Off to Istanbul
Trip Start
Aug 11, 2007
1
18
68
Trip End
Nov 08, 2007
Istanbul, Turkey
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Woke up at 6am on the 3rd to get a good start on the drive from Virginia Beach to Istanbul - Tina had thought she'd done well booking the flight out on a Mon to avoid the horrendous weekend crowds driving back from the beach on Sun, only to find out when it was too late to change anything, that Mon 3rd was Labour Day and the official end of summer (before start of the school year) and so Mon would be even worse for traffic than usual - and then there'd be the possible nightmare of thousands of people trying to fly home causing huge delays in security queues at the airport. SO we decided to leave Virginia Beach by 7 am in order to make sure we made or 4.20pm flight.
So of course it was an easy 3 hour run to the airport, which meant we arrived about 1½ hours before the Lufthansa desk even opened, so sat around drinking coffee, then a breeze through security and more hours waiting until we could board the plane. Good think we had left early though - for some reason the plane departed at 4pm, not 4.20pm as our itinerary showed.
We'd done our last lot of washing the previous night at Chris and Paul's - after both of us had managed to drip some coloured food sauce down our clean shirts and pants. So naturally while we had lunch at the airport, Chris managed to get some bright yellow mustard on the crotch of his shorts, so he tried to clean it up in the bathroom and ended up with a bright yellow patch in the crotch of his shorts surrounded by an even bigger wet patch. Did get some strange looks!
Trouble with a flight that leaves at 4pm, takes 6 hours and arrives at 6am in Frankfurt is that by the time you are actually feeling like going to sleep, they wake you for breakfast! Another breakfast (and lots of coffee) in the lounge at Frankfurt, then a 3 hour flight to Istanbul - on which we got yet another breakfast..... By the time we arrived at our hotel in the Sultanhamet area (the old part of the city) we had been travelling for 26+ hours with no sleep, so the first thing we did was check into our room and go to bed for a couple of hours!
We finally got up around 5pm and went out for a walk. The hotel we are in is by no means up market, but it has comfy beds, great water pressure in the shower and really friendly staff; and its location is fantastic - a short 2 block walk to the Blue Mosque and the AyaSofia, slightly longer to the Topkapi Palace and easy walking to many of the other interesting places in Istanbul. So our first walk in the city took several hours and lead us past many of these attraction - finally down to the Galata Bridge, where heaps of people were fishing off the bridge for little mackerel type fish. One old guy took a shine to us and was very keen on us having a go at the fishing - we caught nothing! We were not particularly hungry (after all the breakfasts) so ended up on the big pedestrian area by the sea, just under the bridge eating fish sandwiched with the locals. There are several boats moored here, where they grill fillets of the same little fish that are being caught above off the bridge, then they put the fish and some onions in a chunk of baguette and hand it to you wrapped in a piece of paper. You then go to a little carts parked in the same area and buy a plastic cup of pickles (cabbage and girkins) and filled with salty pickle juice, then sit at some little plastic kids stools all set out on the pavement, along with everyone else and eat your fish sandwich and pickles and drink the pickle juice. Very yummy (except the pickle juice which we tried and decided to stick with pickles and sandwich only!) Chris was so pleased with the meal, he went back for seconds. Whole thing cost us around $10!!
It was a pretty early night - in bed by 9pm and out like a light!
