However said piece of information must be very small, because it slid right through the sieve of my mind. So when Charlotte appeared at my door on Monday evening asking me to come with her (and Jordanian Ali and New Girl Sarah) to see Dolmabahce Palace, I agreed. Peter couldn't come - he was teaching a class.
So in the morning I was up and dressed and ready, and Charlotte was here in the flat waiting for Ali and Sarah. At the moment when he should have been ringing the doorbell, Ali rang, and said he couldn't come because he had no money.
That wasn't useful. Not coming because of Dink's funeral would have been a better statement. Charlotte and I decided to go anyway. That was a slight miscalculation ...
The queue at the Taksim Dolmus stop (shared taxi) was longer than usual - especially seeing as it wasn't peak hour. But finally we got a ride. Charlotte takes this route every Saturday to teach some classes at Besiktas, one of the other centres for our company. But a few minutes later, as we were sitting in one of those impossible Istanbul traffic jams she commented, "I have absolutely no idea where we are! I've never been here before ..."
Nothing to do but sit tight - the Dolmus was obliged to eventually arrive at Taksim Square. So our shared taxi fare of 1.6 New Turkish Lira bought us an extensive tour of the backstreets of Taksim. I love the tiny streets of Istanbul, but we went to places I would have thought a motor vehicle shouldn't - couldn't - go. Up steep hills, and around tight corners, between ancient dwellings - in Australia the whole place would have been a museum - and in those tight streets our dolmus was squeezing past other vehicles, trucks, buses ...
All the big wide streets were closed. All of the traffic was in the lanes and steep places. And in among the patient drivers were motorbikes, police everywhere.
At thıs point Peter phoned me to ask where I was because one of the teacher's at our school - who lives in Taksim - had been unable to get to work.
The square
The square, usually bustling with people and cars, was eerily empty. But all around the edges there were hundreds of police. Charlotte and I felt quite out of places and a little nervous - I remembered our government website's warning about staying away from places like this. We felt very brave dragging out our cameras to sneak a couple of shots. In this pic you can just see one of the walls of police with their riot shields. There were lots of guns in sight, and a couple of tanks and armoured personnel carriers. We decided to wander nonchalently past rather than point our cameras at those.
We decided to soldier on ... sorry, bad metaphore. We headed out of the square and climbed aboard another dolmuş to go to the palace. Withşn minutes we were once again in gridlocked traffic. We saw the palace - from the dolmuş - with lines of police guardıng the entrance - and we stayed on the dolmuş.
So we had a wander around Beşıktaş, and then we went on to Ortaköy - a beautıful spot by the Bosphorus.
We sat down in this lovely waterside restaurant, and had kumpır - a dish that this area is famous for.
Its a very large baked potato, with all sorts of additional fillings. First they stir some cheese into the cooked potato flesh, and then you choose what else you want - bit like choosing your fillings at Subway.
Maybe on Friday we'll have another go at visiting the palace.
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