My Santorini escape finished, sadly, on Wednesday and I had
to move on to the next part of my adventure. That meant a flight from Santorini
to Athens, overnight in Athens, and then a flight to Istanbul.
I’ve developed a bit of a habit of not doing much on these
transiting days, partly because the travelling is often quite time-consuming,
so there’s not much other time in the day (especially in the northern winter),
and partly because I’m on holiday and I don’t want to feel under pressure to ‘do
something’ every waking hour!
So, I travelled into Athens on the Metro just as before. I
was so confident that I knew what was going on that I set myself up to write
blog entries on my laptop on the 40min trip on the train.
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| This Church is 50m from the Plaka, I discovered after walking 500m |
Well, confidence is a
fine thing except when it’s misplaced! I suddenly realised that I was the only one
on the train and the transport police wanted me to get off! I’d managed to
travel to the end of the line (about four stops too many)! Well, anyway, it was
no particular harm as I could jump straight onto the train going in the other
direction. This time I paid more attention! I got off at Monastariki Plaza as
it was closer to my new hotel. I then walked around trying to find the place on
dead reckoning. Oddly, I did quite well getting within 50m of the hotel and
then turned the wrong way and added another 500m to the journey, towing my bag
along cobblestoned paths.
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| The untiring view |
The Plaka Hotel was quite comfortable and the room I was
given had the wonderful view I cannot get tired of in Athens. I went out to see
if I could buy a book to read, which is not as easy as you might imagine
because I don’t read Greek! Anyway, I was directed to a store I knew quite
well, Public, and was able to buy a copy of Game of Thrones, the first part of the
Songs of Fire and Ice trilogy. Friends will recognise that I love this TV
series and am now reading the original work. Let me tell you, the rich colour
of the TV series adds to the book immeasurably (for me) and the TV series
appears to be very faithful to the story of the book. After acquiring the book,
I wandered around and found a ‘random’ café and ate a late lunch/early dinner
(Linner?); this is becoming another holiday habit. It is a habit that I look forward
to losing when I get home and can get hold of my diet again.
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| That view, at night, from the roof |
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| Some of the rest of Athens, at night, from the roof of the Plaka Hotel |
After Linner, I went back to the hotel which had a Roof
Garden Bar with this wonderful view. However, it was lightly spitting and with
a cold wind, so I didn’t stay. I spent the evening updating the blog.
The next morning, I took the Metro back to the airport and
flew to Istanbul on Turkish Airways. I thought for quite a while that I’d been
given a free bump to business class; that was certainly the boarding pass they
gave me. However, it turns out that they’d given me someone else’s boarding
pass and in spite of it being checked against my passport three times on the
way to the seat, it was only when some ‘celebrity’ (politician, I think) and
their entourage showed up did they realise I was in the wrong seat. So, I was
moved back to the seat I’d originally been given when I checked in on Santorini
the day before. It was disappointing and a little inconvenient, but whatever.
And, no, I hadn’t checked the name on the boarding pass when I received it, why
would I? I was the only person at the counter at the time and I’ve never been
handed the wrong boarding pass before.
On arrival at Istanbul I (re-)discovered that I needed a
visa which was purchased immediately prior to crossing the immigration border.
Fortunately, I had enough Euro on me for the price (they don’t do credit card
transactions I discovered waiting in line) but I was disappointed that my visa
cost me three times as much as an American would pay for the minimum stay (90
days). Apparently, Australia charges the Turks a lot for a visa, so they charge
us a lot; payback is a bitch.
After the other formalities (a cursory passport inspection
and no customs perusal at all), I purchased a SIM card for a local telephone
company and then set out to work out how to get to my hotel. I headed over to a
booth titled “Hotel Transfer Information” where a young man with very good
English suggested that he could transfer me to my hotel for 200Euro! I declined
immediately. “Oh, you can use a credit card,” he said. I told him I didn’t have
that kind of credit (which was true at that moment) and asked for a cheaper
alternative. “Oh, well, you can take the Metro to Sultanahmet.” “How much will
that be?” “Three euro.” Three! He wanted to charge me 200! Nobody who knows me
at all would think I would do anything apart from taking the Metro. That proved
to be a little more complicated than I would have preferred. The Metro tokens
are easy to acquire, but you actually need two for that trip as you change from
a train onto a tram. More inconveniently, the tokens go into a turnstile that
is wide enough for a normal person to walk through. A normal person with a
large bag, however, can get stuck easily and/or must carry their heavy bag over
the turnstile while operating the machine with at least one hand. Yep;
inconvenient.
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| The Blue Mosque |
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| Obelisk from Karnack |
Anyway, I got off at the correct stop and set off for my
hotel, again with dead reckoning. This time I got to within 50m of the hotel
and asked for directions, so I hadn’t really walked too much further than I
needed. I had walked past some of the major sites in Istanbul’s Old City, like
the Blue Mosque and obelisks from Egypt (one from Karnak Temple at Luxor, of
which I’d seen its twin).
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The hotel is very comfortable and furnished in a style that
just smacks of “The Ottoman Empire”, as I imagine it anyway. It is, however,
directly between two mosques, so I know when they are called to prayer! Again,
I stayed in the hotel for the bulk of the time, resting. I did take up an offer
that the hotel made to provide a personal guide for half-a-day. I felt that it
would help me understand the place a bit before I tried to make sense of
Istanbul on my own.
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| The view from my room That's the Black Sea! |
I did venture out about 5pm to find an outlet store of the
telecom provider form which I’d bought the SIM that would make my phone connect
to the internet. This proved to be non-trivial to the uninitiated, including
those in the store, but we did resolve it after the primary guy helping me out “phoned
a friend”.
Dinner and some TV and I turned in for the night.
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