Christmas in the City

The Christmas holidays came and went faster than the blink of an eye and left me more tired than I was before. That’s what happens when instead of spending your week off in bed sleeping you spend it on holiday, trying to fit everything into a week.

I went to Istanbul.

I had been meaning to go for a while now. I have a friend who lives there and it’s only a short hop away from Athens. A very short hop. It’s different and yet the same as Athens. We were constantly amazed at how many Turkish words we knew without even knowing it, at how similar but different the food, the people, the traffic is.

Istanbul is much more beautiful and cosmopolitan than Athens will ever hope to be. The buildings, the roads, the people, the shops are all more colorful. But at the same time the city seems to be crumbling.

All important cities have water. It’s something that makes me feel at home where ever I have lived. Athens has the bay of Phaleron, Thessaloniki has the gulf of Thermai, Paris the Seine and London the Thames. I am used to crossing water, seeing it from my balcony, walking next to it, but in Istanbul the experience is unique. Every day we crossed the Bosporus, from Asia to Europe and back, either by boat or else over bridges. The smell of the salt and the multitude of the seagulls as you took the boat made the city feel even more exotic. And yet we were the lone tourist among a multitude going to and fro from work. I couldn’t imagine going to work everyday by boat. What’s more at times it felt like the whole city was rocking with the motion of the waves. Or maybe it was just me.

We walked up steep hills and down cobbled streets, took wrong buses during rush hour, spent hours in the Grand Bazaar haggling, admired Agia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, ate food that was vaguely familiar, ended up exhausted in the Irish Pub (every city has one!) only to be hit on by the sort of Greeks we successful evade at home.

I just have two blots on an otherwise good short holiday. Both being typical holiday experiences I could have lived without and both being my fault. At a moment of fatal inattention I had my camera (with all my lovely photos) yanked out of my hand by a couple of kids. On the bright side, I got to see first hand the inside of a Turkish police station (all the policemen are young and not half bad looking).

The other less than stellar experience took place on New Years Eve. Need I say any more? I keep on telling myself than no sex is better than bad sex, only to drink too much and forget my good sense. All you end up is unsatisfied, embarrassed and with a surprising collections of new bruises to discover next morning. I blame it on my English genes that make me drink too much and be stupid. My Greek genes are the sensible ones that tell me off next morning.

The one thing I know for sure is I’m going back again. There remain so many things we didn’t do and places we didn’t see. Not to forget the photos we didn’t take...