I spent half of this week in Tarabya, a village on the Bosphorus, so remote that after reaching there one gets surprised she has not left city limits yet. But then it is Istanbul, possibly the most spread out city in the world. You get on a boat along the Bosphorus and keep marveling the villages with grand mansions that Istanbul does not run out of until the very Black Sea.
It took me two hours to get from my house in Moda to the Grand Tarabya hotel by public transport. In the same two hours I could have ended up at our countryside property in Sapanca. But then it is Istanbul where you change from a ferry to a tram, then you get on a funicular and finally hop on a taxi constantly wondering why the city authorities keenly introduce new modes of transportation instead of connecting the dots of the existing ones.
