Chicken, Sheep, and M&M's

As I've said before, transporting around the city is never dull here. Today was definitely no exception. I was hanging out in a district of the city that is pretty far away from where I live, so I decided rather than taking a slow bus, I would take a dolmus(dole-moosh): shared taxi, home. Although getting home fast was my desired intent, I soon regretted that desire.

As we sped around curves, jerking this way and then the other, we came to a 4 lane, busy city street. The traffic was backed up pretty bad, so our driver decided he would just use the lane of the oncoming traffic. No big deal, till there was oncoming traffic! After coming to a complete stop while staring down a taxi in a lively game of chicken, we finally nosed our way back into our lane. One would think this would be enough to keep one's dolmus in the proper lane. Wrong. After waiting impatiently for a whole 5 seconds, the driver darted back into the oncoming traffic only to get stuck there at a red light. This is when the very friendly motorbike policeman turned on his siren, shouted something that NO ONE could understand over a loud speaker, and then proceeded to calmly ask the driver to please not do that again. Tamam, the driver said, or ok! Ouch, that was quite a slap on the wrist. Let it be noted that by this time, I'm laughing hysterically on the inside, trying desperately not to make noise as the other passengers probably wouldn't find it quite as humorous as I did.

Moving down the road, we make it to the interstate highway, or I guess you could call it the intercontinent highway here since we would take it across the Bosphorous from Asia to Europe. Anyway, it's a major 6 lane freeway that we were traveling quite freely on. We weren't driving so fast, though, that I didn't have time to do a double-take when I saw a shepherd and his 50 sheep grazing on the side of the highway!

As I continue to giggle to myself, thinking, wow, this has been quite the road trip, we crossed the bridge to my side of the city and prepared to take the first exit. Only, when we came to the exit, there were at least 6 cars coming toward us in reverse! This actually got 1 Turkish passenger to exlaim an "Allah, Allah" under his breath. Roughly translated to "Holy buckets, I don't believe this!!" :-)

At last I made it to my stop and decided I needed a Pepsi Light and a snack to recover from my trip. This is when God blessed me with finding a snack size bag of Peanut M&M's...a perfect, surprise ending to a very surprising trip.

Such a mix

Today I was walking around a neighborhood here in the city looking for an apartment to rent. While my friend and I were marveling at the giant skyscrapers that surround this particular neighborhood, we had to jump out of the way of a tractor pulling a cart of potatoes for sale. I'll say it again...in the middle of this incredibly giant, metropolitan city, we were nearly run over by a John Deere tractor selling potatoes. Ok, it might not have been a John Deere, but it was straight off the farm in Texas. And that reminded me that it's also not highly unusual to see carts being pulled by mules, either. Just put it on the list of possible modes of transportation: taxi, car, train, metro, tram, slow boat, fast boat, short boat, trolley, minibus, regular bus, and oh yeah, tractor or mule.

City Travel

One of the beauties of this city is the many modes of transportation available. Of course, to the inexperienced traveler this could also be a not so beautiful part of the city. And, there are also those days when just the prospect of having to take more than 3 types of transportation is enough to keep you locked in the house longing for a one red light town. Last week I needed to travel from the Europe side of Istanbul, where I live, to the Asian side of Istanbul, where my friend works. To get to her I had a 10 minute walk to the bus stop, a bus, a boat, and then a trolley if I wanted to be lazy and not walk to the top of the hill. I thought it would be fun to sit on the outside of the boat so I could take better pictures. I was able to get some pictures. But I froze in the process. So, when I got to the trolley option, I opted to walk so that I might regain the feeling in my legs and feet. So, here are some pictures of my frozen boat ride. It took about 15 minutes to cross the Bosphorous.

Travel Tales #1

Picture this:

A 2 lane highway merging with a 4 lane highway
5:00 rush hour
City of 12 - 16 million people, depending on who you talk to

Now picture this:

A city bus traveling down the 4 lane highway starts to exit but decides it is going the wrong way. So it stops, BACKS UP and merges with the other 6 lanes of traffic
No one honks or even seems bothered by this

Picture ME watching from a nearby bus stop, laughing out loud, wishing I had a camera