And so, having dined at the fish restaurant, and still not having found the coveted gas, we returned to the sea terminal to wait for the ferry.
Here my phrasebook let me down – it said that the ferry would be va-pour, even though I see feribot in the dictionary; that's what everyone there
called it. On the other hand, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise later; but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
At the terminal, we fell victim to a generally well-meaning but sluggish employee who stubbornly insisted
that we needed to go to some bus ofis to transport our bikes. What that was, and why tickets for bicycles on a ferry
were sold there, proved impossible to figure out. I had, in principle, read that Istanbul has unified systems
of tokens and magnetic tickets for different types of transport, but only in theory. In practice, we found some
administrator who assured us in broken English that we could bring our bikes as is. We went back
– the employee turned us away again. Fortunately, a security guard intercepted us on the way and patted his walkie-talkie –
go on back, he meant, everything is sorted. And so it was. If we took anything away from this procedure, it's that foreign languages
are bad in Turkey, but the people are responsive.
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