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.
Next up was the procedure of passing through the metal detector checkpoint. If anyone happens to be unaware, the Kurds who settled in the east cause the Turks a lot of trouble. Kurds – they are a people numbering around 40 million. But at the same time, they don't have their own state. The territory where half the Kurds live, and would like to see it, is, sadly for them, under the administration of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. As a result, it's bad for everyone: the Turks can't give up the land because Atatürk bequeathed it so and just because, and the Kurds have to engage in terrorism. Not all of them, of course, but the ones who do are enough to worry the Turkish intelligence services. Especially since half! of the Kurds live abroad and send dough back to the homeland, a part of which ends up in the treasury of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, meaning the guerrillas.
That is why we had to take the bags off the bicycles, put them on the conveyor belt, give the bikes to the airport worker, and pass through separately ourselves. My panniers detach perfectly from the top, but the bottom mount is exceptionally stupid; I'll write about the gear separately later. In the rush and commotion (don't forget that we were passing through the general line), I tore one of the bungee cords, and the one that was just the handy medium length, too. Fortunately, there were enough left for the sleeping bag and mat to hold securely on the back of my iron horse.
As a result of all these twists and turns, we finally ended up on the ferry, where our bicycles were placed somewhat riskily right by the side. The door to the cabin was locked behind us – even though this alarmed us a bit, the chances that curious locals would paw our precious bikes decreased.
There was nothing to do in the cabin but stare at how briskly trade was going at the lemonade and chocolate stall. Victor brought this to my attention, and he also noticed that the young Turk sitting in front of us had an iPhone too. Eventually I got bored, begged a little money from Igor Shchukin who was sitting nearby, and bought something in a red can. The Turk sitting in front started making fun of me in decent English: what if I poisoned myself or worse. Had I seen anyone drink from the same kind of can? I answered him that a girl nearby had just been drinking it, and that I actually love exotic stuff. The Turk neighed at the stupid tourist and said I had bought a Sprite knockoff. And so it was. Heathens, I swear, Sprite, but in a red can!
Thanks to this, the Turk and I struck up a conversation, from which I learned quite a bit of educational stuff. First of all, he used to work in Russia and sort of knew Russian. When I started probing, it turned out he also more or less knows German and French, better than Russian, anyway.
Then things got even curiouser and curiouser – he turned out to be a software developer, i.e., a programmer. At the same time, his “native” language is Java, and he's a Linux fan, but right now he has to code in C# on Windows.
Whenever I hear about Java and Linux, especially together, I immediately put my guard up – and for good reason. The programmer started feeding me a line that Microsoft bought 51% of RedHat and the next version of Windows will contain the Linux kernel. Fortunately, I had come across this idiotic rumor before, otherwise I probably would have lost my mind completely from such news. But as it was, I just replied: “This sounds unlikely”.
Here I should have ended the conversation with the fanboy, but I had to figure out the pressing matters – namely, about gas and petrol. Without long introductions, I made the Turk tell me everything he knows with a phrase as dumb as a brick: “You better tell me something more important”.
Then he delivered another revelation – it's completely forbidden to sell petrol and gas in retail bottles, because of the threat of Kurdish terrorism. Sounds implausible, but liquids are also forbidden to be brought on planes, which is also nonsense and a conspiracy theory. Maybe, after his magical tales about Linux, I should have been more careful and not so gullible, but the data correlated perfectly with the fact that they wouldn't even sell us petrol at the gas station.
Fortunately, at a furious speed (you can see the practice right away – which makes sense, seeing as he has the previous iPhone 2G himself), the Turk typed out phrases for me on my iPhone in Turkish: “We are poor tourists, nothing to eat, pour us some petrol” for gas station attendants and “splash some petrol our way, otherwise the evil attendants won't sell us any” for taxi drivers. With some hope that this would help, I ended the conversation. Or rather he ended it, either not wanting to associate anymore with a micro-softy (i.e., a Microsoft lover), or not wanting to smell my oniony post-fish-restaurant breath.
So all I had left to do – was pore over Wikipedia articles about Turkey, it's a good thing Victor was sitting next to me and awakening my interest with leading questions. Like this one, for example: do people live richly in Turkey? I somehow thought not at all.
Turns out: somewhere in the middle. Here are a few digits. They are misleading of course, but you can understand something.
GDP per household is $13,447, while Latvia's is – $15000-$17000, depending on how you count.
Minimum wage in 2007 was €298, whereas in Latvia it was €172.
A pseudoscientific conclusion pulled out of thin air: as a country, we are still more efficient. There are few of us, and that is usually bad – when there are a lot of people, the economy works better because they themselves are the ones consuming. On the other hand, the poor in Turkey are still richer, especially considering the low food prices. They say they have problems with medicine and some other things, well, recent events have convinced me that things are only marginally better for us.
With all the pondering, time passed quickly, and after ten o'clock at night we successfully arrived in Bandırma. Understandably, it was already completely dark, and we still had to look for a place to sleep. But more on that – in the next part.