RANSVESTIA

ently consists of very old ruins - walls and holes. He removed the collected trash and revealed the remains of the walls, and then they dug down and found the remains of separate cities one on top of the other. As time, de- parture of population or the destruction of wars destroyed one city and later on people would build another in its place. They are in the process of building a giant wooden horse as a tourist item, that being what the place is most remembered for, but it is only in skeleton form as yet. But here was the ground on which Achilles, Ulysses and Agamemnon walked and where Helen lived before her abduction by Paris, according to legend.

Arriving in Asiatic Istanbul and making our way slowly to the ferry dock was fascinating. Even more so was the 20 minute ride across the Bosphorus to the European side. We could see the big Istanbul Hilton on the side of the hill where we were to stay. I've never seen such maritime traffic in my life. It made the Hudson River on its busiest day look empty- boats of every kind from large ocean-going Russian passenger and freight vessels going up to or coming from the Black Sea; private yachts of all sizes, sightseeing vessels also of all sizes, innumerable little tramp coastal vessels going back and forth and ferry boats literally going in all directions. Since boats are not easy to stop like cars in crowded traffic, it took some considerable skill and awareness for the ferry captain- or any other cap- tain, for that matter-to thread his way across, ahead of this one and be- hind that and to the starboard of one and port of another. Everybody seemed to know what they were doing, but for the stranger it was like being in a hurry in a New York or London taxi. I had a beautiful room in the Hilton overlooking the Bosphorus which was ablaze with ships at night as there were eight or nine cruise ships anchored in the stream, and they all had festoons of lights from the bow over the top of the masts and down to the stern. You could sit on that balcony with a pair of binoculars all day long as the pattern wasn't static for five minutes.

Istanbul is obviously a place you could spend a couple of weeks in—if you weren't driven out of your mind by the traffic. Take an ancient city with narrow, twisting streets and dump in a couple of million cars and about five thousand buses, set the clock for 5 PM - going home time - and watch it. We think we have traffic jams here, particularly on big city free- ways-but wow, it seems like the whole city just stops. It took the bus about an hour and a half to go what must have been about five miles across town. It's all very complicated since the Golden Horn, which is a large islet off the Bosphorus, bisects the town and there are only two bridges over it. Everything has to tunnel down to and over them. Watch- ing those bus drivers wrangle those big buses around and through the jams

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