We recently took a bike trip to Belarus for Ligo, which caused a break in the Turkey reports. But now I'm more or less back in action, so I'll continue.
Since we couldn't find a campsite on the very first day, we started looking for a hotel in the area near the airport. We didn't succeed immediately, even though the navigator suddenly discovered that his GPS showed “points of interest”, i.e. hotels and such. The moral of the story is – seek out the settings, and ye shall find!
The first hotel we found via GPS had no vacancies. Maybe that was for the best – the hotel looked fancy, even had an aquarium in the lobby. People in suits were scurrying about inside – looks like they were Turks after all. We conveyed our thoughts to the receptionist basically through two guests – one translated from English to German, and the other from German to Turkish. That is if my memory serves me right, which it very well might not.
In the end, we left that place, and found our second shelter called “Ufuk Otel” partly with the help of passers-by on the street. They advised us in English and even Russian – as for me, the help of a very young Turk would have been enough, but my colleagues experience quite understandable xenophobia and a desire to fact-check, so they lingered to listen to the dude speaking Russian. Who, by the way, said the exact same thing – go down and to the right.
Generally, I'm writing this to you so simply – “went and found a hotel”. Of course, in real life it's much more stressful. Istanbul is a huge city, it bears down on you a bit less than Moscow, but still noticeably. The population together with the adjacent areas reaches 16-20 million (depending on how and whom you count). By the way, I once read in an encyclopedia what mega-cities are called, but forgot. Just looked it up on Wikipedia – didn't make things much clearer.
Seems like a city with the surroundings it gobbled up is called an agglomeration. (agglomeration). If we take it wider – together with rather distant suburbs, but connected to the city, it comes out as a metropolitan area, who knows what it is in Russian. The options suggested by online dictionaries don't spark any enthusiasm in me.
If we take an absolutely giant area uniting several cities, you get a Megacity, or a Megalopolis. Here the terminology gets completely blurry, so in the future we'll manipulate the previous definition. The problem, as usual, is that I don't know the right words in Russian, mostly because they don't even exist.
At Ufuk Otel (Ufuk, by the way, means “horizon”) a fat bearded Turkish guest, though he didn't know English very well, translated for the receptionist confidently and thoroughly. They immediately jacked the price up to 40 liras, to which I just as confidently yelled “çok pahalı”. I hope you'll guess what that means if I tell you the price was immediately dropped to 30. Later my accomplices found the rates on the wall – they actually went lower there. This made my comrades suspect that we were being fleeced and quoted an inflated price from the start. Personally, I don't think so – the price might have been a bit inflated, but the rates were for rooms with a different configuration – without a phone, shower, and the like. We didn't really need a phone, but I consider such a trick of pushing the full package to be harmless. Especially since 30 liras is about 10 Ls, so $20. Not exactly cheap, considering there was no toilet in the room, and the toilet in the hallway was a Muslim one. But compared to European prices it's inexpensive, just like in the pension before.
By the time we packed away our things, it was already getting dark, but we still
went out to crack some sunflower seeds in the hood take a walk. Even though our neighborhood was practically
20 kilometers from the center, life was bustling until almost 10 PM – there were plenty of people, at least, as well as
open eateries. Other stores slowly started closing down after 8 PM.
While walking, I grabbed some of the exotic stuff I love so much – in a small joint we ate pizza and pide. The pizza is a bit dry and has traditional spices, and the pide is a long and narrow bun, like Pinocchio's nose, with filling inside. Not to be confused with döner – that one isn't sealed, it's bigger, and the filling is put into an already baked bun. Pide, apparently, is baked like pizza, right away with the filling. It tastes like a pirozhok, only, as usual, with spices. There were several types of pide – with meat, cheese, and something else.
As you can see, there were also plenty of döners in the hood. The prices are pleasing – half a döner (a sizeable one) with chicken and ayran costs 1 lira, so 33 santims, which is a bit over half a dollar. With meat or offal (if I understand the word “kokoreç” on the right correctly) – 3 liras, so one lat. Note that it's clean inside, the chefs' clothes are also snow-white, plus the hats. It might be Asia, sure, but a civilized one.
By the way, my iPhone was picking up a Wi-Fi network at the hotel: there was an access point hanging in the hallway on every floor. The network was secured – I didn't even ask if it could be opened, and if it cost money (I think yes). This, I think, very clearly shows that I'm not a technomaniac. On the other hand, we were seriously exhausted that day – I didn't give a damn about the internet in that state. In general, Igor once said that on such trips, a designated person is informed about the squad's progress over the phone, and then they post the info online for everyone wanting to stay updated, usually relatives and friends. I'm thinking of setting up a more progressive method via mopoto.com , Twitter, or blogmailr.com. The latter actually allows posting straight here, to my blog, which is exactly what I want. I still haven't grasped the point of Twitter, and as for mopoto, sadly, it can only crosspost to LiveJournal, so it doesn't suit me for now.
In any case, all these options are off the table for now because my half-jailbroken iPhone, as it turned out, is hard to get working in roaming. Even if I managed it, a damn SMS in Turkey would cost 22 santims, not to mention GPRS, which would cost a fortune altogether. So screw the damn capitalist monopolists until the whole world merges into a flatrate infosphere. If you and your friend are wading through my jargon, I'll explain – regular internet now costs a fixed monthly fee with no hidden charges. This will surely happen with all other communications as well, including mobile internet and phone calls. The only question is – when. By the way, if anyone didn't know, your phone transmits SMS during its very frequent, regular service communication with the base station – meaning technically it doesn't put any extra load on it. Right away you get people yelling that cellular operators have gotten brazen – SMS costs them nothing, yet they fleece us for mountains of cash. That's not entirely true – after all, the SMS still needs to be routed through the network. The other thing is that one message is less than half a second of voice, plus the delivery isn't urgent, so the costs are indeed tiny. Still, everyone knows that LMT is one of the most profitable companies in Latvia, and their profit margin relative to turnover is also huge, so I won't be discovering America here.
