An Island Get Away

On Friday, Marshall and I had a vacation from our vacation and did what the other Istanbulites do, we went to the Islands, the Prince's Islands.  Located just off the shore from the Asian side of Istanbul, they are easy to get to on a Ferry.  The slow ferry cost 5 TL and takes just under two hours.  I think we may actually have over paid by taking a private ferry company rather than the one that uses our Istanbul card, but oh well. 

The ferry ride was an opportunity for people watching as well as seeing the city from the outside.  The first interesting charactor we met was the little boy sitting across from us.  My guess is he was hoping that no one would sit on the bench at the edge of the boat so he would have an unobstructed view out wihtout having to crane his neck.  The boat was full, if we didn't take those seats, someone else would have so get over it kid!  He seemed like a whiner, and he had an interesting shirt.  I dont know very much about Spongebob, maybe someone else can decifer his shirt.


The next act came from a salesman plying his wares.  He started out with a collapsable walking stick.  He mimed being short and using it, then extending it and being tall and using it.  He showed that you could take the tip off if you wanted to walk on soft ground, but you better put it back on if walking on hard ground or you could slip.  The best part was still to come.  Not only could tall and short people use this stick, not only could you use it on hard and soft ground, but it also could be used in the dark!  It has a built in flashlight and for the low low price of 10TL he would throw in 10 extra batteries for the flashlight.  What an amazing deal.  A lot of people went for it too. 

After saturating the market with walking sticks, he brought out his next commodity, the citrus juicer.  It was just a plastic tube with screw ridges on one side.  You screw this into a lemon and then gently massage the lemon until the upper part of the tube fills with juice.  Pouring this out into a separate cup, you can massage again and fill the tube again, three or four more times!  These he was selling 6 for 5 TL.  I am not sure why you would want 6 of them, but again he had a lot of buyers.  I was really impressed with his salesmanship.  It was done almost entirely in pantomime and non-words like 'aya!' He did say 'ten lira' in English, so he knew his audience was mixed.  There were other sellers on the boat with water or yoyo tops, but none of them had the same schtick. 

Buyukada (large island) was the second stop and we got out without really knowing what we were going to do. 

So we walked up, and at each intersection we took the road that went up, until we got to the top of the island which was covered with a pine forest (stone pines maybe) next to a graveyard and a religious building of some sort.  We sat there for a little while cooling off and chatting before coming down again. 

There are no cars (other than emergency vehicles) on the islands but a lot of people ride bike (some with motor assist) and there were lots of horses, some pulling carriages, and others just wondering free.  People do live there year round, but most of the apartments are summer and weekend places of people who live in Istanbul and need a chance to get out of town from time to time. 

 

Back down the hill we were ready for lunch, but it was hard to know one place from the next so we stopped when a guy asked us if we wanted to eat there. I gave him credit for making the effort. It was pretty expensive, but we couldn't beat the view and the food was pretty good.

We got back on the same ferry heading back to town and the walking stick sales man did his show again.  (We had seen him plying his wears along the water front while we were eating as well.)  He had at least as many takers for the juicer if not quite as many for the walking stick on the second trip.

Unfortunately the day we went it was kind of hazy, so the pictures didn't turn out quite as well as I would have liked, but what really struck me on the way back was just how big Istanbul is.  I have read that it is a city of 13 million people and the 5th largest city in the world (the largest in Europe) but I guess I had no idea just how much space that many people take up.  The city is also very dense.  I had realized that when I was walking in Istiklal, but even at the edges, there is no urban sprall, it is city an then it is forest and the city goes on and on and on.