August Adventures – Istanbul

Tuesday August 7

24 hours ago we were sitting at Starbucks at Istanbul airport trying to contact our friends here to get to meet them. Seems I missed an email with instructions, but thanks to the necessary travel tools now of laptops, free wireless connections at Starbucks, global roaming on our mobile phones, and USB sticks we soon had printed instructions in Turkish to give to a taxi driver.

Istanbul is a crowded city of 18 million people and we started to see this as we were driven along the coast road amazing Marmara sea then over the bridge connecting Europe and Asia. It’s amazing to see the4 contrast between ruins and new developments. The taxi driver amused us on our journey by pointing out many local features along our way. Jan did her best at interpreting into English – that’s when we both realised how tired we were as the interpretations got very amusing! The taxi driver spent a lot of the time looking in the rear view mirror which was a bit of a concern to us. The road signs stated that the speed limit was 50 but the taxi driver was going 110 – we assumed that the traffic rules were that it was based at ’50 per person’ in the vehicle! We ended our taxi ride memorably as the taxi driver decided that he would take the liberty to pat Priscilla on the backside as she got her things out of the vehicle.

The remainder of the day was spent recovering from a plane trip of night of little sleep. We had an evening meal at a local restaurant – an assortment of Turkish food – pide’s etc.

The view from our window

After dinner, we chatted for a bit until we retreated to our bed for the night – as soon as our heads hit the pillows we were sound asleep for a full night of refreshing and much needed sleep.

Priscilla and Joshua on the balcony