Istanbul: a mosque on every picturesque corner

This trip report will start in the middle. I left Spokane on June 30 and have been traveling nearly non-stop, with short (some merely hours long) stays in various Baltic and Scandinavian ports. I am now in Istanbul, as the photo above shows, and the contrast couldn't be greater.

For one thing, the means of transportation. I spent the first dozen days of the trip aboard a Celebrity line cruse ship, the Silhouette. Along with 2,882 (or so) other passengers, my wife, her sister and husband, and I slept and ate and drank and (sometimes) exercised aboard a ship that, at 319 meters, is just 14 meters shorter than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

Let's just say I grew to appreciate a good margarita, if not a recumbent bicycle.

We arrived in Istanbul yesterday, having left the cruise ship at 6:30 a.m., flying from Amsterdam to Rome, then on to Istanbul, arriving after a full day's travel with only a few mishaps. One involved a near riot caused by a fracas between Turkish passengers on our Alitalia flight and a belligerent Italian official (the Turks slapping the bus windows in support of their fellow countrymen proved particularly impressive). The other came when Turkey's answer to Rambo decided to chastise me for thinking it was OK for me to join my wife at the passport desk, even though another couple had just done the same thing.

News at 11: International incident narrowly averted.

Then came some 50 minutes in a car (we'd arranged online for a drive-for-hire) in which our driver kept saying, "Fifteen minute. Bad traffic. Good traffic? Five minute." We finally arrived at the comfortable Hotel Sultania, were greeted by Turks of the opposite attitude from Passport Rambo, joined our friends Karen and Allen for a late dinner and then fell into bed.

Today we walked for miles, in the sunshine (another contrast: much of the Baltic part of our trip was marked by 60-degree weather, overcast skies and intermittent rain), visiting three of Istanbul's greatest mosques, its shopping mecca Grand Bazaar and touring the various side streets where real life (not to mention better bargains) occurs.

For dinner, we took a taxi through the narrow streets, along the coast north of the city, to the sea-side restaurant Sur Balik (Istanbul sits on a waterway known as the Straits of Bosphorus that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, which flows into the Mediterranean). After a dinner of various appetizers (called mezes), both cold and hot, accompanied by red wine and glasses of raki, topped off by baklava, we headed back to our hotel.

Tomorrow we plan on doing much the same, though probably with the help of some of the city's seemingly convenient mass transit. These legs aren't getting any younger.