Switzerland, July 6: Geneva

Posted on July 6, 2025 by Dan

My one day in Paris accomplished, it was time to leave for Geneva. As a reminder, we had planned two weeks in Switzerland long before the Belgium / Turkey portion of this trip was requested by my job, so I would actually be meeting Leigh there. She’d have a conference for the first few days, but I’d still get to SEE her for the first time in three weeks.

But first, I had to get out of Paris. I had deliberately picked a hotel close to the train station, and as an added bonus, it had a piano, so I could actually PLAY a bit for the first time in a while. After waiting out a teenager playing the legally required “The Piano” noodle-fest, I played a bit of Debussy, and then went to wait for my TGV to Switzerland.

It was crowded, but the architecture sure was nice.

The TGV is fast and reliable, and I was soon in Geneva, where I checked into our hotel and waited for Leigh to arrive. Once she did, I managed to walk halfway back to the train station and then board the tram she was on, since I didn’t want to wait the extra 5 minutes to see her again.

It was now early afternoon, so we decided to bonk around the city and see what we could see while Leigh attempted to remain awake to catch up with her jet lag.

First, we walked through a big open air market with a million food stalls of different types. Geneva is the home of the UN, after all. I had some cow hearts on a stick. (Less glibly, “Antichucos,” a classic Peruvian food item.)

Next, we found a SERIOUSLY imposing monument to the Swiss founders of the Protestant Reformation. (Not the German ones, don’t be silly. Martin who?)

Do not even THINK of buying an indulgence. These gentlemen will know.

But the absolute BEST thing to happen today was when we turned around from Calvinballists and realized that just across the street was a museum that not only had an exhibit of sculptures by Jean Tinguely, but was even free admission!

And before you ask – does this fountain also move and light up? Of COURSE it does.

Seriously, it’s awesome. As is this.

The museum has all the kinetic pieces set to only operate for a relatively small duty cycle, in order to preserve them, but oh man – when this thing gets going it is AMAZING. Here’s a video.

Unfortunately, we got there somewhat late in the day, so they did make us leave before too long. Despite the threatening skies, we did some more walking around the older part of Geneva. There’s a famous flower clock:

It’s fine. The womens’ Euro Cup was going on while we were in Switzerland and it was pretty much omnipresent in every town we went to.

We saw the main cathedral, which we would return to later in the week, but it had this cheery fellow in the courtyard.

I never understood a single word he said, but I helped him drink his wine.

Finally we went and had dinner and encountered the first of many sticker shocks associated with eating in Switzerland. It is SERIOUSLY expensive – you pretty much just have to accept that you will be blowing a tremendous amount of money just to put calories in your system when you come here.

And that was day 1 in Switzerland!

France, July 5: Paris

Posted on July 5, 2025 by Dan

I had one day in Paris, and I was determined to make the absolute most of it by…

… well, actually I was determined to just wander around and see what happened. I had a vague idea I might go to one museum recommended by a friend, but other than that, I was intentionally operating on a “vibes not plans” model.

A la “Family Circus,” here’s how that worked out:
Now, this shows both travel on foot and by metro, but it also doesn’t quite get across the amount of looping around that happened. So let’s get into that.

My hotel was the red dot at lower right. I started walking and the first thing I noticed was the big green park on the map across the river. Let’s check that out, why not?

Ooh, the Jardin des Plants. Very nice. Beautiful landscaping.

Also this person being molested by a bear.

Seriously, I have no idea what’s going on here. And it wasn’t even the weirdest animal sculpture I saw that hour.

Tag yourself. I’m “derpy walrus.”

At any rate, I continued along the Left Bank until I arrived at a small parish church.

Now, I arrived at Notre Dame at about the same time in the morning I had arrived at the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. But the crowds here were much, much, bigger.

I can’t complain too much about tourists taking photos, for obvious reasons. At least I took my pictures quickly and went back to actually LOOKING at the amazing ancient building I was standing in, rather than artfully ignoring it for the camera.

It really is phenomenal, and you can barely tell the fire ever happened.

From there I continued along the river for a bit, pausing to find a geocache, get yelled at by an Italian tourist for standing in front of something they wanted to photograph, and watch someone get engaged.

Ah, Paris.

I had no intention of actually attempting to ENTER the Louvre, but I walked past the courtyard with the pyramids, and made my way through the Tuillerie Gardens to the Musée de l’Orangerie at the far end of the gardens. This was the museum my friend had recommended as her favorite in Paris. It was specifically built to display eight enormous water lily panels by Monet.

The two rooms with the panels are entirely lit by natural light, and are absolutely breathtaking. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s some good stuff downstairs too. In addition to some lovely Matisse, Picasso, and the like, I discovered two new to me artists that I want to learn more about.

Marie Laurencin:

And Chaim Soutine:

Good stuff.

So where to next? Time to take my first metro ride of the day, from Concorde to Saint Lazare – I thought I might go investigate a street with music stores on it. However, on arriving at the station, I decided to go find lunch. I ended up on a rooftop terrace with THIS terrible view:

And at that point, Google informed me that I had walked far enough in the wrong direction that I was better off getting back on the Metro again, this time from Havre-Caumartin to Europe.

I poked around the stores for a bit, but didn’t find anything that really jumped out at me, and luggage space was tight. Where to next? What about cheese? I had read about a cheese focused bar, why not walk up there?

(2 kilometers later)

Because they don’t open for three hours, that’s why. OK, well, failing cheese, let’s do some fancy patisserie – they have that in Paris, right? I picked a place that sounded good, and was only 80% of the way back to where I had started. To the Metro! Specifically, Point Cardinet to Saint Paul, and the Les Trois Chocolates for an amazing raspberry chocolate tart.

Let’s walk some more – haven’t walked enough yet. Headed up the Rue di Rivoli to the Centre Georges Pompidou. This is a modern art museum that, as it turns out, is just about to close for several years for renovations, and is therefore sadly uncontaminated by art.

It did have these, though:

By this point, it was getting late in the afternoon, so I started looking for exhibitions that were open late. A modern art gallery called the “Bourse de Commerce?” Sounds great! And nobody likes modern art, so I’ll have the place to myself.

One more long walk later:

Note the line starting at the door and snaking around the building. It actually went about halfway around. Turns out the exhibit in the rotunda has repeatedly gone viral on TikTok.

How dare people appreciate art that I like?

OK, well, let’s just do some more walking then. What else is around that I could look at, and is on a street famous for being walkable?

(Keeping up with my metro stops, this was Louvre-Rivoli to Charles de Gaulle Étoile Champs-Élysées.)

The Arc du Triomphe is indeed large and impressive. It’s also in the middle of a terrifying roundabout, although I didn’t see either Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves doing actiony stuff in the middle of the road.

The Champs Elysees on the other hand is…

… well, it’s Disneyland. The road itself is nice, with the trees and the lamps, but it is wall-to-wall tourists and businesses designed to take advantage of tourists. I get it – I’m a tourist too – but at some point we’re all just there to look at each other. OK, where else can I go? Let’s turn right and head down to a draft of the statue of liberty’s torch.

There’s two other things to see at this spot. One is the road underpass behind the torch in the picture. It’s actually the spot where Dianna Spencer was killed, and there’s a lot of messages written on the wall.

There’s also one other thing you can see from this spot that seems like it might have been vaguely interesting to spend some time on.

Meh – it’s just a gimmick. It won’t last. And anyway at this point I was hungry. Not wanting to go all the way back up to the cheese bar, I identified a restaurant not too far from my hotel that specialized in custom charcuterie boards. To the Metro! (Alma-Marceau to Voltaire, thank you for asking.)

Mmm… cheese. I swear I would eat Mimolette every day.

Just a bit (OK, quite a bit) more walking brought me back to my hotel, at which point I realized I had 29,200 steps for the day.

Well that won’t do. I walked back up past the National Opera to a tabac to get an iced tea, just to get the nice round number.

And that was my day in Paris!

France, July 4: The Warmup

Posted on July 4, 2025 by Dan

I took the TGV high speed train from Brussels to France on Friday evening, and didn’t do THAT much, so it might have made sense to include this post with the one day I did spend in Paris. Except that one’s gonna be a doozy, so here’s a short one about just Friday night instead.

Paris has a number of major train stations – I was arriving in to Gare du Nord, but would be leaving from Gare du Lyon, so I had booked a hotel closer to the latter, near where the Bastille used to be. Which meant navigating the bonkers that is the Paris Metro at rush hour.

Actually, it was fine – not as bad as Tokyo, and purchasing passes directly to your phone is super easy. The biggest difference with Tokyo is that the connecting passages between the platforms and the exits and the other lines are winding and tiny, where in Tokyo they are wide, generally straight, and huge.

At any rate, I arrived at a column erected in a square named to celebrate a bunch of people who didn’t think an autocrat should be arbitrarily confining people in a horrible prison. I wonder why it occurred to me to describe it that way.

Just to cause confusion, the column itself is about the revolution of 1830, not the storming of the plaza’s namesake prison. But hey – I’ll take my autocrat eliminating where I can get it these days.

After checking into my hotel, it was time to get dinner, and I wanted to check out a historic restaurant named Au Pied de Cochon, literally “At the foot of the pig.” Opened in 1947, it is known for being a 24 hour restaurant with excellent food and ample people watching opportunities.

While perhaps its most famous dish is the pork trotter, a close second in terms of being iconic, and a distant first in terms of how much I actually wanted to eat it after a long day of travel, was the onion soup.

A thing of beauty, I tell you. Honestly, that would have been a meal in itself, but I didn’t necessarily realize that when I ordered. And had I done so, I would have missed out on another lovely thing:

After the carbonnade in Belgium, the represents the second of three times this trip I would have the opportunity to try one of the dishes from our “cook the world” project in the actual country of origin. This is a seared duck breast, and it was fantastic.

After dinner it was time to head back to my hotel. I had a LONG day ahead of me…

Bonus Belgium

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Dan

Before moving on to describe the rest of the trip, here’s some other highlights of the two weeks I spent in Belgium. During the day, other Dan and I worked on installing two of our company’s systems at a nuclear pharmacy on the outskirts of a tiny Belgian town called Seneffe.

How small? I’m not sure it even HAD a hotel, which is why we were staying in the neighboring, slightly larger town of Nivelles. The nearest LARGE town to us was Charleroi, and I’m actually sort of glad we weren’t staying there, since if you search for it on YoutTube, you get a bunch of videos with titles like “I Visited the Most Depressing City in Europe.”

We never actually went there.

Nivelles itself has a very pretty town square with a 12^th century cathedral and a number of little brasseries around the outside. We ate dinner on this square more than once, and it was nice seeing everyone out enjoying the weather.

This being Belgium, I did have mussels while we were there, of course. But it turns out Nivelles also has a local specialty, the “Tart Djote”. “Djote” turns out to be the local word for “Chard”, so this is a vegetable pie in a short crust, which consists of not much more than chard, cheese, and butter. (Why are the first syllables of “chard” and “cheese” so different? English is weird.)

Nivelles takes this dish so seriously that they have an annual competition, featuring a select panel of judges with detailed criteria for judging the perfect tart. Here’s the official tarte djote website.

I had one – it was pretty good. Also AMAZINGLY filling – I couldn’t eat more than half at one sitting. Neither could other Dan’s mom.

The other thing I of course had plenty of in Belgium is beer. Highlights:

the first beer in my room was a Belgian tripel recommended by one of the staff at the pharmacy. Very good, AND I learned how to open a beer bottle with a strike plate.
Deciding just because I COULD do that didn’t make it a good idea, I acquired a bottle opener and some LOCAL beers from the nearby supermarket. They were fine, but I need to be more careful about not accidentally buying pale ales when I don’t want them.
Lots of beers in restaurants, ALWAYS served in the correct glass for the brewery.
A cherry beer called…

Wait, what the hell am I talking about. There was only one beer highlight, and it was this:

Some fraction of the readers’ jaws are now dropping, and for everyone else, I will explain. Westvletteren 12 is one of the most difficult beers in the world to acquire. It is made at ONE monastery in Belgium, and they only make enough to pay their bills. It doesn’t get exported or distributed – if a restaurant wants to offer it, they have to send someone to the monastery to buy it, where they will be permitted to buy a single case, and that’s all.

We had dinner on the hotel restaurant during the first week, and I was perusing the prices on the beer list, which were, of course, at hotel restaurant prices: 7 euros, 8 euros, 7 euros, 9 euros, 25 euros…

Wait, what?

This hotel actually has Westvlettern on the menu? I mean, sure, it’s about $40 for a 375 cl bottle, but how many times in my life am I going to get to try this beer?

Unbelievably, this makes two.

I didn’t start drinking until I was 40 years old, for a variety of reasons, and for the first few months I was very cautious in my consumption – only one beer at a time, and only in public with friends. Which meant that for something like five months after I started, I had never actually had a bottled beer – just draft.

I was in grad school at this point, and at some point I went to a retirement party for someone from the lab where I was doing my PhD. My wife came along and ended up sitting next to the lab manager. She didn’t know any more about accelerator physics than what I had inflicted on her, and he didn’t know anything about music theory… so they talked about beer.

Apparently he asked if she had ever tried this incredibly rare Belgian beer, and she said, no, no one has ever tried that beer. “Oh, I’ve got some in my basement, I’ll give you one.” She did not, of course, believe this for a second.

And one appeared on my desk the next day.

And that’s how the first beer I ever tried out of a bottle was Westvletteren 12.

Getting back to the main not-actually-linear narrative, the other place we visited were an evening in the nearby town of Namur, which has a very nice castle. You should go see it.

Finally, at the end of the trip I took the train back up to Brussels to continue on my way and had a few hours to spend near the train station, which is where I learned the difference between a Belgian Waffle and a Brussels Waffle. Belgian waffles are chewier and irregularly shaped. Brussels Waffles are thinner and lighter and square-er.

This one was also served in a very nice hipster coffee shop with a Chemex of probably the best coffee I had all trip. And then it was off to Paris!

Belgium, June 29: Waterloo

Posted on June 29, 2025 by Dan

After spending all day Saturday in a group, on Sunday I struck out on my own…

…to the laundromat. I had, after all, been in Europe for 2 weeks at this point with one carry-on sized suitcase.

The process was reasonably well documented, and another very nice customer was at pains to make sure I understood how everything worked. There was a vending machine for soap, and the washing machines were all controlled from a central terminal, although oddly, the dryers were not.

Laundry accomplished, I headed back to the hotel to drop off my clothes and make a plan to do some sightseeing. I needed to get to the Nivelles train station, and since the next bus wasn’t for a while, I decided to just walk. This was going to turn out to be a theme for the day.

Just one stop down the train tracks from Nivelles is Brain-L’Alleud, where the historic battle of Waterloo took place. (Not to be confused with the neighboring town of Waterloo, where the historic battle of Waterloo did not take place.) Waterloo represented the last decisive defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, and is part of why many of us are stuck using inches and pounds to this very day.

After a long, sweaty walk to the train station, I bought my train ticket to Brain-L’Alleud and boarded my train, which looked suspiciously like a bus. Just a few weeks prior, I took the Hamilton Street Railway and an Air Canada flight in Hamilton, Ontario, both of which looked a lot like busses. And now this Belgian train, which also appeared to be a bus.

When the “train” arrived in Brain-L’Alleud, I first got lunch at a really excellent little Syrian place next to the station. Seriously, if you ever go there, this is where you want to have lunch – some of the best schwarma I’ve ever had.

Then I looked at the bus schedule, realized the next bus to the battlefield wasn’t for a while, and decided to walk. This MAY have been a poor choice. It was, after all, about 27 (I mean 80 – THANKS NAPOLEON) degrees out. After another long, sweaty walk, I arrived at the battlefield.

Only to discover that the once-a-year reenactment of the battle had taken place that morning, and I had missed it. Then again, I REALLY needed laundry.

There’s a few different things to see at Waterloo. The most obvious from a distance is the Mound of the Lion. It is a huge hill that dominates the landscape of the battlefield, and commemorates the wounding of William II of Orange, arguably maybe the fifth most important commander present at the battle. Maybe.

Or maybe it commemorates the battle more generally. Given its scale, that’s the more charitable reading. Heck of a view form the top, anyway.

There’s also a very well executed museum that talks at length about the history of the battle, the uniforms, the weapons, the commanders, and very little about why Napoleon was not actually a very nice man. (Spoiler: he wasn’t.)

There’s also a display of Napoleonic scenes recreated in Lego, which is pretty neat. Here’s the retreat from Moscow:

Next the Big Hill of the Moderately Important Guy who Lived Thirty Four More Years After The Battle is a panorama, a kind of nineteenth century VR installation where you stand inside a 360 degree painting and see the battle illustrated all around you. That was actually pretty neat.

But honestly, the most impressive thing was just walking a few hot and sweaty kilometers around the battlefield and appreciating the importance of this particular bit of Belgian farmland to the history of the world. Counterfactuals are always a bit iffy, but there’s one small gate in the wall of one small farmhouse at one end of the battle line that could potentially have changed the course of everything if it had been successfully breached. (as it almost was.)

It was also a hoot walking around surrounded by all the reenactors, who were largely still there after their morning’s exertions, and also largely still in costume. Made it even easier to visualize being back in 1815, except for the bit where they were also largely tailgating next to their cars at this point.

At the end of my visit, I was at the other end of the battlefield from the bus stop, so I decided to just go ahead and walk back to the bus station. I blame heat exhaustion at this point from preventing me from doing something dumb like this much more walking in the sun.

At least I didn’t walk back to my hotel from the train station in Nivelles. No, instead of that I (checks notes)… oh wait, no, I did do that. It was a long day.

Belgium, June 28: Bruges and Ghent

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Dan

For my first Saturday in Belgium, I went to Bruges with my coworker Dan and his parents, who had flown to Europe for a bit of a family vacation with Dan.

Belgium is divided into two halves, the Dutch speaking northern half, and the French speaking southern one. Interestingly, the Dutch speakers are required to learn French in school, but the French speakers are NOT required to learn Dutch. Make of that what you will.

Our installation was in the Wallonia (the southern region), so our field trip was to Flanders in the north. Our destination for the day, Bruges, is a beautifully preserved medieval city with stepped roofs, canals, a bell tower, and all that stuff.

It was also the setting for an extremely violent comedy starring Colin Firth. We did not encounter any gunfire, fortunately.

What we did encounter was tourists – lots and lots of tourists. To be fair, WE were tourists, so it’s not as though we weren’t part of the problem. But it’s frustrating, because Leigh has been encouraging me to go to Bruges for as long as we’ve been married – she has very fond memories of trips there in the ‘90s.

And I can see why; the city IS beautiful. But it also has a lot of McDonalds and Starbucks and Instagrammers, just like everywhere else in the world at this point. Too many people wanting to see not enough stuff, I guess.

But with that discussion out of the way, let’s find out about the stuff I personally got to see. To start with, the architecture really is just impossibly picturesque. The city was in a bit of an industrial depression during the World Wars, so it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to bomb it. As such, a lot more of it has survived more intact than in many comparably aged cities in this part of Europe.

We wandered around a bit just gawping at stuff, and then bought a ticket to climb up the bell tower. The entire time we were up there, a carillon recital was underway. This was good and bad.

Good, because I am actually a former carillonneur – I learned to play at Yale and continued to actively perform in Cleveland until I moved to Michigan. Bad, because those suckers are LOUD – the best place to hear a carillon concert is emphatically NOT six feet from the bells. Still, the performer was excellent, and he played a range of pieces, from traditional Dutch carillon preludes all the way up to “Ring of Fire.”

The view was pretty nice too.

On returning to ground level, we found a nice little café a bit away from the tourist center to have lunch, and then headed back into the madding throng to do the other traditional activity in Bruges, a tour of the canals.

Bruges has many canals earning it the (possibly self-issued) nickname “The Venice of Belgium.” But while the canal boat tour COULD have been a total tourist gimmick, it really wasn’t.

For starters, Bruges is just as pretty from the water as from land, if not more so.

Secondly, our tour guide’s ability to code switch was worth the price of admission all by itself – he gave detailed, high speed information in German, Dutch, English, and French, and it sure seemed to this monolingual tourist that all four languages were just as fluent and ready to hand as his English.

After a waffle break (this IS Belgium, after all), we headed back to the car to start the trip back to Nivelles. But we had another stop on the way: Ghent!

Ghent is another city with an interesting medieval center, although it seems a bit more integrated into the modern city around it.

We were there late enough that it wasn’t really worth paying for admission to the castle, but we had a nice walk around looking at it and some other medieval structures.

We also saw the graffiti street, which is a LOT more fun than the gum wall in Seattle.

Finally we made our way to the 10^th century cathedral of Saint Bavo, which was architecturally amazing, and had a choral concert underway to boot.

After that long day we headed back to Nivelles, where I got a nice simple dinner from the grocery store across the street and crashed.

Turkey, June 25: Kadiköy

Posted on June 25, 2025 by Dan

I had one remaining “buffer” day in Istanbul, and since it didn’t appear I would need to go back to the customer site this day either, I decided to take a chance and visit a different continent.

This is less dramatic than it sounds, as the Asian side of Istanbul is a 15 minute ferry ride from the European side. And a beautiful ride it is, too.

The particular neighborhood I decided to explore is Kadiköy, which is easy to confuse with Karaköy, the Genoese neighborhood on the European side. At least – I found it super easy to confuse them. And by “found” I mean “find”, since I had to expressly look it up while I was writing this to make sure I had it correct. (Also to find an “ö” to cut and paste in here.)

Kadikoy has its touristy sections – there is a cruise ship port on this side as well – but in general, it’s a lot calmer, and the northern section of the neighborhood where I started out had a vibe I would probably describe as “hipster.”

Coffee shops every ten feet, art galleries, a (sadly closed) comic book store, and lots of thrift shops. A nicely refreshing change of pace from the insanity of the European side.

I didn’t really *DO* much in Kadiköy. I walked the length of the neighborhood several times. The center of the area is this bull statue, which was made in Paris in the 19th century, captured by the Germans, gifted to the Ottomans, abandoned after the end of World War 1, moved to a Hilton in the 1950s, taken to Kadiköy city hall in the 1970s, and finally moved to its current location in 1987, where it serves as an easy meeting point for confused cruise ship escapees.

I pursued a few geocaches, but my usual approach in a foreign city is to spend no more than five minutes looking once I get to the site – it’s fine to use caches as a way to take you to places you might not have otherwise seen, but once I get to the place, I want to SEE it, and not spend half an hour looking at the underside of park benches.

And I did see some very nice places.

(Isn’t this a nice picture? I’m kinda proud of this one, and wish I were a painter so I could have a go at it. On the other hand, if you get me this on a jigsaw puzzle I will straight up murder you.)

I had some döner for lunch, (still getting some mileage out of that “ö”) and later ice cream, and visited a few shops to buy presents for Leigh. But I planned my route poorly, and the presents and the ice cream involved a SILLY amount of additional walking. By the time I got back to the ferry terminal at about 4, I was dragging quite a bit. But just to perk up my spirits, there were a pair of musicians playing folk music on the ferry, and they were apparently familiar enough tunes that other passengers were singing along.

Given how tired I was, I decided to just sit in the train station back on the European side for a bit and think about what else I wanted to see on my last evening in Istanbul. I realized that one more bit of historiana that I hadn’t looked at yet was the column of Constantine. More walking, but the thing was put up in the 300s – how could I NOT go see it?

The Wikipedia article informs me that the column was erected in 328. It also informs me that the column is “popular as a place to perch with local pigeons,” which is perhaps somewhat un-encyclopedic, but I ain’t gonna edit it.

Finally, I wanted to go to a restaurant recommended by my friend Walt, who regular readers of this blog (Hi mom!) will remember as my expert on all things Balkan and adjacent. He recommended a fish restaurant in an old neighborhood called Kumkapi.

The neighborhood was great, although I was definitely there a bit early to see it at its most alive. Tiny streets crashing in to plazas where the tables from the sidewalk cafes did battle to hold the most advantageous territory. Unfortunately, I got the sense that the restaurant was not quite the same as it was when Walt had last visited – the name on the menus was different than the name on the awnings, for one thing.

Still – the food was still great. One of my favorite culinary discoveries this trip was a humble dip called “atom” consisting of chiles and yogurt. Every time I ordered it, the waiter was at great pains to explain to me how spicy it was, and seemed shocked that that was, in fact, a selling point as far as I was concerned.

But also – it’s chiles and yogurt. It’s got the dairy built right in. It is absolutely delicious, but on a scale of one to Thai food, it is about a three in terms of spiciness.

After inadvertently destroying one of the restaurant’s chairs, it was time to head back to the hotel. Istanbul was amazing, and I would absolutely come back here again some day.

Turkey, June 24: Karaköy

Posted on June 24, 2025 by Dan

I had allowed two more days in Istanbul just in case any followup with the client was needed. However, it did not appear that that was going to be required.

Rather – the client promised to follow up with me! One of the folks at the company I was visiting promised to meet me the following afternoon to show me another great Turkish meal and another of the big historical sites I hadn’t made it into on Sunday.

I had the morning open, however, and I decided to start by going to visit the Theodosian walls.

The city of Constantinople was established by the emperor Constantine in the 300s, when he moved the primary capital of the Roman empire. In the 400s, during the reign of Theodosius a set of incredibly formidable walls was erected to protect the city. How formidable? Well, quite a bit of them are still standing today.

Perhaps more impressively, the walls kept the city safe for nearly a millennium. Only the 4th Crusade in 1204 and the Ottomans in 1453 were able to take the city by force.

Without these walls, the Byzantine empire wouldn’t have stood for as long as it did as the gateway between east and west, and European and middle eastern history would both likely have been very different.

Oh, and they were a block from my hotel.

Walking along the walls in the morning thinking about how long they had been completely impregnable was a really sobering way to start the day.

From there, I took the Metro to the north side of the Golden Horn to Taksim Square. Regarded as the center of the city and the main hub of the train network, it also contains a monument to the founders of modern Turkey,

The square is connected to the old Genoese quarter, now called Karaköy, by a touristy shopping street with a quaint little tram line running up the center.

I’m glad I was here fairly early in the morning, because I’m 100% certain it was going to be batshit crowded later. At the bottom of the street is the Galata tower, which is a 7 story stone tower erected in 1348. The district at the time was a Genoese outpost, which the Byzantines PROBABLY didn’t want building things like towers and walls, but no longer really had the mojo to prevent.

Still, their loss is my gain, as the view from the top was great.

And I’m sure nothing bad happened as a result of the Byzantines becoming basically ineffectual even as close as just across the river from their capital.

After climbing back down, I explored more of the district, and eventually ended up at the Kılıç Ali Pasha Mosque. What’s amazing is that even though this Mosque was designed by one of the most famous architects in Ottoman history, and was located right next to the cruise ship port, I nonetheless had it almost entirely to myself.

And that made all the difference. While the Blue and Sultanahmet mosques may have been larger, the ability to appreciate this one quietly, and not surrounded by hordes of instagrammers, made my experience completely different.

At this point it was time to meet up with my friend from the client and go have Turkish meatballs. We went back to Sultanahmet, which is the main historical / tourist district on the south side of the Golden Horn, and I discovered the advantage of a local guide. Where there were literally dozens of kebap restaurants in the vicinity of the Hagia Sophia, my friend was able to walk right up to the correct one, and tell me the history of the family that had run it for something like nine generations.

He also knew about the secret parking lot behind the Blue Mosque.

Finally, he knew how to game the online ordering system and get Turkish resident prices for one of the other really impressive sites in the neighborhood, the Basilica Cistern. Constructed by the emperor Justinian as a water reservoir, (no matter what they said in “From Russia With Love”) it’s a spectacular underground space with vaulted ceilings and ornamental columns.

And how did they fill all these cisterns? Why, via an aqueduct, of course!

This is the Aqueduct of Valens. It was built in the year 373. We drove under it. I can’t even with this city.

Finally, I was taken to a brewery to try a local beer. It was an excellent Kolsch, and we hung out in a nice cool beer garden to drink it.

After I was returned to my hotel, I had an experience that I am absolutely kicking myself for not getting video of.

I returned to the rooftop restaurant for dinner (and once again had it completely to myself) It has a lovely view over the city, and at roughly 8:30, all of the mosques started broadcasting their call to prayer. Now, the call to prayer isn’t a recording, and it isn’t the same from mosque to mosque. Rather, it’s an amazing cacophony, with each mosque’s caller making their own plea for the faithful over generally quite powerful loudspeakers all at once. All of which blended together to blanket the city in sound.

The effect of which was slightly spoiled or possibly enhanced by additional layer of the bar’s sound system, which was playing a cover of “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” by Eiffel 65.

Turkey, June 23: Fatih

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Dan

This trip to Istanbul was actually a BUISNESS trip, as I was meeting with a potential customer for my company. I am NOT the normal customer service person, but Belgium was close enough to “in the neighborhood,” that they decided to send me. They sent me and not other Daniel, because other Daniel is actually a lot better at the “installation” part of the job.

I won’t bore you (or break confidentiality) by posting any pictures of my visit to their laboratory, but after the business of the morning had concluded, they took me out to lunch, and you are DEFINITELY getting pictures of that.

We started with a selection of appetizers – dips, bread, salads sausage. All of this was just as amazing as it looks. And then – the meats:

I want to emphasize that my hosts were absolutely generous throughout all of this – they were constantly loading more food onto my plate, and making sure I was trying all of the interesting bits. The hospitality really was incredible – if you have a chance to be taken to lunch in Turkey by locals, do it. I was lucky enough to be taken out TWICE. (See tomorrow’s post for more details.)

Finally, dessert:

Filo pastry, honey, and pistachios, so a lot in common with baklava, but thinner and more subtle. Also strong tea and sherbet, which in this case means cherry juice with lemon and mint. A fitting end to a staggering meal.

After lunch, I was returned to my hotel to type up my notes, but then I had the afternoon free to go see more stuff. So stuff I saw!

In particular, I wanted to go visit the Grand Bazaar. After the prior day’s experience at the Spice, or Egyptian, Bazaar, I wasn’t optimistic about the actual stores, but I very much wanted to see the architecture.

On the way there, I snapped this picture of the entrance to the Istanbul University.

Quite an imposing entrance, that. Definitely fancier than anything at MY undergrad. The first part of the bazaar I explored was a street with booksellers, and that was lovely – quiet, shady, and with some amazing Arabic calligraphy on display.

The booksellers’ street was located slightly apart from the rest of the bazaar. As I approached the MAIN building, I was suddenly surrounded by fake handbags, fake perfume, and a surprising number of people trying to sell me socks, of all things. THIS was about what I was expecting.

Still, the architecture of the main bazaar, once you got past the sock merchants, really was spectacular. These corridors went on forever.

But after exploring the whole building, I wasn’t even REMOTELY interested in buying anything. Instead, I wandered off in search of a nearby geocache. After I got to the coordinates, I read the description, which said something like “This geocache is near one of the most famous mosques in all of Istanbul.”

Wait, what? Never mind the plastic tube in the hole in the wall – I want to see that.

This is the Süleymaniye Mosque, the one I could see from my hotel room. In addition to being spectacular on the inside (and far less crowded than the Blue Mosque), it also boasts an amazing view over the Golden Horn.

I exited the mosque by the back streets around the university, and had a nice walk through a student neighborhood. Hard to believe these quieter streets with people drinking coffee and studying were only a few blocks from the batshittery of the bazaar.

Not having a better plan, I just kept walking all the way down to my transfer station on the metro, which was easily another half an hour in the Istanbul heat. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was absolutely exhausted, but somehow still full from lunch, so I had a nice appetizer plate in the hotel restaurant and called it a day.

Turkey, June 22: Sultanahmet

Posted on June 22, 2025 by Dan

I arrived in Istanbul on Saturday evening, and my client meeting wasn’t until Monday, so I had all day Sunday to explore the city. I had also allowed two more days for potential followup meetings, and my flight left on Thursday morning. Did I spend Tuesday and Wednesday in a nuclear pharmacy? Stay tuned…

But for Sunday, I knew the big tourist sites were going to get crowded, so I needed to get moving early, and pick one site to do first before the crowds arrived. And there was really only one possible choice.

The Hagia Sophia was built by the emperor Justinian I in the 530s. Although it is currently used as a mosque, the building predates Islam itself. It’s coming up on fifteen hundred years old.

And they just let you go in and walk around.

Now to be clear, they don’t let you walk everywhere. Quick history of the building: It was a Catholic church for the first 500 years of it’s existence until the Great Schism separated the Eastern Orthodox faith from Catholicism.

It remained Orthodox from then until the Fourth Crusade showed up to steal the bronze horses and otherwise generally pillage stuff. Back to Catholicism for a bit until the Byzantines managed to retake the city. However, they couldn’t hold on to it, and when the empire was defeated by the Ottomans in 1453, the Hagia Sophia became a mosque.

Among other things, this transformation required putting the mihrab, or prayer alcove, off-center, since Istanbul is close enough to the holy lands that Jerusalem and Mecca have a detectable difference in direction.

The building remained a mosque until 1935, when it became a museum. It was converted BACK to a mosque in 2018. This latest transformation is a bit of a bummer from a tourist perspective, since it means we are confined to the second floor balcony.

But the second floor balcony is HUGE, and we still get to walk around this fifteen hundred year old building.

Truly a stunningly memorable experience.

After leaving the mosque, I walked down the street to the museum that was included in my ticket. That was… less stunning. The second floor had some nice historical artifacts, like this golden arm. (Eat your heart out, Frank Sinatra.)

But to get to them, we first had to walk through a goofy-ass multimedia presentation on the third floor. Every room had a projection and “exciting” music, and we were given headsets with narration in our language of choice. But the music was so loud, you literally could not hear the narration over it.

It was fascinating seeing Christian artifacts described with the same dispassionate neutrality applied to non-Christian artifacts in western museums.

The Hagia Sophia museum is just across the hippodrome from the actual Blue Mosque, so I got in line to see that. It is certainly nice, architecturally, but the crowds were starting to detract from the effect.

Moving on, it wasn’t quite time for lunch yet, so I wandered off to see what else I could see. I found a small cistern that charged way too much for admission, and also had a DIFFERENT goofy-ass light show playing on a loop. I would have rather just let them turn the lights on so I could SEE the ancient architecture.

By the way, this is NOT the famous “Basilica Cistern.” Rather, this is the cistern of Theodosius.

Right. Coffee time.

I’m not coming to Istanbul and NOT getting Turkish coffee, and this place seemed pretty nice – it was down the end of a long stone walkthrough. The container in the middle held Turkish Delight (although NOT served by a pale woman in a sled), and the cup on the right is sherbet, which is NOT an ice cream in this part of the world.

Went back to the square, ticked off some simple pictures for Geocaching, and then I decided it WAS time for lunch. I found some great reviews of a nice place nearby, but when I got there, it was closed for a private function. One street over, however, I found a perfectly nice fish restaurant, so I got a fish.

I also got an audience.

This little beggar sat there the ENTIRE duration of my lunch hoping I would trip and feed them. I did not.

Coming back up to the main square again, there were a few possibilities for other major attractions, (such as the Basilica Cistern and the Topkapi palace) but, as expected, they had all gotten super crowded. Instead, I went to the quite interesting Archaeology museum.

Here’s an exhibit showing the various layers of Troy, with artifacts extracted from each one.

Here’s Artemis, the patron goddess of ARTMS, my employer.

And finally, here’s me taking a selfie in front of a sculpture that looks like it’s taking a selfie. Remember THAT running joke? No, of course you don’t.

It was late afternoon by this point, so I started walking back towards the Golden Horn in hopes of visiting the spice bazaar and then going and finding some food.

The spice bazaar is a large enclosed shopping structure. The building is fascinating and historic, but as far as I can tell, the vendors are effectively a) all identical and b) all crap.

There’s also a little pet and garden area tucked in to one corner of the exterior. It’s fun seeing pet food sold in exactly the same way as sumac powder.

To finish the day, I crossed the Golden Horn again, and went to an excellent rooftop restaurant called Tershane Karaköy. What was so excellent about it? Well, THIS was my view during dinner.

And the food was pretty damn good too.

Phew – that was a long day, wasn’t it?

Everything But a Mule

In Which Dan and Leigh Occasionally Go on Vacation or Make Dinner