Well, we weren't marooned on a desert isle, but our trip to
Ateşehir on New Year's Day was a new milestone in our public transportation adventures! It was a
four-hour round trip extravaganza to the Asian side--and not even the furthest
eastern point of Istanbul. On the way there, the transportation gods smiled:
the 150 bus was coming down the hill just as we approached the bus stop, from
Sarıyer the Beşiktaş dolmuş made good time in light traffic, from Beşiktaş we
caught the ferry to Kadıköy with just 5 minutes to spare, from Kadıköy we took
the metro to Bostancı where we met our friends (the host and another guest) and
took a taxi to the hosts' house.
It was a lovely evening--low-key
conversation with the most generous, delicious meal. I wonder if they had been
cooking for days... and I only wish I could cook like them. So, the menu
included: roasted red peppers, stuffed eggplant/tomatoes/zucchini, lentil
salad, green salad, mushroom soup, chicken popovers, whole grilled fish! (çopra /
loach), and bread; followed by Turkish coffee, poppyseed cake with fresh fruit
and tea. Mercy, that was three meals worth!! The sad part was that we couldn't
stay as long as we wanted because of the long road home.
On the way back, we three guests took a
bus to Kadıköy. About one minute into the bus ride, our friend noticed that he
had forgotten his phone, ooooops--time to panic! We almost got off the bus to
go back with him to retrieve the phone, but he figured out that he could live
without it in the last two days of his time in Turkey (before going back to
Arizona). From Kadıköy to Sarıyer, we had two more dolmuş rides, which in terms
of time, were about as efficient as it gets.
But on the first ride, we witnessed an
ugly incident. As the dolmuş was filling up at the first stop, an older man,
clearly drunk, started by annoying the very young driver and his friend and
then moved back to sit next to a young woman behind us. For a while, it seemed
like he was just being noisy. Then, I don't really know what he did to harrass
the young woman, but she complained loudly. Everyone on the dolmuş was on edge.
The dolmuş driver told her to move up to another seat, and another passenger
gave her his place. The old man started shouting at her and as she moved to
another seat towards the front, he spat at her. I don't think the spit hit her
at least. The man sat back where he was before; I wonder why he didn’t get
kicked off the dolmuş at that point. Alex guesses that the driver didn’t want
to risk a fight. A couple
stops later, the old man got off the dolmuş, much to our
relief. I suppose it’s good that this is the only such harrassment I’ve seen in
the five months that I’ve been here...
