Bye Bye!

After saying good bye to Maris we headed to Istanbul. The more we visit Brooklyn the more we like it. We talked about how New York truly has a little bit of every country. While its a very pricey place to live you never really need to travel because everything is in New York. So why travel? We decided to test the theory.

Istanbul felt instantly exotic, but easy to navigate—even with few English speaking people. I suppose a great part of it was the large number of women wearing burqas, which I never completely adjusted to, but it certainly added to the mystery of the place.

It was an hours drive to our hotel which was actually within the old town—which is no vehicles—so into a buggy again. For unclear reasons we were upgraded so after quickly checking out our hotel we were off to dinner (which happened to occur about 3 hours after we woke up).

So this a HUGE city—in size and population—twice the size of New York City, and a third larger than LA. It is spread out over the ocean front of the Marmara sea along the Bosphorus strait on the continent of Asia and Europe. I didn’t fully realize the geopolitical importance of the location until I saw the ocean “parking lot” of tankers and container ships waiting to be tugged through the strait—-about a thousand per day. At the end of the strait, the tankers pop into the Black Sea. It’s a small sea with just a few countries along it’s coast —among them, Russia and Ukraine—hmm interesting huh?

While we did lots of walking—-20,000 is our top number we also used public transit. Our favorite was the ferry which was about 40 cents a trip. We happened to be there for Victory Day which is when Turkey took Asia Minor or Anatolia from Greece. Lots of music, food, people and flags everywhere (which was our tip off that it was a holiday0. Regardless it was an organized easy place to get around. And always food was nearby. It was definitely a city of contrasts—women in shorts next to women in full burqas—often chatting together. People tried to help us (like trying to buy tickets from a machine) but their method was to just say things over and over in Turkish so it generally wasn’t that helpful. We left with so many more places we wanted to explore.

This is special baklava made for victory day. We also had baklava with water buffalo ice cream—-interestingly it’s made to be a little chewy. Chewy cold ice cream—-very interesting. Also some stands served ice cream with a magician—-very odd and unexpected—-the little girl in front of me cried when he gave it to her took it away and pulled from her then served it upside down. Kind of made me want to cry too—I knew exactly how she felt. JUST GIVE ME MY ICE CREAM 🙂

The Tokapi palace was huge. We literally walked for miles through garden and palace. I think I took a hundred photos of just this place. We had never seen anything close to it in our travels. It was so old and yet I felt I could have furnished it with West Elm and DWR then cuddle up with a good book.

This was a place we left with many more things left to do. Maris had warned us the airport was complex with 3 security check points before even getting to your gate. On the second check point they found a tiny pair of scissors in my knitting (which was not of concern atthe previous 4 airports), they kept standing there holding the scissors and not giving me my luggage back. I could not understand what they were saying—nor could they understand me. Finally, I said “Bye Bye!” And waved good bye to my scissors. She laughed, zipped up my bag, then waved and said “Bye, Bye!” You don’t need to speak the language but you did need some patience and a sense of humor.