Today was a long day with lots of walking. We went to four districts of Istanbul - Galata, Beyoglu, Taxim, Nisantisi. We started out our day near Galata Tower which was built in the 6th century by the Byzantines. The story goes that this tower and surrounding area in Galata was not destroyed when the Ottomans conquered Istanbul in 1453 because they did not resist against the Muslim invaders. Hence today you can still see the Galata Tower on the Golden Horn skyline.
We were given an assignment to walk through Galata, Beyoglu, Nisantisi and see if we could feel the huzun (melancholy) that Orhan Pamuk writes he could feel in his memoir, Istanbul. While you could see broken fountains and a couple of disintegrating wooden houses, there was still a vibrancy to the area. My classmates and I had already decided that Pamuk suffers from depression, as we have a hard time finding the dying melancholy city he writes so often about.
We ended our class trip discussing Pamuk's memoir and travels that day at Limonata, a very nice (and expensive) restaurant at the top of a mall in Nisantisi that specializes in exotic flavors of lemonade. After a long hot walk through the city it was nice to get to relax and drink some really good lemonade.
The highlight of my day, however, was getting the chance to see the last Harry Potter movie in Beyoglu. Because we were in Europe and the time change, I actually got to see the movie almost two days ahead of everyone in the US. Going to the movies in Turkey was definitely a different experience. We walked in a small but tall doorway and it opened up to a large marble room with gigantic ceilings. I think the movie theater used to be an old opera house because there were opera boxes on the side of the room and in the back. Surprizingly there wasn't very many people there besides us and we had most of this gigantic theater to ourselves. A man looked at our tickets and helped us find our seats with a flashlight (like in the old movies you see). Then halfway through the movie the screen went black and the lights came on. We didn't know what was happening, our first assumption was that something was wrong with the movie or the screen and we weren't going to be able to finish watching the movie. To our surprise the man who helped us find our seats came back out from behind the curtain in the door and had boxes of popcorn, candy, and drinks (like at a baseball game) and we were relived to discover that in Turkey you have intermission and the film was not damaged so we would be able to continue watching the last Harry Potter movie.
It was a wonderful day exploring the city and beginning to feel like a true Istanbullus.
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