Our plane engine was leaking fuel and so our flight was canceled and we are back in Istanbul, and at our hotel waiting for another try tomorrow. It was impossible to book something else to fly out because everything is booked due to Thanksgiving travel. We miss the girls so much!!!!
We left at 8am and came back to hotel at 4pm. Fortunately they had a room available. Adding to what will soon be an avalanche of good reviews to Stories Apart hotel chain will not help with availability in the future :) But we need to give credit where credit is due.
After confirming our return flight tomorrow we went to a tiny Adres Kanat restaurant where we had our best meal in the country. So much for our perpetual complaining. They have a large grill lovingly attended by one of the men working there. I think that is the trick. Yesterday when we walked around after dinner we thought that we are just jaded and us 10 years ago were a whole lot less pickier. But this restaurant proved us wrong. Most of the plentiful tourist places around just throw the same lowest denominator food at people and they gobble it up so why bother. This place served very simple food - we had grilled chicken and shish kebab with rice and spicy salad, lavash, and ayran from the restaurant's cooling machine rather than the fridge. And it was awesome. They also allowed us to connect to their Internet and we were able to call home and speak with Dan's mom and Isabella.
We walked around interesting streets with hippy stores close to Galata tower. Walked across the fishermen bridge. Today they were having a blast - we watched them take out fish after fish. Stopped at Ada coffee shop/book store and had brownie, ice-cream and strategically placed banana dripping with sweetened condensed milk. Quite a sight. When we finished it we enjoyed watching the passerbys: religious young families, young men on the evening sprawl, tourists. It is a great street for people watching.
Now that we are back in our room and preparing for our last last evening in Turkey a few parting thoughts.
Ingenious local device for collecting personalized information accompanied by the photo. There are those booths in the street that allow people to take a picture of themselves and have it emailed to the email address that they have provided. The email, of course, never gets there. How brilliant is that?
Anti-sanitary conditions. Today was particularly "fruitful" in terms of sightings: in the morning we watched a cart with oranges for juicing overturn and oranges roll to the garbage bags lying on the street. Store workers just gathered them up and put them next to the press like nothing ice- cream. We saw ice-scream shop employee help himself to some samples without changing the spoon in between. Shavarma employee wiped his nose with his hand and then proceeded to start cutting the meat for the customer. Those fishermen near the river.. I am not sure what happens with the fish. The caught ones are swimming together with dead bait. Who knows if they dump the whole load on the grill? Hardly any bathroom would win cleanliness award, though bathrooms are a plentiful. I am not even talking about stalls selling dubious closed mussels. It looks like cops may be cracking down on them though we saw police truck with some stalls and splattered mussels inside yesterday. Anyway, we keep drinking the Coke and hope for the best :)
Speaking of police. There is intense presence on Istiklal and other places. They constantly drive around, chase away beggars, and remove unlicensed sellers. Garbage trucks are here around the clock too constantly removing the garbage and keeping the city very clean even considering how many people are here now. In addition the Grand Bazaar is a lot welcoming now - with lots of cops around no one is grabbing your hand, no pushing. You can walk around enjoying things and no one is disturbing you. So we like.
Turkish people are very friendly and we really enjoyed ourselves. Even though one of our goals on this trip was confirming Georgia as our summer destination for telecommuting, but now we firmly put Turkey on the map. It is a great place to come to with kids.
Getting ready to go to sleep now. Best of luck to us tomorrow. We want to go home.
We left at 8am and came back to hotel at 4pm. Fortunately they had a room available. Adding to what will soon be an avalanche of good reviews to Stories Apart hotel chain will not help with availability in the future :) But we need to give credit where credit is due. After confirming our return flight tomorrow we went to a tiny Adres Kanat restaurant where we had our best meal in the country. So much for our perpetual complaining. They have a large grill lovingly attended by one of the men working there. I think that is the trick. Yesterday when we walked around after dinner we thought that we are just jaded and us 10 years ago were a whole lot less pickier. But this restaurant proved us wrong. Most of the plentiful tourist places around just throw the same lowest denominator food at people and they gobble it up so why bother. This place served very simple food - we had grilled chicken and shish kebab with rice and spicy salad, lavash, and ayran from the restaurant's cooling machine rather than the fridge. And it was awesome. They also allowed us to connect to their Internet and we were able to call home and speak with Dan's mom and Isabella.
We walked around interesting streets with hippy stores close to Galata tower. Walked across the fishermen bridge. Today they were having a blast - we watched them take out fish after fish. Stopped at Ada coffee shop/book store and had brownie, ice-cream and strategically placed banana dripping with sweetened condensed milk. Quite a sight. When we finished it we enjoyed watching the passerbys: religious young families, young men on the evening sprawl, tourists. It is a great street for people watching.
Now that we are back in our room and preparing for our last last evening in Turkey a few parting thoughts.
Ingenious local device for collecting personalized information accompanied by the photo. There are those booths in the street that allow people to take a picture of themselves and have it emailed to the email address that they have provided. The email, of course, never gets there. How brilliant is that?Anti-sanitary conditions. Today was particularly "fruitful" in terms of sightings: in the morning we watched a cart with oranges for juicing overturn and oranges roll to the garbage bags lying on the street. Store workers just gathered them up and put them next to the press like nothing ice- cream. We saw ice-scream shop employee help himself to some samples without changing the spoon in between. Shavarma employee wiped his nose with his hand and then proceeded to start cutting the meat for the customer. Those fishermen near the river.. I am not sure what happens with the fish. The caught ones are swimming together with dead bait. Who knows if they dump the whole load on the grill? Hardly any bathroom would win cleanliness award, though bathrooms are a plentiful. I am not even talking about stalls selling dubious closed mussels. It looks like cops may be cracking down on them though we saw police truck with some stalls and splattered mussels inside yesterday. Anyway, we keep drinking the Coke and hope for the best :)
Speaking of police. There is intense presence on Istiklal and other places. They constantly drive around, chase away beggars, and remove unlicensed sellers. Garbage trucks are here around the clock too constantly removing the garbage and keeping the city very clean even considering how many people are here now. In addition the Grand Bazaar is a lot welcoming now - with lots of cops around no one is grabbing your hand, no pushing. You can walk around enjoying things and no one is disturbing you. So we like.
Turkish people are very friendly and we really enjoyed ourselves. Even though one of our goals on this trip was confirming Georgia as our summer destination for telecommuting, but now we firmly put Turkey on the map. It is a great place to come to with kids.
Getting ready to go to sleep now. Best of luck to us tomorrow. We want to go home.
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