MONDAY At 5:00 the alarm woke me up and I went out into the windy, empty streets to take some photographs. There were no tourists about at that hour as I walked up Yeniceriler Çad searching for a road leading to the Suleymaniye Mosque standing tall above the surrounding city. I was unable to find the way to the mosque and only managed to snap off one photograph of the fiery orange sun rising out of the grey haze behind the Galata Tower. My search for a street leading to the Suleymaniye Mosque took me through the dingy and littered streets of Beyazit District and eventually back to Sultanahmet where I turned right and walked down to the Bosphorus then around to the street leading back up to the hostel.
Later on, Linda and I went to the Gentur travel office (a complete dead loss as far as cheap flights went) and several other travel agencies. Eventually, we found and booked a flight to Amsterdam for US$130 each, leaving at 7 a.m. on the 3rd. We will have to get a ferry across the English Channel from Amsterdam back to Britain.
We walked up to the Grand Bazaar for a look but it was so awful and such a tourist trap that it doesn’t even rate description here except to say that it was full of rich tourists ripe to be fleeced by the cunning Turkish shopkeepers. We spent the afternoon lazing around and I went to see “a Fat Man”1 who is supposed to be able to get fake I.S.I.Cs but he wanted 10 quid so no deal was made.
We had our evening meal at the “world famous” Pudding Shop2 and it was shitty food and shity value for money then we went back to the hospital and sat on the steps drinking beer and talking to the three other people with a brain amongst the collection of idiots staying there
1There had been talk among backpackers that we had met on our travels around Turkey about a man in Istanbul who could procure fake International Student Identity Cards. When I had asked one of the guys who ran the hostel about this he had smiled conspiratorially and said “yes it is possible. You will have to go and see a fat man.” The fat man turned out to be something of a con artist and the fake ID cards, as well as being expensive, would take a week to get hold off so in the end we didn’t bother trying to get them. Besides, we had our Youth Hostel ID cards and we could bluff our way into “student discount” using those! But to this day whenever a situation requires some dodgy dealings I always say: “we will need to go and see a fat man!”
2 The Pudding Shop had once been a great place for backpackers on a budget to get a cheap feed. Sadly however, as is often the case, once it had appeared in the Lonely Planet and Let’s Go guidebooks it had to gone downhill and become expensive. This was a situation we often encountered on our travels. Although we were avid users of Lonely Planet guides we often found that places that have been featured because they represented good value for money would have jacked up their prices and lowered their standards simply because they knew that people would still come to the premises because they had been featured in a guidebook.
CurseOfTheTraveller 