When flying Turkish Air, you have to stop in Istanbul, so we decided to take advantage of the layover and make it into a mini-vacation. The modern network of subway, buses, and metro rail facilitated circulating through the massive city, and being wintertime low-season, we had this staple of package tourism almost to ourselves, sharing mainly with local Turkish tourists. After two years in Africa, Istanbul had a very metropolitan feel and with ancient monuments in site everywhere, it felt much more historic than anything in our part of Africa. Situated on several hilltops and surrounded by various narrow bodies of water, every direction tempted the photographer’s eye with panoramic vistas, so even though we are only amateurs with a little point-and-shoot digital machine, we still took nearly 400 pictures during our short stay.
The city’s countless mosques with their myriad minarets, each trying to outdo its neighbor in projecting the call to prayer from its megaphones left no doubt when the faithful should face Mecca and comply with their religious duties. For us the five times daily cacophony of Arabic was a convenient way to mark our daily activities: waking up, breakfast, lunch, mid afternoon snack, and time to head home.
Food in Istanbul is omnipresent and amazing. Markets burst in cornucopias of fresh fruits and produce priced very reasonably. We treated ourselves to pomegranate, dried apricots, and apples. There is no peanut butter, but we discovered hazelnut chocolate spread just as good for making snack sandwiches. Street vendors make sure you are never more than a two minute walk from the nearest sesame seed bagels, called simits, pastries, or fire roasted chestnuts.
Tea vendors find you even in the most obscure places, like on top of the cities ancient walls. Luc’s favorite vegetable eggplant is everywhere, and in every form.
Potatoes are also taken to creative extremes, often times unrecognizably camouflaged by toppings,
and bright windows full of sweet desserts, baklava, and Turkish delights entice even the most regimented of dieters as they wander the avenues.
For the bargain hunter there is the Grand Bazaar, an entire covered section of the old city spanning several city blocks where you can find anything from antique carpets, to tourist curios, to plastic junk manufactured in China. We took advantage to do some last minute Christmas shopping.
Istanbul is most definitely a European city when it comes to walking. Even a drizzly afternoon created no visible reduction of volume in the river of Turkish pedestrians clad almost exclusively in dark colorless winter attire.
Istanbul, having served as capital of various empires, had more historic sites than even Luc could try to visit on a three day layover, so we tried to get a representative mix of the highlights: imperial mosques,
ancient Christian churches with golden mosaics,
the more than opulent Topkapi Palace where the Ottaman sultans reigned,
the roman aqueduct and city walls,
the Genoese fortifications,
and even an underground Byzantine cistern.
We took a ferry cruise across the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city, which seemed no less European to our casual visit. We enjoyed the views from the boat, but locals seemed busy feeding the seagulls ensuring flocks of birds around each vessel.
Janet found time at one of the centuries old Turkish baths to get the full clean experience where a young masseuse scrubbed off two years of accumulated African grime. Still, despite the amazing opportunity for a mini Istanbul vacation courtesy of Turkish Air, we were longing to be home, and secretly enjoyed the fact that we only had three days there and soon enough found ourselves on a USA bound jet plane.
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