After a quick breakfast we headed back down to Topkapi Palace grounds because I wanted to check out the Istanbul Archeological Museum. It looked pretty small and was absurdly cheaply priced, so we saved it for the last morning.
Well, we didn't go straight to the museum. We of course had to detour by the Starbucks so I could have a caffeine injection that didn't taste like dirt, which is how all Turkish coffee tastes to me.
We walked into the IAM and found a wide and extensive collection of old statues. They were pretty cool. (The only unnerving part was the fact that there were AT LEAST 3 security guards for every visitor in the museum. I'm telling you, a friggin' police state.)
We eventually realized that we were not in the IAM building, but rather just a wing of the building. After that exhibit was another one, and another one, and another one... In fact, we were only in one wing of one building; it turns out there were two other buildings, which I don't know anything about because we never made it out of the first one.
The IAM is not small at all. It's massive. When Hans was talking about the Turkish Louvre, this was it. And there was absolutely no way, at all, to tell that this was a major museum before going in. From the outside it looked like an afterthought.
Weird.
And disappointing. I love museums, and we only got a sense of this one because we were pressed for time. Oh well.
We got back to the hotel, packed up, and paid for the shuttle back to the airport because it is apparently impossible to know what you are going to get if you call for a taxi.
A strange thing about Ataturk airport: you can't even get into the building without going through security, which means you go through with all your suitcases and everything. I'm not sure if this is standard across the Middle East or not; I guess it's because having a bomb go off in the terminal is a somewhat serious possibility.
We connected through Frankfurt again, which is where I had to get my new EU visa stamp (really, that was the whole point of the trip in the first place). The guy asked me where I was going to. "Brussels. Well, Belgium. No, well, actually I'm going to be going on through to Amsterdam." I was completely unprepared for the question and ended up sounded like a moron. I had been through so many passport checkpoints that it caught me by surprise when the guy started talking to me.
I assured him that I would be leaving before 3 months were up. "Are you sure?" He asked with a German accent, raising his voice a bit. "Oh yeah, definitely." He waited a second, then shrugged and gave me the stamp.
Easy enough.
And so ended the Istanbul adventure. We did pretty well for ourselves; I think we really got a sense of the city over the span of the weekend. I have a certain admiration for Turkey. I admire its commitment to secularism, even though it verges on the side of militarist nationalism now and then. I feel like it's a country we need on "our side".
Since I've left, Turkey has carried out a series of airstrikes and limited border incursions on Kurdish territory in Iraq and a full-scale invasion is still possible. It's suspected that the Americans are giving them aid and intelligence on Kurdish terrorist groups in order to stave off any invasion and shore up support for the wider 'War on Terror'.
However, support for America and its role in the world has seen a sharp decline among the population recently, especially as the Iraq war turned nasty. Attitudes towards Europe have also soured as EU-negotiations drag on. And while the government itself has largely remained on good terms with Washington, they openly expressed outrage when the Senate passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide a month ago, as they did when France passed such a bill last year.
So it's a tough country to generalize or make predictions on.
But there's good reason to feel confident that a large portion of the country's population and leadership, regardless of how they feel about George Bush (not our best spokesman, is he?), will continue to move towards Western-style democracy and reject the Mullah-dominated theocracies that still permeate much of the Arab world. I hope they eventually do join the EU, which will certainly raise living standards across the board and ensure full freedom of speech.
And it would mean I wouldn't have to pay 60 f@#&ing dollars just to get in the damn country.
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