Travel Journal 2002-10-21



Travel Journal	2002-10-21
More tour members
"Last night at dinner we met two more tour members: Sylvia and Carol. Sylvia is from Chicago, and Carol is from Milwaulkee (I feel like I've butchered the spelling of that horribly). It turns out that both of them are nurses -- Sylvia is a research nurse at the University of Chicago, and will be joined by her partner Ruth tomorrow; I didn't find out where Carol works, but I did find out that her partner of 5 years, Cesar (who is apparently a fabulous cook), couldn't make it on the trip due to schedule conflicts. Both Carol and Sylvia have extensive travel experience, though it sounded like Carol has mainly gone on tours (to places like China!), while Sylvia has travelled more independently throughout Europe with a group of 8 or 9 friends. I'm amazed that she's been travelling with the same people for 10 years! This morning at breakfast we met a few more tour members briefly: Laura (whose sister was still asleep), Lawrence, and Phyllis. I think all three of them are from the Seattle area, though Laura's sister lives in California. John just stepped out of the shower, so now it's my turn -- we have no real plans for the day other than to find the post office, so it will be interesting to see what we come up with before meeting up with the tour this afternoon."

Yet another lazy day, though at least we got up for breakfast...
"Today I accomplished my primary goal of going to the Post Office first thing. I had to ask at Tourist Information for the location of the Post Office, since we had tried to find it before and failed. No wonder -- it's completely unmarked, and is located in the basement of some kind of municipal or legal center. In a nearby park, there were a series of typewriters with men working at them and stacks of forms; we surmised that they were people you could hire to fill out forms for you. At the end of the street there was an office building where each window was labeled with a name and then "Avocat"; must be lawyers. Anyway, the post office itself was a very crowded room with a huge line of people who helpfully told me that I didn't need to wait in the line; it had something to do with telephones. Instead, I was able to walk right up to a counter where the guy didn't believe me when I told him I needed 50 postcard stamps to the USA -- he tried to give me 15 and looked very surprised when I said that I really needed 50. I guess most tourists don't write as many postcards as I do. Mission accomplished. We then headed to the enormous underground cistern (which had the highest admission price of anything we've seen here, about $5 a person), where we spent a lot of time fiddling around to get photographs we liked (there wasn't much light down there). The cistern was built around 1535 by order of the Emperor Justinian, and held 80,000 cubic meters of water. (Very helpful in a siege!) By the time we were done there, it was lunchtime, so we went back to a restaurant we had seen along the "trolley street" (Divan Yolu), where we got to point at the food we wanted to eat. We both chose the mushroom side dish, which consisted of a prodigious quantity of mushrooms cooked in a slightly spicy sauce. Yum. The restaurant was primarily occupied by local people when we started eating there, but was descended upon by a tour group partway through our meal. That experience made us a little nervous about the fact that we're about to join a tour group -- they were just such a horde, and I think part of the problem was that it was such a large number of people arriving simultaneously so it overwhelmed the waitstaff. Oh, well...I'm sure it will be fine! After lunch, we paid a brief visit to an Internet Cafe, which was made much more charming by the fact that a girls' school across the street had just let out for lunch, so most of the other customers were girls from the school. The fellow staffing the place remarked as we left (after 15 minutes) that we should stay longer -- they need the money! We all laughed. On the way back to the hotel to do laundry (incidentally, the inflatable travel hangers from Magellan's are great for drying clothes- we wish we'd gotten more than 2!) and relax before the tour starts at 4, we spotted two cats near a fish-vendor's cart. There are beautiful stray cats everywhere here, but this was the first time I'd seen such a young kitten (eating fish that had fallen to the ground) -- it couldn't have been more than 3 months old. One of the things that's interesting is that the stray cats seem to be beloved by the shop-owners and local people -- I saw a woman petting one of them as she got off the trolley earlier, and I wouldn't be surprised if the fish vendor let a piece of fish fall to the ground intentionally. One of the carpet vendors told the the name of one of the cats yesterday (Safina or something like that). And now, laundry."	Underground Cistern