our own for dinner. I'll post about that when we've figured it out!
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