The plan: spend the 5 hr layover in Istanbul Ataturk Airport to visit the Asian side of Istanbul by ferry.
The plan was devised by my friend and I with no planning. Our other companions stayed behind and wished us luck since we needed it. First one needs a $20 visa to enter Turkey, this took 15 minutes. Next was the passport check line, this took 25 minutes - we have 4 hrs and 20 mins left before our plane left to our final destination. The easiest way to get into Istanbul is by the Metro. We had to take the Subway then the tram to the ferry. Luckily we had no map and were depending on strangers to get us to our destination. We arrived at the ferry one hour later with no complications except for the slow and jam packed tram - 3 hrs and 20 mins to go.
And the problems began. We were told that the ferry was free - it was not. We had to scramble to get tokens - where did the Turkish Liras go? We were rushing to catch the next ferry, and did not confirm its destination. We boarded and waited for 5 mins for the ferry to launch. We saw the Asian side to the left of us, and it stayed to the left of us. The ferry took 15 mins to arrive at its destination which was still the European side of Istanbul - oops. We had no choice but to retrace our steps back to the airport. We finally acquired a map and saw where we went wrong. We took the wrong ferry. The ferry fiasco took 40 mins - 2 hrs and 40 mins left.
We missed the first tram back - 10 mins wait. We got on the next one and slowly countdown the stops in order not to miss the transfer to the subway. It always felt faster returning but this time it did not. Everything was new and we didn't notice how close the tram was to the people and the sidewalks - did we get on the right tram? We did as confirmed by the tram map. We transfer to the subway and get back into the airport - one hour gone, 1 hr 30 min left.
We had to go through two security checks - one has not seen a film camera before. We also had to go through the passport / visa check again and ran through the airport. We checked the flight status boards and saw that our flight was blinking red - FINAL CALL. We arrived at our gate with 10 mins before take off and the airline ticket attendants questioned us. A special screener was assigned to my friend since he had no checked in luggage. We eventually boarded the plane with cheers and jeers from our companions. It was a good yet unsuccessful adventure on a nice day in Istanbul not Constantinople.
Here are a few photos I managed to snap with the new Carl Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 Distagon lens on
the NEX-7. I was hoping I had more time to shoot but this was low on our priority list. The camera was on Aperture Priority and Autofocus.
