We land at Ataturk airport in the early hours of a cold January morning. It’s the usual airport with duty free shops, tiled floors, travelators, immigration counters, crew and people. Thankfully, the immigration is fast and we’re out in 45 mins after landing.
As it’s 6:30 am in the morning we decide to kill sometime at a cafe at the airport. Not knowing what to expect, we order Turkish chai and some kind of pastry. This was our very first of the copious amounts of Turkish chai we would have in the next 6 days to follow. The pastry is filled with fig jam and when I take a tentative bite, my eyes pop – it’s delicious and crumbly!
We start walking towards the exit and it starts to feel cold. We put on our thick jackets and zip them up. We see a middle-aged couple do the same thing right in front of us. Our eyes meet for a second and we exchange a smile.
We now exit through the door and a chilling breeze greets us. We’re thankful for our jackets but the cold gusts of wind are refreshing as we don’t have any seasons in Singapore and this is a welcome change. Within a few minutes we’re back inside an adjacent building. We’re trying to buy metro train tickets but there’s no manned counter, only ticket vending machines. It takes us a few minutes to figure out how to change the menu to English but the machine is asking for smaller denomination change or notes and we have only bigger denomination currency notes.
DJ leaves me by the ticket vending machines with the luggage and tries to get some change from the only stall open that early in the morning. Turned out many others were doing the same and the vendor has no change left to exchange. DJ goes further and is gone for at least 15 mins. At this point in time, I stand there and unpleasant thoughts are floating in my head – ‘what if something were to happen to him, how will I know?’ or ‘what if someone cheats him and runs away with the money?’. I cast them aside and continue to wait. After what seemed like an eternity, I see him walking back hurriedly. He has the change and we manage to buy the tickets and get onto the train towards the city.
We choose a block of two seats side by side and have enough space to hold our luggage in front of us, by our legs. As the train starts to pull away, we notice there’re very few people in the compartment. As it gets closer to the city, more and more people fill up the compartments until there’s hardly any room to stand. It must be around 8:30 am now but it’s still dark and people are already on their way to work. It must’ve been drizzling outside as almost everyone who walks into the train has tiny droplets accumulated on their coat sleeves, collars and on the top of their woollen caps. Many are also carrying umbrellas.
For some inexplicable reason, majority of the people are wearing black coats or jackets, with a few greys, navy blues and an occasional green. I think about India and how colorful the clothing usually is, even during winters. I’ve observed this black coat syndrome elsewhere as well. I feel it’ll be a good idea to wear colours especially on such a cold overcast day.
No one is smiling and DJ talks about how it must feel to start and end your day in the dark. He makes a good point and I say to him how this cannot be good and must have some impact on the “happiness” of people during the winter months. We talk abut SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) then move on to lighter topics and people watching.
It’s crowded and we jostle our way out at the station and take a short Uber ride to get to our Airbnb in Cihangir. Our host – a Mr. Sui, welcomes us. As we’re early and the place is not ready yet, he recommends his favourite breakfast joint in the neighbourhood – a cafe called Kahve 6 Cihangir. We have our first Turkish breakfast here which we love and decide that Kahve 6 is amazing.
We go back to our Airbnb and are shown to our loft, from where we get a tremendous view of the Bosphorus. We dump our stuff, turn on the heating and for the first time in 18 hours, plop ourselves down for a power nap.
