After a few days of feeling quite confident and increasingly knowlegable about this whole house buying business, yesterday was a setback which left me feeling, again, as though we might be a pair of babes in the wood, ripe for the taking. First, there was the increasing suspicion of that nice flat with a view, […]
Uphill
It was a quiet Sunday: we walked down to Taksim Square (stopping for a kibbeh for me along the way), and then onward to take the cable car to Nisantasi. This turned out to be unexpectedly enjoyable, as the cable car was just two capsules each way, and went over the park, over ruined walls […]
Further thoughts
Flat hunting continues. I am finding it rather painful as my attention moves between work and flats, with little attention for anything else. We took a friend to see the place with the beautiful views I mentioned a few days ago, and he was rather good as an impartial, unemotional eye, and showing up the […]
Someone else’s home
A couple of days ago, when I was feeling particularly glum about the flat that got away, I went on the main property website for Turkey and fired off WhatsApp messages to everyone with a flat that looked nice and within our budget. The first of these viewings was this evening: a flat in Galata, […]
New possibilities
This evening we met up with someone the GF had been communicating with, and who works in the property world. He turned out to be a German Turk, rather nice fellow – nicer than the last, and with a more trustworthy air – and talked quite frankly about the scene in Istanbul. It seemed genuine, […]
Church, mosque, museum, mosque
I had a working weekend but planned it so I could take some time off. This afternoon we went to the Chora museum, formerly the Chora church, then the Chora mosque, and soon to be the Chora mosque again. Nothing can quite replicate the astonishing luminescence and life of Byzantine mosaics, certainly not photos. The […]
Istanbul pads
Last night the GF and I went flat hunting with a local property person we’d found online whose portfolio seemed to have the sorts of properties we would like. It didn’t start well: he took us to one we’d seen on his website, which looked rather pokey, but when we arrived it was well beyond […]
To the palace
Sunday was at Topkapi. As before, easy to get to, a simple tram ride across the Golden Horn, to the domes and towers we see every day from our window. I had thought it might be relatively empty but it really wasn’t, though most of the other visitors were Turks, Iranis, South Asians, etc. Turkey […]
Emerging markets
This afternoon we went across the Golden Horn to Fener, a sub-district just beyond the dramatic bits of Sarayburnu – an old Greek/ Jewish/ Bulgarian/ Armenian neighbourhood which recently received a UNESCO imprimature for heritage for its churches, synagogues, mosques, and scores of graceful Ottoman era row houses, tall and narrow, with moulded ceilings, wooden […]
Intercontinental travel
This afternoon we took the ferry across the Bosphorus from Europe to Asia. We went to Kadikoy, and in particular to Moda, which is a little pointy bit of Anatolia looking down from the Bosphorus into the Sea of Marmara. Because it is pointy, there is a sort of a quiet lagoon within a lagoon […]