Author: Sarah Northway

In the Rain
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

I feel like I’m not doing these days in Czech justice so far. Probably it’s because it was like four days ago and there was so much happening (and a lot of beer) that now it seems like a blur. Let me stress that we were A) super happy to be with our friends, B) very impressed with Czech food, and C) in love with the peace and beauty of Prague.

On our third day we visited the Walshtein gardens. We had seen it from afar and noticed a grey wall that looked from a distance like it was built of howling faces. Up close it was more like random patterns in lava, but every here and there were indeed hidden faces. There were peacocks, then we took a furnicular up to a tower that looked sort of like the eiffel tower. It was a long way up it, and Colin hopped the entire way. He certainly earned his beer that day, wheuf.

It started out as a beautiful sunny day, and I wore my little dress from southwestern Turkey and my new leather strap sandals. I just developed about five pictures of myself, so vain. But after we came back down from the tower, the clouds finally came together over us and the sky broke open. It poured! We scurried for cover in a mirror maze and took hilarious pictures of ourselves as three foot tall gnomes with cone heads and beasts with long dangling gorilla arms. We also saw the Cimrman museum in the tower basement. Cimrman was a fictional person, a pseudnom for political artists around the time of the revolution. In the museum we witnessed his made up life as an inventor of such devices as the gentleman’s travelling chamber-pot and a clip that secured your glasses to your hat so neither would fly off.

The rain only got worse as dinner approached so we eventually had to make a run for it. Out of the park, down the furnicular, across to the metro and back to the castle we ran from cover to cover. Nobody was expecting rain and only Colin had a waterproof jacket with a hood. By the time we made it across the bridge to the restaurant we were soaked through. Poor Jeff was starving and looked like a wet cat. We wrung out our clothes, hung the outer layers up to dry and started with a round of hot grog. Colin and I shared goulash in a bread bowl and for once we weren’t too stuffed for desert.

We hit up the brewpub (pivovar) Fleku next door where they only had one type of beer. Servers wandered table to table with platters of the dark and tasty brew and shot glasses of bitter yellow liquid. An old guy with an accordion and a wide smile played Long Way to Tipereli and Yellow Submarine and everyone sang along. It was touristy but we didn’t care; we were dry and warm and the rain had stopped outside. Good beer and friends: all was right with the world.

Playing Bang at the beer garden
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Even though after the pork knuckles the night before I swore I’d never need to eat again, I was happy to take a second bowl of granola at the complimentary breakfast on our second day. Colin was even happier; he really hated those white-bread-and-bad-olives pension breakfasts in Turkey. We gathered ourselves and explored the area around the old castle. Some things were closed but we saw part of the palace, and a neat chapel with people buried in the floor and a creepy green skeleton statue. We watched japanese tourists getting their pictures taken with the stoic palace guards.

For lunch we went to a brew pub in a monestary and I had a terrific IPA. Well I think it was terrific, but to tell the truth it had been awhile and my beer tastebuds may be going. I had a reasonably light meal of crispy fried trout. In the afternoon we met up with some of Lenka’s friends at a beer garden in the park. Tonight was the night of some important Czech hockey game and the place was filling up in anticipation. You should all know how hopelessly ignorant Colin and I are of hockey events so it won’t surprise you that I don’t even know what game it was, but it was clearly important. After a few drinks, the Czech strangers at the end of our table surprised all of us by pulling out a deck of Bang cards. They needed a couple more players to have a game, so Charlie and Colin obliged. The cards were in Czech, but Charlie had most of the cards memorized by their art after two years of playing Bang at Three Rings at lunch. No kidding – what a coincidence that they’d pull out this game in front of him! I believe Charlie and one of the Czechs had a joint win.

We left just as the hockey game was about to start, and people looked about ready to fight eachother over our table which had a good view of the big screens. We had a dinner reservation at a bar that was also showing the game, so we got to watch and cheer along with everyone in the bar. We had another meal of epic proportions, starting with beef tartare served with raw egg, paprika, onion and other spices that you mix all together and spread on fried bread rubbed with raw garlic. Serious yum. Then some excellent cabbage soup, and for a main I had a very traditional Slovak dish (Lenka said Andrea would be proud!) which I thought was like a very rich mac and cheese with spicy sausage bits. I could have lived on the stuff when I was in university but was so full I could only manage about a third of it. Czech Republic won the game against Russia. We were expecting honking car horns etc (you should have seen how excited Istnabullers got over football) but the streets were silent except for the occasional yells from a bar here or there.

Na zdraví!
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Colin and I arrived in Prague in the evening, just minutes after Charlie and Chelsea’s flight landed. Our travel time was a little shorter than theirs… by about 20 hours. We were driven to the hotel by an expat from San Francisco who gave us a bit of foreigner insight to the city, pointing out communist era apartment blocks that had been recently painted in an array of pastel colors in an attempt to cheer them up. The buildings changed dramatically as we got closer to the heart of the old city where we were staying at the Castle Steps. The streets in that area are cobbled but very wide, the buildings old and decorated with statues of cherubs and gargoyles. Over the doors each has some sort of iconic image of a scene or an animal, which were used to identify them, eg “deliver this to the Two Suns building, a couple doors down from the Rooster building by the old nunnery”.

We’d been eagerly awaiting seeing all of our friends in Czech for Lenka’s birthday (Lenkapalooza), especially after the solitude of the Bond House. Due to a British Airways strike and some schedule changes, the rest of them had gotten in much earlier in the day and were hanging out on their terace and drinking, trying (some unsuccessfully) to stay awake through the day. We celebrated our reunion with more beer and some fresh baklava, then made our way up the cobbled streets to the Seven Cockroaches “medieval style” restaurant. They sat us downstairs at a long wooden table with huge lance hanging over it. The walls were decorated with hops, boar hides and tapestries and around the corner was a dungeon scene complete with skeletons.

We sat down just as they were starting their nightly show, beginning with a dancer dressed as a saucy maid who pulled Colin up to sweep around her (then up her leg) as she danced. She got a bunch of us up and taught us a short barn dance kind of routine where each couple had to pass through the other’s arms. Then we had just enough time for our first beer before The Magic started: an eccentric magician with a tiny ponytail in his beard did some slight of hand tricks. Colin was unimpressed with the slight of hand but loved his patter. Our favorite was when he closed his left hand around a hankerchief, then described in detail how the hankercheif was travelling up the veins in his arms to his chest (Lenka translating and providing misdirection) then back down his left arm where it reappeared in the same hand it had started from.

We feasted on pickled cheese, pork knuckles and lard spread on large slices of bread, more food than we could possibly eat. The dancer came back in a belly dancing outfit, climbed up on the table beside us, spread broken glass onto it and danced barefoot in it while we all winced. The magician reappeared with baby rabbit sponges that magically multiplied in our closed fists. There was some fire dancing, but no snakes.

After dinner, we rolled our pork knuckle filled selves outside and went for a walk over the old bridge to admire the castle area at night. I blissed out at how silent and wide the rods were after the crazy streets of Istanbul. No cars on the sidewalk, no delivery trucks that just barely fit threatening to run you over around every bend. Old Prague is peaceful and beautiful and old. It survived both world wars virtually intact and hardly any earthquakes or fires or other major disasters have bothered it in the last thousand years. I should probably look that up to be sure (I know there have been some bad floods), but the number of perfectly preserved old buildings was amazing.

Sarah <3 Prague!

Balik Ekmek
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We packed a lot of favorites into our last day in Istanbul. Our flight didn’t leave until late in the afternoon, so we donned our backpacks (still relatively light) and struck off early and took our local bus to its terminus at Taksim square. We watched an older man feed the pigeons then wandered leisurely down Istiklal street. It was the first really drizzly day we’d had in Istanbul so we pulled my backpack’s handy little jacket over it to protect our precious laptops. Have I mentioned before that I love Istiklal street? Well, I do. We stopped at another candy store for copious samples of Turkish delight and a box of fresh baklava, bought some last minute trinkets and said goodbye to the area. We followed the street to the end near Galata tower where it turns into a narrow cobblestone hill lined with satellite and electronics stores.

I had my heart set on Balik Ekmek (literally Fish Bread, a simple sandwich filled with little fish). We crossed over Galata bridge which was teeming with fishermen pulling my soon-to-be-lunch out of the water, then had a seat at a Balik Ekmek stall and ordered straight from gilded boats tied to the quay. The boats seemed designed to rock dramatically in the waves as cooks danced around frying up little fish on them. The sandwich itself was meh, but the experience was worth it. It was obviously a popular activity with locals, especially groups of middle aged women taking breaks from shopping nearby.

We could see the spice bazaar from our seats, so after some fried honey mini-donuts we tentatively took our huge backpacks into the throng of spice shoppers. We lasted long enough to buy some snacks for the flight then fled to less crowded shopping avenues and checked out the unusual cheeses, fresh fruits (cherries were just coming into season), and nuts. Turkey is the world’s biggest producer of hazelnuts and they don’t let you forget it, they appear everywhere and in everything from Turkish delight and truffles to sugary breakfast spreads in different flavors.

We wandered up streets that sold children’s clothing, sewing notions and fabric towards the Hagia Sophia. There we sat on a wall, ate some roasted chestnuts (sold on practically every street corner in tourist areas, it was my last chance to have some) and admired the ancient city one last time.

We’re in Prague now with our friends from San Francisco. There’s already so much to talk about and so many pictures to post – coming soon!

View from the Bond House
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We awoke on the day of our flight back to Istanbul to find that my phone could no longer connect to the Vodaphone network. There is a cumbersome cellphone registration process here in Turkey, and out of country phones will only work for a few weeks or months before being banned from networks. They say it’s to prevent people from dodging taxes by buying phones online, but I suspect it’s a homeland security thing. At any rate, there went our only connection since the one at our pension was down. We hit up a wifi cafe and scribbled down the address of our next apartment in Istanbul, then traded up our wheels for wings and with a hop, skip and a jump we were back in the big city.

The doorman met us as our taxi pulled up in front of the new apartment on the water near Fatih bridge, but we weren’t sure it was the right place until we looked up and saw the huge deck around the top floor. The building itself is a little worn in and has a rickety old elevator, but our apartment… well the pictures weren’t lying, it definitely could pass as a Bond villain’s hideout. Everything in here is wide, white, and where possible, marble. The living room walls are entirely windows that slide open so that the walls just disappear. It’s surrounded by a deck so impossibly huge you could never use it all, an enormous expanse of white marble above the sight of most of the surrounding streets and houses. The view is spectacular, the only building between us and the water is a beautiful two hundred year old mansion covered with ivy. There are indeed two Jacuzzis; the one outside is probably the coolest bath tub I will ever use. It even has a clothes dryer imported from Germany, something I was starting to think was illegal in Turkey.

There was only one catch… no Internet.

Let me try again with proper emphasis: _NO_INTERNET_!! :(((

We were crestfallen; gone were our plans of meeting up with the Istanbul Game Jammers that night as we couldn’t look up the address, find the route, or contact them. We couldn’t find translations for the router settings. We couldn’t contact the apartment owner or the ISP to ask them to fix it. We couldn’t upload our backlog of pictures and blog posts. We couldn’t order in food. So we did what we could: we panicked.

Colin voted we skip dinner and go to bed, curl up in the fetal position and cry ourselves to sleep. I voted we go out and spare no expense to get back on the sweet teat of the mother web. After some argument, I won. First I begged our nextdoor neighbor for the password to his wifi, but the rich douchebag Brit rejected us. Next I asked at all of the cafes up the street, but they cater to rich douchebags and don’t share their wifi either. Finally we abandoned the confines of our white marble fortress and its stuck up neighborhood, and took a near-eternal bus ride through traffic to the hustle and bustle of Taksim on a Saturday night.

Good old Taksim. We got Colin’s phone online with a new Turkcell sim card and breathed a sigh of relief. We had dinner at one of those overpriced restaurants with four floors of perfect people-watching window seats, then set out to do some souvenir and gift shopping. I discovered a marvelous candy store called Kaska on Istiklal with a dazzling selection of Turkish sweets: baklava, helvasi, marzipan, pistachio Turkish delight and chocolate coated candied chestnuts. Mmmmm… I’m tempted to open just one, and if I don’t mention it here they won’t even know that I ate it instead of bringing it to Czech!

The next day we attended the first Istanbul Game Jam with our Turkish indie game developer friends. They are a cool bunch of guys and we had a lot of fun with them writing two-day (and in our case one-day) games. I’ll let Colin give you the details, but I think they turned out incredibly well and I was energized by getting so much done in just one day.

Monday we spent inside our fortress, and I’m pretty sure Colin didn’t get dressed the entire day – a sure indication of living the good life! I foraged for food up the hill then finally got to work on Rebuilder. When I wasn’t lounging in that jacuzzi on the deck, that is.

Tuesday we both worked on our games and enjoyed our white mansion. We were visited by the young couple (Ayca and Mark) who handle repairs who tried unsuccessfully to get the Internet working. We went for a walk and discovered a cool area around the university up the hill where we ate a pretty close approximation to burgers and delighted the chef by speaking French with him. In the afternoon Colin fell asleep on the couch listening to a Radiolab podcast and I watched the sunset from our beautiful huge windows. I watched someone hang enormous long Turkish flags from the bridge that swayed in the wind way, way overhead.

Yesterday Ayca and Mark visited again and after another long, frustrated phone call to the ISP they finally got the Internet going – woot! We took them out for lunch and checked out their art gallery / book and record store Marquise Dance Hall which they recently moved from Brooklyn to Beyo?lu. Then Colin and I continued downtown for one more tour of the Grand Bazaar. We kept most of our lira in our pockets but saw some very curious old (and/or made to look old) silver and tin objects and ate some tasty street pudding. After another near-eternal bus ride home, we ordered in food and watched the lights go on in the houses across the Bosphorus from our sudsy tub on the deck.

This morning I’m spending some quality time with the Internet and working on my game. So far it promises to be a quiet, contemplative day.