Istanbul – Arrival, Day 1

On Wednesday, I woke up somewhere over Amsterdam, still hours away from Istanbul. Breakfast was the lamest airplane breakfast I’ve ever had, but at least it was vegetarian. While approaching Istanbul, we caught some glimpses of Black Sea and then mosque after mosque; thankfully, the guy behind me stopped counting after 15.

As in Atlanta, international arrivals must walk and walk…and walk. The signage for Visas was minimal; we saw many people make their way to the front of the passport control line only to have to go back and get a visa; my mom missed it completely because she approached passport control from the other direction! As we had no checked bags, we headed right out of the customs area.

The first thing we saw was a Starbucks — reminiscent of our arrival in Japan! Chloe had to go to the bathroom. In the first stall, there was an Eastern toilet (hole in the ground) and Chloe groaned. I showed her the next stall had a western toilet, and she was so thrilled! We found the sign on the sink wall that said that feet washing was not allowed to be humorous.

At the Metro station, the token machine confused us at first, but then someone explained how to get multiple tokens, and we were all set to get on the train. From the train, the city seemed like any other European city; a bit dirty, a bit rundown, but functional. We changed from the train to the tram (another token) and headed through the heart of old Istanbul. For the most part, we could have been in any European city, except for the multitude of mosques and the larger percentage of women wearing colorful head scarves.

From the tram, we then changed to a funicular (another token) to get us up to Taksim Square. We wandered around a bit, but finally made it to the hotel (I had forgotten to print out a map — oops). This was not the first time that my nose pointed us in the right direction.

We checked in and cleaned ourselves up before heading back out…more on that later!

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