2010 Trip: To Edirne
8th May 2010
Today, I got packed up and said goodbye to the girls and Simon. When I left they (the girls) were watching sleepily from bed. Awww, cute!
I made my way to Taksim on the subway and eventually managed to catch the 83O to the Otogar (bus station). Unfortunately, I had to wait almost an hour and a half for the bus as they decided to cancel one without telling anyone, including several rather irate Turks. The Istanbul Otogar, well the western one, is massive and built in three stories. I knew the numbers of the companies who sold tickets to Edirne, so finding a bus was trivial. I arrived and 10TL (Turkish Lira) and 10 minutes later we were off.
I was impressed with the intercity bus system last time I was here, and this was reinforced. Plush buses, in this case featuring Turkish TV on the back of each seat, are the norm. They are cheap, very regular, and efficient! In a 2 1/2 hr bus trip, the steward came round and provided us with tea, juice and large biscuits twice.
The area we were passing through is known as Thrace. It has been occupied for 6500 years and for the most part this is not noticeable. The countryside is for the most part carpeted in (relatively) small fields with obvious crop rotation taking place. It is flat, or at the most slightly rolling hills. It has that dry Mediterranean feeling, where the crops are lush even if the ground looks parched.
The Edirne Otogar is a few kilometres out of town. I caught a free shuttle into the city centre. Eventually I managed to find a hotel that was not entirely booked up. It is cheap, but a bit of a dump. My room is less than 2*3m in size, the bed is incredibly lumpy, and the shared shower/toliet is less than could be desired. But don’t think I am complaining, it is a place to sleep, there is a power point and the proprietors seem friendly and always have a welcoming word.
I wandered round the streets in the late afternoon/evening, comparing the city to Istanbul. Of particular note, their are very few hawkers here. It is a laid back town that obviously doesn’t get many tourists. Of the tourists that come here, the vast majority seem to be from Turkey (95%) and the rest from nearby Eastern Europe. I have not seen a western tourist (knowingly) yet. Having said that, the population has significantly more European features than the predinantly Middle Eastern appearances in Istanbul. Many of the people here would not look out of place in an English country pub!
The city has a population of 150,000 today, but in its heydey, before the conquering of Istanbul, it was the capital of the Ottoman empire and reached a population of 350,000 people.
While the main shopping area seems well populated, walk a few streets out and this becomes apparent. The city is slightly run down and the newest places are the cellphone shops. They are everywhere, every second or third shop. In the centre of town, an erected stage played host to a well known Turkish singer and several other acts throughout the evening.
People stood around and chatted and listened, eating ice cream. Ice cream seems to be a veritable obsession here, mainly in a gelato style. The other obsession is fried liver, which I haven’t tried. People are, like the rest of Turkey, obsessed with kebabs, along with baklava.
Now for more random observations - the cops here all carry handguns, in addition, many monuments or important buildings are guarded by army personnel, often sporting large and imposing semi automatic weapons that they wave around rather too freely. Turkish pop is awesome, it has the same bouncy techno feel as Spanish pop, but it has far more variation and the addition of local instruments lead to a quite distinctive feel. A lot of the music one hears here is Turkish, but there are a large number of American pop numbers played.
End of rambling… For today.