They Might Be Giants was stuck in our heads all weekend. “Istanbul, Constantinople, Istanbul, Constantinople… Nobody knows but the Turks!” There are other words to the song, but we don’t know them. 🙂 Actually we just looked it up and we even had those lyrics wrong.
Elisa and I took a flight to Istanbul on Saturday. Todd and Linda and Julia were already there. Julia’s on semester at sea so she’s been stopping in all the cool places you’ve ever wanted to visit–Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, Egypt, etc. Todd wasn’t feeling good so they hadn’t seen too much of the city yet.
Daniel also made his way to Istanbul to meet us. He has gone to all these other cool places in the Balkans that I didn’t know I would want to visit. His stories make us want to see them–Romania, Albania, Macedonia, etc. It was a lot of fun hearing from both Julia and Daniel all the cool places they’ve gone.
I had been sick. So we had just planned to take it easy anyway. Plus we had heard that it was supposed to rain all weekend. We ended up all going out to dinner to a really nice seafood restaurant. We called it a night and then Daniel and Julia partied until the early hours of the morning. Our hotel room was so loud! Luckily I had brought ear plugs. That’s the only way we slept. There were loudspeakers out in the streets, plus the horns, plus eventually Daniel’s snoring. 🙂
The next day we got some good pictures of the tourist attractions. The weather was great for us. We managed to get ripped off by a cabbie. He had his meter running twice as fast. Then he wasn’t satisfied with that, so he thought he would try to convince me that I had given him the wrong bill. I wasn’t amused enough to play along with that part. Not to mention he almost killed us on the way home. He was a terrible driver. We found really good local Kebabs and Turkish pizza. I was really impressed by how huge the mosques were. It was cool to hear them calling for prayer from nearby. Todd and Linda had to leave before we could see the Topkapi Palace. But Daniel and Julia came with us and we really enjoyed seeing the harem. Everything was really ornate.
Julia had left by Monday. And we needed to leave in the afternoon to catch a flight. We window shopped at the Grand Bazaar. It’s thousands of shops under one roof. We got lots of practice ignoring people. But it wasn’t near as bad as Kusadasi. There were all sorts of random trinkets that we almost decided to buy.
The best part was seeing family. It was a little unreal to be in such a foreign place with such familiar people.
Saturday morning we joined a caravan to Iza’s house. We followed windy roads for an hour and a half. We kept thinking we were almost there for the last hour. Everyone stopped for a minute to decorate the car. They even shined the tires. At Iza’s house, Iza’s nephew was barring the door while Marcin and his friends bartered about the dowry. Marcin’s main selling point seemed to be the quality of the vodka he was offering. We didn’t understand much else, but it seemed at one point that Marcin was offered Iza’s niece for the dowry and he said no.
Then we were invited inside Iza’s house for the blessing by the parents. Marcin and Iza knelt down on a white sheet and both sets of parents one after another put their hands on the kids’ heads and said a blessing to them. Marcin’s dad mainly just mussed his hair. Elisa and I were lucky to be there for this intimate tradition.
At the Polish-Catholic ceremony we again thought it was almost over and then waited a long time. The church echoed really cool. And it was interesting to see all the ritual involved. When Marcin and Iza exited the church, their friends threw handfuls of pennies on them. And then they had to pick them up. One of the traditions apparently is to bring flowers and then to give them to the bride and groom. Oops.
Marcin and Iza threw a reception at a hotel. At the beginning, everyone was handed champagne. Marcin and Iza had glasses tied together. After they drank them, they threw them behind them and the glasses crashed all over the floor. Their friends organized a program of games and dancing. We have never been entertained at a wedding for so long. We got there around 3 pm and partied until we were too tired at around midnight. There was course after course of food getting brought out every time we sat down. We learned some really fun dances and they had a special appearance of Polish performers. There were crazy dances. Most of them involved us running around in a ring. We did dancing lines and a chicken dance even. We played games where people got dressed up in silly stage props. I can’t describe all the stuff that went on. There was a bowling alley right in the hotel and some of us played a game.
A few of the family and friends did some songs for the party. They grabbed Elisa and asked her to sing “Love me Tender” on short notice. By the way, I don’t really know that song. We don’t know how they knew that Elisa sings either.
Friday morning our plans were to travel to Bolesławiec to buy some Polish pottery. Our trip was long:
- A 90-min train ride from Krakow to Katowice
- An hour wait for a bus
- An hour-long bus ride from Katowice to the airport
- A car rental
- A drive back to Katowice
- A 3-hour drive to Bolesławiec
- A mad dash around town to find information about the right pottery warehouse before they closed
We got to the pottery store at 4:20 pm. They closed at 5 pm. A German tour bus showed up right at closing time, so they stayed open for an extra half hour. Elisa and I used all the time to pick out a freaking cool tea set. We got some other fun stuff too.
For dinner we strolled around the center square and tried really hard to locate the source of a good crepe smell. We gave up and settled on really good pizza. The town square was really colorful. We hardly met anyone who spoke English or even German.
Our little compact car took 100 zł of gas (about $40) to fill up after the 3-hour drive. That was a surprise!
