We arrived in Istanbul after our seven hour flight in the early afternoon! After a few rounds through various securities, customs, passport checks, and bag collecting we loaded up into two taxis and headed into the city! Despite having had somewhat limited sleep (I spent about five and a half hours of the seven hour flight watching the extended version of the Two Towers), I was very excited to see the city! That started with seeing our hotel, which had been provided to us by Turkish Airlines because of our flight delay. It was fancy, very fancy. Like three different kinds of saunas fancy (I sampled them all with my hotel roommate, Isabella – the consensus was the Turkish Bath sauna was quite nice, the wet sauna was physically painfully hot but probably good for the skin, and the dry sauna brought me right back to Olduvai).
After getting settled, all thirteen of us followed our fearless leader, Scott Solomon, into Istanbul! It is such a beautiful city, completely different from anywhere else I have been! Gorgeous mosques with high towers could be found down most streets, Roman aqueducts (shoutout Ms. Downey, my Needham High School Latin teacher) could be seen on the side of the highway, coffee shops and fruit markets sold their wares on the bottom floor of tiled or brightly colored apartment buildings, and there were a lot of old men in parks.
The best part of Istanbul, however, are the cats. So many cats. The stray cats in Istanbul are essentially communal pets, well cared for, fed, watered, and given veterinary care. Locals and tourists stop to give them pets and snacks and all of them were so friendly! I made a bit of a game out of it, and pet more than 20 cats in less than 24 hours (and like, 8 of those hours were spent asleep). It was awesome.
To make the most of our layover, we adventured relentlessly. We started off from the hotel on Istanbul’s metro system (which puts Houston to shame) to go into the Old City and check out the Grand Bazaar. I had never seen so many trinkets in my life, it was amazing! Small shops sold rugs, ceramics, candies, teas, glass lanterns, jewelry, and so much more. It was like a maze in there, a very glittery maze. It was very neat to see, and such a cool experience to walk through the vaulted corridors and avoid buying a floral carpet I knew would not fit in my luggage. Rose and I encountered the best cat in Istanbul in the Bazaar, who we named Typhoid Fever (his real name was Whiskers). He purred nonstop and would sort of melt into your lap and cling on with his tiny claws when you tried to get up.
Enjoying the late evening light (for context, the sun sets at 6:30 in Tanzania), we meandered down streets toward the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, stopping for ice cream (it was amazing). Both mosques were across from one another in a gorgeous park area, with just incredible architectural features and impressive sizes. Unfortunately we could not enter either mosque (due to our lack of tickets and also lack of appropriately modest dress), but even seeing them from the outside with seagulls wheeling overhead and palm trees swaying in the breeze and the sun setting of the city was just an amazing experience.
We stopped for dinner on the way back home for Turkish food, and it was so good! I got roasted vegetables, and I was very impressed because the bread they brought us had sesame but our waiter actually made me a sesame free portion so that I could eat it! Definitely an uncommon occurrence to be accommodated like that, and I appreciated it very much (especially as an enjoyer of bread). We set out back to the hotel by cramming all fourteen of us in an eight person taxi, clown car style.
For the first time in I’m not sure how many days, I got to take a shower with hot water that was longer than three minutes. I was refreshed. And the next morning, after a walk about town with some fellow travelers, I got to sample Turkish coffee! For those uneducated readers amongst my fans, Turkish coffee is both concentrated and unfiltered, delivering twice the amount of caffeine found in a typical coffee in maybe a third of the volume. I was oscillating at frequencies hitherto unknown to man. I thought I had developed something like a tolerance to caffeine from my three cups a day of tea in Olduvai, but I thought wrong. I was vibrating in place. It was an experience. 10/10, probably would not partake again.
All in all, Istanbul was amazing and a great end to an awesome trip and incredible class.
Sincerely,
Caroline (successfully resisted the urge to smuggle a cat home)
