Istanbul - Our Impressions

Istanbul is a great place. An enormous, sprawling city of 13 million people. It has one foot in Asia and one foot in Europe. It has been continuously settled since 657BC. Quickly transitioning from a traditional, heavily religious society to a western influenced consumeristic society.

It is big, loud, in your face city, like most big cities are, and it has an enormous variety of stuff to do. It has world class monuments and museums, a very modern and sophisticated financial center, terrific restaurants and bars where you can sit on cushions on the floor and smoke tobacco from a water pipe and lots and lots of cute neighborhoods.

Shopping in the bazaar is an unforgettable experience and watching the whirling dervishes was very interesting.
We were amazed by the amount of really old buildings that we saw everywhere and we were surprised by how many European tourists were there. The place was crowded with Italians and Spaniards. we could count the amount of Americans we saw the whole time with one hand and we also saw 2 Argentineans!

We found Istanbul to be hot (in the 90s or over 100 all the time) and quite expensive. We took a lot of public transport around the city but still managed to walk a lot.

One of the things we enjoyed most about Istanbul was the Turks themselves. They are tough, hard working, positive and very energetic. Some of the interesting people we met included the owner of our hotel, who was in New York on September 11Th. He was less than 2 km from the twin towers and saw everything happen up close. His girlfriend died in one of the towers and he said that he boarded a plane the next day and flew back to Turkey never to return to the US. He said that he doesn't want to go back because he tells himself that his girlfriend still lives there and he can't go and confront her death. We really enjoyed talking to him.

Another guy we met was one of the waiters at the restaurant were we ate, around the corner from our hotel. He rolled up his sleeves to show off his muscles and when he wasn't serving food to some, he was getting people into the restaurant in every language imaginable. We would stop by to see him afterwards and he would wink at Gaby and say "Como estas, chica?".

Someone else that we enjoyed meeting was the guy that had a grocery store in the corner, who would teach us Turkish when we stopped by every morning to buy water and provisions.

We really enjoyed our time in Istanbul, we saw amazing places and things but we were ready to continue our travels.

Steve