In the center, we dropped by a pub, seemingly called “The Whirling Dervish”. It's called that because in the evening they put on a show there, the gist of which you can guess from the name. A dervish is sort of a Muslim monk with a Sufi lean. Sufis, in turn, are guys kinda like Buddhists, except they want to merge with the deity through spiritual practice instead of achieving enlightenment. This probably has something to do with the philosophy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, famous among sci-fi fans, about humanity (and all matter in general) merging with the divine at the Omega Point. Only here, Sufis try to merge right away, one by one.
At the pub I finally drank some Turkish coffee, another checkmark in experiencing the exotic. The guidebook says it's an amusement for tourists, the Turks themselves usually drink tea or globdernist instant coffee. By the way, about my eternal quest for variety. Here you can draw a parallel with a youth subculture that is currently trendy — hipsters. Unlike the subcultures of old, they somehow completely resemble mush, just like my colleague Jay Lee. And the parallel is that hipsters also try everything, but don't stick around in anything. Looking at it from this angle, it makes me feel bad that I act this way.
The coffee cost 5 liras — almost 2 Ls. Practically the same as a fancy coffee in Riga. My colleagues, meanwhile, drank apple tea, recommended by Igor Shchukin. He kept insisting that this tea, despite its simple recipe of “pour boiling water over dried apples,” is different from kompot.
As you can tell from his look, Igor (the navigator) disagrees with this viewpoint. In principle, the tea really reminds you not even of kompot, but rather of warmed-up apple juice that oozes out of a Soviet juice steamer. It tastes okay, but because the cafe is in the center, the price isn't justified.
Then we took a walk along the promenade near the Bosphorus. Barkers were running around, inviting us to take a ride along the strait, which, in case anyone doesn't know, leads from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea.
We didn't go for a ride, instead we ate a fish döner. Not bad, even though they fry the fish not directly on the coals, but on a metal stand like this. What's underneath it — I have no idea. But the döner had vegetables in it, and generally I love fish because I rarely eat it — it's expensive, and I don't know how to cook it. By the way, I've been wondering — fish usually grows in the sea on its own, without the antibiotics and growth hormones currently beloved by animal farming. Does that mean it's so expensive because it's all-natural? Or has the biochemical industry already invented stimulants for it too, which they spray over the ocean?
The only thing from that opera that comes to mind is the pollution of the seas by toxic chemicals from the land — naturally (river runoff) and unnaturally (tankers dumping waste off the coast of Somalia or burials of WWII CWAs)
The fish-bread cost 4 liras, meaning 1.30. Reasonable.
It's not worth going to the restaurants on the bridge — the guidebook says they're expensive and nothing fancy. For gourmets there is a special district, check the guide yourselves.
By the way, off-topic, but I just remembered. When you're constantly rolling up and down, up and down long gentle hills, you eventually lose your sense of reality: you can't figure out if there's an uphill or downhill ahead. It might seem weird to you, but my comrades noticed the effect, and then I experienced it myself. It's especially amplified when you have a tailwind: looks like an uphill ahead, but you're smoothly rolling at 25, or even 30. By the way, inexperienced cyclists sometimes feel like the wind is always against them. That, of course, is just a common illusion of the senses to which people are so susceptible. Figuring out which way the wind is blowing isn't that hard: if you're going 20-15 downhill, it's a headwind; if you're blasting uphill at 25-30 with no effort, it's a tailwind. If the speed is more or less normal, but there's a sensation of wind, it's a crosswind. In Turkey it's even easier to tell — there are flags flapping in the wind periodically.
I drank grapefruit, I think there was pomegranate too. I love grapefruits, their taste is deep and rich, I find it hard to understand people who can't stand them.
Just remembered this: I also ate some kind of sweet tube on the street for 1 lira. It was pretty good, albeit very cloying.
Besides the market, we naturally went into shops as well, and popped into the spice bazaar. They don't actually sell that many spices there, but I did buy something anyway. Namely: black tea and chili pepper. My mom identified it as sun-dried: it looks chopped into pieces of half a centimeter or smaller, not dry. Unfortunately, it's hard to figure out which spices are which, and my comrades feel uneasy in a foreign-speaking crowd and are in a hurry to leave it.
Also, by the way, I wanted to buy a set of traditional tea glasses (çay bardağı), but for some reason I dragged my feet, even though I did find some emerald ones I liked. On the bright side, I spurred Shchukin into buying some: showed him that the shop I peeked into had a big selection, and he found some to his liking. I, unfortunately, did not anymore.
Towards evening we walked back and forth some more. I tried to tempt my co-bikers to swing by a food joint, but unsuccessfully.
I have just enough words left to tell the story of how, on the trip back, we fell victim to a dishonest taxi driver. The thing is, we had a transport problem again: there were six of us, and all the taxis in Istanbul are regular cars, no minibuses. As a result, we took a taxi in the center on the meter. A share of the blame (and not a small one) falls on me because I said “let's go by the meter, it should be fine,” as I had read that in the guidebook. But it turned out that the cabbie either didn't know the short way, or was deliberately driving us in circles, and the meter ticked up to practically 80 liras, which is almost 30 lats. In the end, he brought us somewhere (about 2.5 kilometers from the hotel), and we decided not to risk it any further. We tried to settle up with him, but in the process, by some magic trick, the slick driver also swapped our banknote, resulting in us giving him 100 liras altogether.
An unpleasant experience, but what can you do. At least we'll be smarter in the future, at least I definitely will. What I recounted above, I'm conveying from the words of my cycling colleagues, because I didn't participate in the payment myself. As to whether the taxi driver was driving us in circles on purpose, I don't know. Two negative facts aren't in his favor — it would be a weird coincidence. Then again, stranger things have happened. In any case, a tip for the future — try to agree on the fare to your destination in advance, even if it's tough without knowing the language. It will save you nerves and money down the road. We parted ways with 30 lats — considering there were 6 of us, no big deal. But it's just really unpleasant to end up in such a situation, especially if you're untrusting by nature and have a critical view of your surroundings. I myself don't really hold grudges, and I try to forget the little things as fast as possible, so this specific minor episode evaporated a long time ago. As for Igor (the navigator), he was stressing out. He, by the way, reminds me of Rat from the comic strip Pearls Before Swine.
