Since my stopover in Istanbul in 2017, I had been dying to visit Turkey again, but somehow all my attempts were blown. As a result, it felt quite surreal when I said “let me tag along” when Christy, my decade-long travel companion, said she was maybe kinda thinking about going to Turkey or somewhere, and we paid for our flights on the spot.

In the next ten days, I was looking through as much resources on the internet as possible (while trying to avoid spoilers, of course) but found the process frustrating. Most of their websites don’t have an English version, and then a local phone number is needed to purchase a bus or train ticket. There was also the pain crash-coursing almost the entire history of Western civilization in a few days, only to forget it later. Truthfully, I had never been this unnerved before a trip yet.

In retrospect, I see a lot of things I could have done to better utilize my time and money. I should have gotten a MuzeKart in advance and use it for Ephesus and Pamukkale as well as all the museums in Istanbul. Same goes for the Istanbulkart (I still don’t know if I can buy one at the airport!) so we can save a lot of time messing arount with train/ferry ticket kiosks. I also think I’ve spent too much time taking bus and train to and from Denizli and Pamukkale - it only took a simple search to know that there was an airport in Denizli and fly back to Istanbul from there :( Not doing these didn’t prevent me from having a great trip, but I hoped this summary would be useful for people who planned to go to Turkey later 🙏

Hierapolis

The Places

We spent the first 3 days in Istanbul.

Day 1.
First taste of Turkish coffee in The Rabbit Hole, a chic colorful place deep in some tangled alleys. We stayed at Little Hagia Sofia for a while afterwards, then walked over to the touristy area around the Hagia Sofia to start a touristy day. We brought Turkish rugs at tourist shops and toured Basilica Cistern like many other tourists. In the evening, we took a tram to the peer near the Marmaray train station, had dinner at a local fast food shop nearby and I took a bunch of pictures of the Galata tower across the river (or canal?) In the evening, we enjoyed (not really, the jet lag made us quite sleepy) the “human fan” by watching the “whirling dervish” dance. (Why human fan? The dancers’ whirling made their big white skirts all pumped up and spinning, making huge winds like a fan did…)

Personal highlight of the day: The area around Marmaray train station reminds me soooo much of Hongkong. The city vibe in the chaotic alley ways spanning all unpredictable directions.

Day 2.
Taksim Square (which somehow felt kinda… communist?) and walked all the way down to Galata tower. Then we crossed the Galata bridge and walked all the way back to… Hagia Sophia (one of the most tiring walks in three years!) We made it to the long line for the long Hagia Sophia at 6:30pm, when we originally believed was the closing time of the mosque. Fortunately the line was slowly moving, and at 7pm we got in, making the long walk worthwhile. On the flip side, Hagia Sophia was a bit disappointing: what we thought should be a solemn and awe inspiring place had became just a beautiful but souless hall where everyone was blabbing or laughing or taking selfies.

Day 3.
After spending an hour at Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, which I highly recommend to everyone else (and you really should get a MuzeKart!), finally we get to experience the famous Turkish Bath (the “bubble bath” part was interesting; otherwise it wasn’t too different from Asian bathhouses) Afterwards we took the “supposed to be ₺8 but we paid ₺20” ferry across the Bosporus Strait (the one dividing Europe and Asia) to Usukdar (honestly we didn’t even knew we would end up there when we board the ferry lol) where there were no other tourists FUIYOH! We took the railway back after a nice dinner and some window shopping. Not having a Istanbulkart, it took us 20 minutes to finally get the train tickets 😂

Gelata Tower

Then we flew south. Starting here, the schedule gets a bit tight, mainly caused by my several mistakes on planning 😂

Day 4.
Early morning flight to Izmir, rode the train from Izmir to some train station (not really far away from Ephesus) waited at that transfer for 1.5 hours - because during the planning phase I didn’t realize it was two separate trains!!! - before resuming the trip to Ephesus. Although the morning incident made us tired and bored there was a silver lining - we entered Ephesus later than we planned to (3:30pm). Instead of enduring the mid-day heat, we basked in the golden sunset on the ancient stony grandeurs, seeing less other tourists at some of the lesser-known sights, and we ended the tour in a nice evening breeze.

Day 5.
Izmir (early morning bus)-> Denizli (Dolmuş) -> Pamukkale. While the Hierapolis was a plesant surprise (a less grandious but more primitive version of Ephesus), the travertine walk, unfortunately, won my personal “most disappointing site” award of the trip. All the naturally formed calcium pools were empty by the time I was there, while all the full pools were very large and obviously man made. I was expecting some “nature phenomena experience” but all I felt was fakeness. NOT RECOMMENDED IN GENERAL.

Day 6.
Pamukkale (Dolmuş) -> Denizli (bus) -> Izmir. At Denizli bus terminal, we bought two tickets on the spot for a bus that woudln’t depart until two hours later. I might have took the risk of buying transportation on-demand on purpose - there wasn’t another way to know if it would work unless I tried! Predictably, we arrived at Izmir late in the afternoon. Also, the bus terminal at Izmir wasn’t where I thought it should be, so what I thought was a short walk to the hotel turned out to be another taxi ride :( The evening was quite fun though. We brought stuff at a local touristless bazaar, had dinner in a restaurant right by Aegean Sea (didn’t taste good though,) and ended the day walking back through the downtown night scene.

Personal highlight of the day: The bus ride made up for the two hours wait. In terms of comfortableness it was below my mark, but that was the first time I had ever seen a snack trolly on a bus…!

Day 7.
Flight from Izmir back to Istanbul, then spent most of the afternoon walking along a waterfront promenade, went back to Little Haga Sofia one more time, before enjoying sunset, cocktail and the view of Blue Mosque on a rooftop bar :)

Overall Impression: Same as when I was traveling through Chinese tourist attractions (and I guessed the same would apply to many Asian places): The ancient remains, local lifestyle, and every thing that’s associated with “culture” and “humanity” are spectacular and worths a trip. Nature, however? Not so much. It’s so over exploited by the travel industry and so over re-architectured to “attract more human beings,” that the meaning of “nature” is lost altogether.

bus

The Food

I noticed that local restaurants in Turkey could be grouped into two types: one served what I expected of “middle eastern food” with naans and kebab; the other, which caught me by surprise, served Uyghur cuisine common in northwest China like pilaf and big plate chicken. The latter was way more close to my “comfort food” than kebab. It almost made me feel nostalgic.

It might be middle eastern style but most of the cooked vegatables coming with the food were not up my standard, except three really good ones: tomatoes, eggplants and peppers. See what’s in common? All of them belong to the Solanaceae family… wait, did i miss potato? They also have really good potato, it’s just that I never count potato as a “vegetable” 😂

I also loved the Simit (Turkish bagel) which Christy said tasted similar to the bagels in Montreal (interesting how two places so far away from each other could have this in common!). I buy one whenever I get the chance. Of course, almost every time I get a Simit, as well as many other sort of food or snacks, a cup of Turkish tea in the ince belli (tulip-shaped cup) accompanies. Turkish tea seems to be the “default drink” in Turkey (or do I feel more so because they serve it more to tourists?) I’m having at least 3-4 cups a day; whenever I sit down somewhere indoors, someone would bound to ask whether I want a cup of Turkish tea.

Lastly, Turkey didn’t make me feel any warmer torwards baklava. It was way too sweet for my taste, but previously I did wonder “maybe the American ones weren’t good enough.” Answer is NO - it was just not my thing.

bagel

The Culture

I expected Turkey to be more conservative than the average western world, but still more liberal than my impression of an Islamic culture (which probably is still true.) Being the “center of the world” and locating within 10 hours flight to all metrapolises in the northern hemisphere, Turkey should have its fair share of globalization and western influence, shouldn’t it?

Therefore I was taken by surprise when I buy train tickets online. Each passenger has to declare their sex when selecting seats, because you’re not allowed to sit next to someone of the opposite sex. This left me quite bewildered - people were telling me that Bulgarians and Greeks travel here all the time and vice versa, so where’s the influence?

As I’m writing this, I start Googling “why gender restriction on turkish trains.” Nothing in the first page attempts to answer the question “why”, but there are a bunch of posts discussing ways to “workaround” this, like lying about the gender or booking extra seats. This reminds me my conversations with my non Chinese friends about Chinese internet regulations and speech censorship - “Don’t you people feel this is wrong? If you do, why are you still tolerating this?””Many of us actually do feel wrong and are rightfully angry, but workarounding it is so much easier than fighting a losing battle, especially when we have a tough life to live, a high rent to pay, and so many more immediate problems we have to solve.”

I also got a blast of gender inequality in mosques. While women were all wrapped up in hijab and sleeves, men praying in mosques were wearing shorts and big T-shirts which looked too casual even for the office 🙄️ After a few mosque trips, I started thinking that woman tourists with short hair really needn’t bother with mosque attires - just wear something that’s not a dress or skirt and tell everyone that you are male, and there are so many clothes you can leave out of your luggage 🙄️

The People

This section is long, so TL;DR:
Have a local friend take you places, and if you don’t have one, try to make one on the spot.

A Tale of Two Taxi Rides

During the week long trip, we would take a roundtrip flight between SAW (the domestic airport in Istanbul) and ADB (Izmir), and to get to SAW from our hotel A in Fatih we need to take a cab, and the same would apply when we go to hotel B (also in Fatih) from SAW on our return trip.

The evening before our early morning departure to SAW, we asked the hotel A receptionist, whom we had made occational chatters with during our stay, to help booking a cab for us. The cab arrived promptly and dropped us off at the airport before 7am, and we paid less than ₺400.

After a good time in the southern parts of Turkey, we flew back to SAW and hailed a cab at the airport. The cabbie agreed to charge us by the meter before he pointed to a card saying in English that we need to pay a tunnel toll (we learnt later that it would be the Eurasia Tunnel,) and said the English word “two hundred!” When we got off the cab, he asked to be charged ₺500, ₺300 for the ride and ₺200 for the toll. We were like, WHAT? How could it be ₺100+ more expensive than the previous trip other way around?

While we demanded a convincing explanation, the cabbie actually took our suitcase and put it back into the trunk. I stood there, kept arguing with the cabbie and showed him the Eurasia Tunnel website that clearly stated that the tunnel fee was only ₺53 for compact cars, while Christy went to bring the hotel B receptionist for rescue. The receptionist came soon afterwards, only to immediately sided with the cabbie and started going, “Everyone paid ₺500! It’s normal! Just pay the money and go!”

After we refused to pay the amount again, the cabbie threatened to call the police. He literally picked up his phone, dialed and talked into it for a while, hang up and told us that the police were on their way, and if we were found guilty, we would pay ₺500 plus some sort of compensation fee(?), and something like “you’ll be shameful for getting the police on you”. I admired Christy for, at least seemingly, firmly standing her ground and fighting back saying “call the police all you want, we did nothing wrong and would never be shameful for it”, because my mind stopped working altogether at the moment, and could only form one thought: if he wasn’t faking the call to the police, the police would behave just like the hotel staff and stand against us.

Then the event took an unexpected turn - a passer-by asked what happened and, according to the hotel receptionist who spoke English, started telling the cabbie off for charging us too much. He even went ahead to get some of his friends and together they shouted at the cabbie. Now that the cabbie was overpowered by this two or three big local guys standing in front of him, the situation reversed and almost immediately, the receptionist came to our side; he translated everything said by everyone to English for us, and when he determined the time was ripe, asked the pair of us to quickly give the cabbie ₺350, get our luggage, and leave before he could react. If it was not for the warm-hearted stranger, I had no idea how we would get out of this situation with such an optimal outcome. The receptionist asked him why he would help two stangers on the road, and he replied “they are my sisters!”

The next day was the day of returning to the States, and we need yet another ride to the airport, this time to IST (slightly closer to Fatih than SAW.) Not trusting the receptionist anymore, we called for a cab on Uber. Similarly, we got charged by meter, but ended up paying something less than but very close to ₺500. Is ₺500 the money they charge for riders who are obviously tourists? I couldn’t believe that a local would pay this much for the same ride, otherwise how did the people in hotel A got us the ₺400 ride?

Other Stories and the Moral

Similar things are happening all the time while we were in Istanbul (and Istanbul only; there wasn’t any conversations happening in the South that left me any long lasting impression) -

  • I was trying to buy train tickets from Ephesus to Denizli with an app, but it requested a local phone number, so I reached out to a hotel A staff (his name was Selçuk, same as the name of the departure station of the bus route I was buying 😂) for help. He let me used his phone number to go through the process. At the end, the app was unable to charge from my American credit card, so I had to ask Selçuk to do me the favor of letting me use his credit card while I pay him back with cash. He did so obligingly, and only took my repayment rounded down to the nearest ₺10.

  • We were trying to take a ferry but we didn’t have Istanbulkart to enter the station. A guy passing by saw through our situation and offered to help, by charging us ₺10 each in cash to get us through the station gate. Later we checked the price of the ferry. It was only ₺4 each.

  • We went in to a cheap accessory shop in Usukdar, where Christy wants to buy a chain for her new chainless pendant. The shop didn’t sell any standalone chains, but we found some necklaces with a chain that matched the new pendant well, so we could deconstruct the necklace and take the chain. When paying, Christy asked the cashier whether it was possible switch the original ornament on the necklack by her own, and the cashier guy really took what I remembered was 20 minutes to help her do it 😱

The book I’m reading “The Cultural Map” introduces the concept of “task based vs. relationship based culture”; in a task based culture, personal relationships have little influence on business decisions, where as in a relationship baased one, how friendly you are with the other person plays a big factor on if and how you will pursue a business relationship with them. My experiences above convinced me that Turkey falls on the “relationship based” end of the scale, which explains why most Istanbulish who we had a chance to chitchat with were being really nice to us, while most others - with the exception of the passer-by who stood by our side in the cabbie situation - saw us as tourists and targets to be ripped off a fortune from. (I checked the book again - Turkey was actually quite close to China on that scale!) In these sort of cultures, including both Istanbul and China, people are generally warm-hearted and easy to befriend; they are always willing to help those who opened themselves up in some way (hotel guests who had a long chat with the staff about their life) or at least displayed some sort of vulnerability (strangers who get lost in an unfamiliar area). Until you make the attempt, however, people tend to assume the worst of others, especially when money is involved, and it’s sort of “your responsibility” to “assume the worst of others too” and be careful of any traps, otherwise most people from that culture would laugh at your naivety, instead of blame the trap makers for lying.

I can’t judge whether tasked based or relationship based culture is better - each has its own historical and political reason for being that way and solves specific problems - but I think it’s safe to say that traveling to a “relationship based country” without a local friend as a guide could be tough. Also coming from a relationship-based country, I have a slight advantage over my American friends visiting China, because unlike them who are ready to pay $400 for a Great Wall tour, I always am acutely aware of tourist traps and try my best to avoid them. There are just times when that isn’t possible. Let’s go back to the story with the cabbie; public transportation took 2.5 hours and we desperately wanted to check into our hotel and got rested, so taking a cab became our only other choice; if the kind guy didn’t come over to our aid, what honestly could we have done to avoid paying that ₺500? If I’m visiting Istanbul again with the same itinerary, I’ll make sure I stay in the same hotel for both durations in Istanbul, so I can build rapport with the hotel staff in the first stay and use it to my benefit in the second.

I also reflected on my conclusion from the first section, that in both Turkey and China, culture experiences were great but nature experiences could be disappointing. It’s possible for this phenomena to be related to both cultures being “relationship based” rather than “task based.” In cultures where people don’t naturally trust strangers and try to reap as much benefits from them before they get alerted, uniting for a cause like “preserving the nature” , which is so distant from everyday life, doesn’t seem very plausible when the nature is such a big well of gold to be exploited…