After spending nearly month back in the US for my little brother’s wedding and bachelor party, it was time to head back out on the road. First stop- Istanbul, Turkey! Istanbul is a beautiful old city with a ton of history, ranging from being part of the Byzantine/Roman empire (then known as Constantinople) to the Ottoman Empire, to present day Turkey. It is also the only pan-continental city on earth, with parts of the city spanning both Europe and Asia.
The trip started out great. I had a nice apartment in the Taksim neighborhood, which is like the Time Square of Istanbul, with streets packed with tourists and great bars and restaurants everywhere. On my first day there, my Airbnb host introduced me to his friend who runs a language learning club for foreigners in Istanbul. They were meeting that night and he invited me to come along. I jumped at this opportunity as I was initially under the impression that I could learn some Turkish and meet some people from around the world. Well apparently the Turkish language group meets on Wednesdays, and this was a Thursday, where they were learning English LOL. It was still a good experience and gave me an opportunity to meet some cool people, but I felt like one of those 18 year old kids who lied about his age to play in the Little League World Series, as English is obviously my first (and only) language 😂. The language club was hosting a house party that weekend and they invited me to attend, which was great. There were probably like 30 people there from all over the globe. I met people from Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, UAE, France, Iran, Iraq, and of course Turkey. Everyone was extremely friendly and we had a great time. Both the language club meeting and the house party were also located on the Asian side of Istanbul, which gave me an opportunity to explore that side a bit and experience some Istanbul public transportation, which was a bit of an adventure.
The following day, a bomb exploded on the densely packed tourist street I described above, just a few blocks away from the apartment I was staying at. To be clear, I wasn’t on the street when it happened. Fortunately, I was moving pretty slowly that day after having maybe a bit too much fun at that party the night before and I was in my apartment when it went off. I didn’t even realize what had happened until my sister texted me in a panic to make sure I was ok. After that, I went out to see what was going on and it was a very different scene than the previous days. There were police and military everywhere, streets were closed down and you could tell that people’s mentalities had changed, people were very scared and sad as you would expect and the streets had cleared out, which was very unusual for a Sunday. At this point I still didn’t realize how close I had been to that bomb, the road was blocked off and there was military everywhere but I assumed that they had blocked off the entire street.
By this point I was starving and walked by a restaurant I had tried to go to the day before but couldn’t get in because it was packed and had a wait. This time around, I was the only person in the whole restaurant. I was chatting with my waiter who told me that normally they would be completely full, if it hadn’t been for the horrible event that had just occurred. Looking back on it, this shook me a lot more than I realized at the time. Not only did the attack occur very close to my apartment, but it happened at a place that I had walked by every single day thus far in my trip. Pretty scary stuff, but at the same time you have to remind yourself that bad shit happens everywhere in the world and there’s always a chance of something like that happening, no matter where you are. So live it up and enjoy every second! 😃
For the remainder of my time in Istanbul, things definitely felt different. People were (understandably) scared and sad about what had happened and there was a much more visible police and military presence in the area, who would close down the main street every evening. They moved very fast in catching the people responsible for the attack, which I think was a relief for everyone. The Turkish government also came out and very explicitly rejected the condolences given to them by the US government for the attack, signifying that they felt we were in some small way responsible for this horrible tragedy, which was awkward… The background here is that the group responsible for the attack was an extremist Kurdish group who was somehow affiliated with the Kurdish military group that the US armed and funded in the fight against ISIS in Syria. I’m obviously very biased, but that seems like pretty much a no win situation to me, as ISIS was certainly not a group of upstanding citizens either, as has been very well documented.
Anyway, I spent my next few days in Istanbul checking out some tourist sites. Namely the Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, and Basilica cistern. The Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque are 2 massive mosques located right next to each other in a beautiful square. Turkish mosques seemed to be much more open to letting non-Muslims visit the mosques than they were across Europe, which was cool because I’d never been inside a mosque before. The only requirement were that you dressed properly (no exposing your shoulders and knees and you have to take off your shoes before entering). The blue mosque was unfortunately under heavy renovations, so I was only able to see one small part of it, but they were all most beautiful from the the outside.
I also did a lot of good eating in Turkey. It’s the birthplace of the doner kebab so obviously I got my fill of those and they didn’t disappoint. There was also a lot of really good seafood in Turkey. For some reason I really didn’t expect this going there, but it makes complete sense as they are surrounded by some major bodies of water. Another dish I enjoyed was manti, which is basically these tiny raviolis filled with lamb meat or ground beef and served with a butter sauce and garlic-yogurt sauce that was excellent.
Turkish was one of the bigger linguistic challenges I had run into this far on the trip as well. The language is derived from Arabic, but utilizes the Latin alphabet. This is very helpful when trying to pronounce words off a menu, because you can at least try your best to pronounce them, but alot of the words are crazy long and combinations of letters you don’t typically see together. So that was fun. I learned from my friend Jusef, who ran the language club, that the Turkish empire moved their language to the Latin alphabet not that long ago (less than 100 years). During Ottoman empire times, they utilized the Arabic script but after WWI and the fall of the empire they started utilizing the western alphabet to better align Turkey with the rest of Europe.
Istanbul is an absolutely beautiful city. It extends over multiple bodies of water and I enjoyed walking across the bridge over the Bosphorus and seeing all the beautiful minarets from all the mosques towering across the skyline. I feel like I only scratched the surface of all the things to see there over the course of the week I spent there, so I’ll have to go back again someday. Next time, I’d like to stay over on the Asian side. Taksim was cool, but it was a little too touristy for me and I’d like to get a more local experience. After a week in Turkey, it was starting to get cold, so I started making my way south en route to the Middle East. Next stop, Antalya, for some golf and sunshine (or so I thought…).
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