Up a bit earlier today and off to the now familiar Iranian Embassy where we picked up our visas (3,000 Turkish Liras each) from the friendly official. A quick tour of the bus companies left us with only one alternative, unless we wanted to stop in Tehran (which was not advised at the time) or pay over the odds. We paid our 7,500 Turkish Lira (£20.50) for a ticket on the bus leaving tomorrow at 17:00 hrs.
We dined at our local and set of for the Galata bridge and a 30 Turkish Lira ferry to Asia. The ferry roared across the Bosphorus strait with it’s huge jellyfish pulsating in the murky water and we reached the Asian side, the districts of Galata, Beyoğlu, Şişli and Harbiye, where a large proportion of the inhabitants were non-Muslims and where foreign merchants and diplomats lived and worked. As Peyami Safa wrote in his novel, Fatih-Harbiye, a person who went from Fatih to Harbiye via the Galata bridge set foot in a different civilization and a different culture.
However, south of the huge Bosphorus bridge, linking “East” and “West” we discovered with disappointment that it was the same as the European side, if not even more drably European in format. We went into a seedy local watering hole with it’s familiar green baize table cloths and after a couple of çays we decided that we had had enough of “Asia” and got the next ferry back.
George settled in the hotel lobby with the mammoth tome “Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien and I divulged myself of all valuables and set off for a Turkish Bath which we had walked passed last night. The Şifa Hamami Turkish Baths are situated behind the Blue Mosque and I wandered in not knowing what to expect, but with the attitude “when in Rome . . .”
I was directed to a booth with a couch and some clothes pegs, so I stripped off and hung up my gear. I was then directed to the bathroom where I started to have a shower when I was joined by my masseur and scrubber. He indicated that I should lie on a warm marble slab and there followed about 10 minutes of punching, pinching and walking on my back, pulling my limbs all over the shop.
This over, we returned to the washroom where he washed me all over several times and ran over my body with a roughened “oven mitt” glove. In between each wash I was drenched with hot water from a drainless basin. I was then trussed up in an assortment of towels and led away to rest on the couch in my cubicle. After a while I got dressed and gave the bloke the tip he made obvious that he required. I had already coughed up 740 Turkish Lira so I was buggered if I was going to give him much more and gave him a 50 Turkish Lira note.
In all it was an enjoyable and cleansing experience but in future I will settle for the self-service bath. As I left I was given a squirt of lemon aftershave and I re-joined George, newly returned from a solo roam around the Sultanahmet area. We hit the Sultan pub early and when we bored of this, with it’s instrumental background music and flat beer, we moved on to another establishment. Here we hit the beer again to wash down the accompanying chips and returned via a cheap purveyor of fast snacks in merry alcohol-induced spirits.
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