Merry Christmas from Istanbul, Turkey! We left Saudi Arabia on December 24th and arrived for our Istanbul adventure on Christmas Day! We rented a two bedroom apartment in the Taksim area for 10 days. It is a decent enough apartment...much like one would think an apartment would look like in the middle of Istanbul. It isn't luxurious, but it serves it's purpose which is to allow us to experience Istanbul in a different way than normal...more like natives. Our apartment for the first three days was a fourth floor walk-up. Yeahhhh...51 stairs to get to the apartment. Uff.
The weather in Istabul was absolutely fabulous for the first few days. In the high 40s during the daytime and the high 30s at night. As tired as we were, we still spent the first couple hours walking around and seeing the sights around the apartment. After a brief nap, John and I left the girls sleeping as we ventured out to see what Taksim Square had in store for us. It turns out that even though our apartment is on a steeeeep hill....Taksim Square is STRAIGHT UP from there. Once we made the trek and explored I was so excited to go back and get the girls! The square is all decorated in Christnas lights and coming from a strict muslim country this was awesome for us! The square and the streets surrounding Taksim are full of stores! It just so happens that the girls favorite thing to do is shop! We walked up and down that street shopping. It was packed! It reminded me of Times Square at New Years. I loved it!
Day two was spent going to see the Blue Mosque and the Sultanahmet area. We wanted to see the Hagia Sophia as well, but it was closed on Mondays....we really need to learn to read our travel guides better! We visited the Blue Mosque and, as most people experience, we did it with at local "guide." The guide is really a carpet salesman that brings you to his family business for a sales pitch. We knew that going in, but we decided we wanted to experience it anyway! The pitch wasn't that high pressure...the family was very pleasant. If we didn't live in an area that had beautiful Persian rugs (or the fact that we will have to girls at A&M next year) we might have considered buying one. We spent the rest of the day just wandering the streets and enjoying the sites.
The people here are really nice, but it is very similar to being in a souk in Bahrain or Dubai where they yell at you and try to get you to come in to their shops. All of the shops have the same thing and pretty much the same prices. Stuff here is really beautiful and very reasonable! The food is very inexpensive as well. The girls...welllll most of the girls, have been adventurous about trying the local cuisine. The food here is similar to the food in Saudi....they have "schwarmas" but they aren't wrapped in arab bread...they are more like sandwiches. The Kebap is a big thing here. The girls really liked those as well.
We just love it here...coming from Saudi we appreciate the freedoms even more than normal I think. There aren't very many Americans as far as tourists go. The fact that there are so few Americans here is baffling to us. It is very inexpensive to get here from the Middle East and the accomodations are reasonable, the food is inexpensive, and there is freedom here. If we ever decide that we have to "get out of Saudi" in the next few months this will definitely be where we come. If Istanbul is on your bucket list...you need to just do it! It is full of sites to see and it really is an amazing place.
On the fourth day here we rented a car at the airport and drove to Bulgaria to ski for a few days....
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