Today is a miserable day. The weather just won't get any warmer, the sky won't clear up. And the drizzle doesn't make it any better. So we decide to have an organisation day.
We drive to the ferry, which we take before 2.5 years from Europe to Asia have travelled. Or as the old poets would say: from the Occident to the Orient. Or even better: from the Occident to the Orient.
"Occident" is an old term for Europe. In the past, it was probably thought to be in the far west, where the sun sets. The opposite would be the Orient or the Orient.
Istanbul and its location on the Bosphorus, i.e. the water connection between the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea, has always been regarded as an important link between the Occident and the Orient, as was the case in the Byzantine Empire. Today, the term "Occident" is usually used to refer to the whole of Europe.
And we roll onto the ferry, cross the Marmara Sea, which is actually more of a lake, and land in the Orient. The Orient as it appears here is not so different from the Occident over there on the Gallipoli peninsula. But, and this is the most important thing for us, we now know that we are in Asia, and our imagination alone makes a big difference.
Here we wander through a city completely overcrowded with cars. We find a parking space, buy a good internet sim card relatively quickly and organise a motorway vignette. However, this is a strange endeavour.
Because they are only available at the state post office. We fill in a form, which is of course only available in Turkish, but again we get a lot of help from the others in the queue. Now we pay a small amount, get a sticker, similar to the Swiss vignette, and are allowed to drive on the motorway from now on. However, we have not yet paid the toll, which is deducted from our toll account per kilometre of motorway. We don't know how much. We have to go back to the post office every time to pay it. Within 15 days.
I'm desperately trying to find out how much we've already used, it's only possible with a Turkish passport. I see. We don't have one at the moment. So we have to go to the post office every now and then and ask. It's a very strange system. Other countries, other systems. We wanted that, so we're going along with it.
We also quickly tick off the last item on our to-do list: we buy some good oil from a Fiat professional - after all, our Felix needs to be pampered from time to time. And as large garages are usually located on arterial roads, we set off straight away out of the hustle and bustle of the city and find a nice parking space for the night in Troja, which is "quite by chance" on our way.
Merci for "travelling with us
We are thinking about taking another break from travelling in the summer and visiting our families in Germany and Switzerland. One of the ideas is to organise a Lecture about our long journey to the Persian Gulf to prepare. If you would like to, what would interest you the most? We will also tell stories here that don't find a place here on the blog. We're thinking of the Bern and Berlin area - simply because we have family there. But other places are also conceivable. Feel free to write to us.
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