Istanbul(Turkey)

September 2011

We’re currently on a Turkish Air (“Europe’s Best Airline”) flight from Seoul to Istanbul. It is the middle of what will be a very long day. Our flight left Seoul at midnight Seoul time and arrives in Istanbul at 6am Istanbul time. Our flight to Rome leaves at 10pm and arrives in Rome at midnight Rome time.

During the flight from Seoul, I asked the flight attendant for wine with my meal. She asked if I wanted Turkish wine or French wine. Not having had it before, I asked for Turkish, which was really quite good. She asked me later if I liked it and when I said I did, she brought me another.

Not sure how energetic I’m going to feel, but we plan to go into Istanbul for a few hours.

Friday, late afternoon

The Turkish Airways lounge in Istanbul is the best airport lounge I’ve ever been in. Freshly made hot food, including Turkish pizza made in front of you, pots of Turkish coffees and teas, a barista making coffee drinks to order, fresh fruit and juice and the best selection of whiskeys and wines I’ve ever seen in a lounge. Only odd thing is beer. I couldn’t find any. I finally went up to a juice bar and asked the lady where the beer was. She reached under the counter where they had hidden the beer and said that all they had was this (rather bad) local beer. I guess that’s why they hide it.

Oh my gosh, yk just arrived with a freshly made apple strudel.

Took the train into Istanbul this morning, arriving at the Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque area about 7:30. Nothing, including restaurants, opens before 9, so we walked around for a while, eventually going into Hagia Sophia. We couldn’t go into the Blue Mosque because yk didn’t have a head scarf, but we did go into Suleman’s mosque some time later when a scarf was provided.

We then walked through the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Market. Had lunch at a restaurant above the Spice Market, walked around more of the very hilly city and eventually took the ferry across the Bosphorus to Asia.

If any of you would like to take the ferry, I have an extra ferry token, due my mistakenly believing that subway tokens and ferry tokens were the same (same dispensing machine, same price.)

The immigration, money change lines, in fact, all lines are crazy, so I was dreading airport security, but wound up going through it without realizing it. After we left the subway and entered the airport, we had to go through a single x-ray machine. It took just a minute and I thought it was some kind of supplemental security, but, it turned out, that’s all there was.

We’ve got a few hours left in the lounge which I will thoroughly enjoy. Our flight leaves a little after 10 and arrives in Rome at midnight.

Update – my initial concern about security lines turned out to be correct. We went through security again at the gate and the one and only x-ray machine broke down and no one seemed to know what to do. Eventually, two technicians and a supervisor came and got things rolling again.