journal

Day 6 – September 6 2024 – İstanbul – Bursa

Goodbye Han Point Hotel,

and to the streets of Fatih which every morning each of the four times we have set forth have like the stairs at Hogwarts and every night of each of our four days spent in Istanbul changed. Our street was always one more over, either left or right, so that we had even this morning leaving to steer by, it’s right here isn’t it? And, I didn’t see those shoe shops there before! Here are the bricked in arches of an old church, perhaps? And there is the church, of which the bells we never heard ringing.

Imagine: on the site of the already existing city Byzantium, Constantinople was founded in 324 by the Roman Emperor Constantine; It fell on May 29 1453: And for a thousand (1129) years church bells rang.

We had time to pause in a small park where a small scene played out,

The night of the warning cat (either the water in the ice was bad or the rice was off) another cat, a male, such big bollocks the males have! was going from table to table on the street … and suddenly a German voice: WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING! YOU MUST NOT DO THAT!

Another voice, She’s only a child. Then: SO YOU MUST TEACH HER BETTER! CATS ARE HUMAN TOO!

A small girl, walking with her parents and sister, had gone up to the cat and hit it.

These are the escalators leading down to the (paid ₺5) loos beside the new mosque,

Goodbye Istanbul!

Ferry docked where there were buses for Bursa. We queued for the Bursacard. By the time we got there, guy behind us with a ferret face started repeating Tamam! Tamam! to hurry us along … which means OK but which threw us off our game.

Two cards acquired but only one adequately loaded J ended up paying on a credit card, the conversion rate of which would have exceeded the cost of the ticket at least ten-fold. We took our seats. The bus waited while the bus driver helped another punter get his card sorted. We fumed a little. Ferret face sat next to his wife covered up to the eyeballs waiting too for the plenty of time it took so that that guy the bus driver was helping might save a few coins.

We dismounted prematurely into a very hot place expecting to catch another bus but there wasn’t any.

We cabbed it and paid about NZ$2.50 to be dropped off at our hotel, the Termal.

We were looking forward to thermal baths, for which the hotel is named and were told at reception since it is summer and not winter there is no thermal.

The foyer had a bookshelf,

and,

On the writer İskender Pala I read in the preface: Honoring his success, The Turkish Patent Institute has registered İskender Pala as a brand name.

Roomed up, we went wandering uphill towards where reception had directed us (to “some good restaurants”) and got a Oses Çiğ Köfte each, the flatbread smeared with muhammara paste, fresh mint, fresh coriander and cans of sarsaparilla, yummo! Got some directions in Turkish to dolum our Bursa bus cards that I understood and topped up in the hardware store having another little Turkish chat, then bus-a-Bursa! we were on our way … somewhere. Which, after a metro ride too, ended up being here,

from here we followed a guy in a dirty T who said he’d show us the way to the centre of town, the Grand Bazaar. Only after a few blocks did it become clear he meant I will drive you.

Thought it would be a big deal breaking it to him that we weren’t going anywhere in a car with him. He didn’t seem to care and carried on up the road.

We doubled back, caught the metro one way, then back the other way and emerged somewhere near here,

a welcome return to the familiar,

From the bazaar always a short step to the mosque. This one Sultan Bayezid I’s built after victory at Nicopolis at the end of the 14th century. If victorious, he’d promised to build 20 mosques; and instead fulfilled his promise by building like 20 mosques, 1, with 20 domes. Here’s outside,

lotta life going on in Bursa. The guy on the scooter represents all the guys on scooters who barrel along footpaths all over Türkiye. The boy is about to let loose a string of bubbles.

The Koza Kahn (Silk Bazaar, built by Sultan Beyazid II, late 15th century),