I'm watching the sun rise over Istanbul. Anne and I wrote this blog to chronicle our semester studying abroad in Madrid. We haven't posted here in ages, I'm not in Madrid now, and I'm not studying abroad. Still, this is our first time back go Europe since we left Madrid, so posting here seems appropriate. After all, we arrived in Istanbul on the five-year anniversary of our first post on this blog, and I once again have the pleasure of feeling utterly lost and foreign in a new place.
You might call bullshit on this post, pointing out that the Sarah you know is never awake early enough to see a sunrise. So, I took the precaution of photographic proof of the sunrise. Don't worry, though, I'm still not a morning person. I'm just still confused by traveling eight time zones east.
Sunrise over Istanbul
View of the city - you can see a sliver of the Bosphorus strait in this picture.
About an hour ago, around 6:20am, I heard the morning call to prayer. It was still dark outside and the city was beautiful with zillions of twinkling lights. The call to prayer blended with the wind whistling by the big windows where I'm sitting.
Thank you, hannah!
Where am I in Istanbul, and why? I'm here thanks to our wonderful hostess hannah, who is in the foreign service and is just finishing a tour serving here. She and her fiance Eric are graciously putting us up for our nine days here, feeding us delicious food and bulgarian wine, introducing us to their friends, guiding us around the city, and being generally generous and wonderful. Thank you!
Pretty much everyone else here has the good sense to be asleep right now, but hannah's adorable kitten Şimşek (pronounced Shim-shek, means lightning that races across the clouds) is keeping me company. It took a few tries to get a picture of her because she kept headbutting the tablet each time I tried to snap one. She's extremely affectionate and sweet, but she' was spayed a few days ago and so is currently suffering the indignity of a cone on her head to keep her from licking her stitches. Poor kitty. Beej, hannah's other cat, is far older and wiser than Şimşek and is probably off sleeping like everyone else.
Poor Şimşek, scratch her ears for her.
Istanbul
Istanbul is in the far northwest corner of Turkey, near Greece and Bulgaria. Istanbul extends to both sides of the Bosphorus strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea and then the Mediterranean Sea.
map from planetware.com
The Bosphorus strait is the dividing line between the Europe and Asia. Right now I'm on the European side of the city, but we will visit the Asian side of the city before we leave. In the picture of the sunrise, you can see a little sliver of water to the top right. That's the Bosphorus strait. So the other side of the strait is Asia. Like Sarah Palin (claims), hannah can see Asia from her house (and I can see it too, right now)!
Flight and First Impressions
We flew to Istanbul direct from Chicago on Turkish Airlines. The flight was as nice as a 10 hour flight can be, and they treated us well. Before we took off, we sat on the tarmac at O'Hare for an hour and a half, because it snowed a wee little bit in Chicago, and Chicago pretended like it had forgotten what snow was.
But, Turkish Airlines treated us well. They served complimentary hazelnuts and cocktails as an initial snack, then a hot dinner of pasta or chicken with green beans, salad, warm bread, butter, cheese, raspberry cheesecake, and more cocktails. Overnight they had self-service soft drinks, cheese sandwiches and lemon cake, and then they served a hot breakfast before we landed with scrambled eggs, vegetables, fruit, cheese, warm bread with butter and jam, and tea or coffee or soft drinks. I'm getting hungry just thinking about the food. It was all really good, and served on cute trays with actual metal silverware. It's so exciting to have airlines serve you food. They also gave all of us little pouches with sleep masks, a change of socks, lip balm, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. Lovely!
As we landed in Istanbul, I was amazed by the density of the city. On one side of the plane I could see the sea, and on the other land that was covered with fairly tall buildings as far as I could see. The buildings were so compact that I couldn't see any streets as we landed, just lots of buildings. Out the window on the other side of the plane, I was struck by how many big ships there were! This really is a major port.
The snow followed us to Istanbul! Saturday morning/afternoon had some continuous snow here, which Istanbul really didn't know how to handle. A power plant went offline and most of the city was without power for several hours. We were lucky and had power because hannah's awesome building has backup generators. I caught up on sleep for most of the day, but we went out that night and had Falafel for dinner and a drink at a bar near Taksim square, which is an area with a lot of night life.
I expected to find lots of Falafel in Istanbul since all the supposedly-Turkish Kebab places in Spain had falafel as well as shaved meat, but our hosts told us that the Falafel restaurant we went to was perhaps the only one in the city (although you can get meat Kebabs all over). The food was great, maybe the best Falafel I've ever had (sorry, Oasis in Iowa City).
Cevahir
Yesterday Anne and I ventured to Cevahir (pronounced jeh-VAH-heer), the mall that is right next to hannah's building. It's not just any mall, it's the 2nd largest mall in Europe (the largest one is also in Istanbul, though I have no idea why they wanted to outdo the one we saw yesterday). We had to go through metal detectors and xray security at the mall entrance.
The mall is six or seven stories high, and man was it PACKED! Anne's expression sums it up pretty well. I think that all 20 million people in Istanbul must have been at that mall yesterday.
We didn't stay at the mall a long time, but it was fun to watch people and look at styles in stores. It reminded me quite a bit of Madrid, except that I can speak enough Spanish to buy and order things, while the only Turkish phrase I could remember was thank you. But, we managed to buy a couple of things by smiling, pointing, and mumbling "teşekkürler" (thank you) and "Coca-Cola Light."
Coming up...
That's about it for now. I have some bread that I'm making that I'm going to go bake. I think today we are going to the Old City part of Istanbul and heading to the Grand Bazaar. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures, and will try to post again, especially if I keep being an insomniac.
