Istanbul

We arrived in Istanbul mid-afternoon on Friday. We flew into an airport about an hour outside the city (our hotel called it the “far” airport) and I’m thinking the reason it’s so far away is because it looked brand new. It was very modern and very very clean. They even had little soaps in the bathroom sinks to keep the bathroom smells to a minimum. Istanbul is a city of about 12 million people, and it has the suburbs of that many as well. On our drive into the city, we passed sprawling apartment complexes (very few single family houses) and strip malls. One girl I was travelling with went so far as to say it looked like Orlando, but I thought that was stretching it. As we got closer to the city, the buildings got more compact and started to show their wear and tear.

Our hotel was located in the old part of the city on a cute, renovated street full of restaurants and shops. Very pedestrian friendly (in the sense that everyone walked in the streets) and lots of places to sit and eat under awnings next to cobblestone roads. It was obviously made for tourists in the fact that it was extremely clean and well-maintained, and we enjoyed it. I hadn’t eaten since leaving at 5:15am that morning, so we headed to one of the restaurants near our hotel. We were walking down the street, trying to decide which to eat at, and one of the men standing at the entrance to his restaurant (all the restaurants have these men; they stand there and try to beckon you to eat in their restaurant) offered us a 10% discount to eat there. I figured if he was offering 10% off we should counter will 20%, and I told him he should give it to us because it’s the off-season. We settled at 15% and enjoyed a nice meal. I loved what I had—the menu called it a “lamb casserole” but what really came out was a sort of thick lamb stew with tomato, eggplant, peppers and some other vegetables. I was fabulous and I literally lapped up every last drop.

After dinner we headed back to our hotel to shower and change, and then went to the rooftop of our hotel to enjoy the views of the Blue Mosque. The rooftop didn’t have any furniture, but inside were a pile of rugs so we brought a few outside and had some wine on the ground before going out.

Picture: The Blue Mosque from the hotel's rooftop