It wasn’t until our taxi exited the highway into the organized maze of narrow one-way streets of central Istanbul that I started to feel like we were traveling again.
Before that it was the generic air travel that is the same for everywhere, although that does a disservice to Turkish Airlines, which was one of the best airlines we’ve flown.
Our flight was delayed a bit for de-icing (! - it’s almost April). We landed in Istanbul nine hours later and quickly got through passport control. They didn’t care to look at our evisa printout - they just scanned our passports and I’m assuming that looked up our visa info automatically. Going through Pearson seems so antiquated in comparison.
Istanbul’s new airport opens on Apr 6 and it was a bit sad to see the old airport in its last few days. Then I remembered the IKEA commercial about feeling sorry for the old lamp and was fine.
We always book airport pickup through the hotel when we first arrive in a new country. There were hundreds of names listed on signs for pickup - we actually split up to search for our names.
The drive into town was quick, following the coastline of the Sea of Marmara most of the way. We crossed over the bridge to Karaköy and then onto cobblestone streets approaching the hotel. There’s a cool vibe to the area we’re staying - lots of pedestrian traffic, people sitting in cafés spilling out the sidewalk, steep up and down winding roads.
We checked in at Hammamane, cleaned up and then headed out to explore the immediate neighbourhood before having dinner. There’s small barriers separating the road and sidewalk which makes it less stressful to walk on narrow streets.
We also saw lots of food and water set out for the street cats. We had read that locals love their cats here, but hadn’t realized how much until we saw the homemade cat shelters on every spare area of sidewalk, and healthy looking street cats everywhere.
We had dinner at No 19 at the recommendation of our hotel. It’s basically home cooked food that is now a restaurant. Very yummy and a great way to get into Turkish food.
Walked around some more after dinner, looking for a cool coffee shop. The cool ones looked like they just catered to tourists so ended up in a bright neon-lit place which was very local, made great coffee and tasty pastries. The locals were glued to their TVs watching the local election results.
It was a relaxing start to our trip. Istanbul is our hub, tomorrow we’re off to Egypt. We’ll have some time to see Istanbul at the end of this trip.