Raincoats FTW

Second full day. We made it up for breakfast which was a “traditional Turkish” breakfast with cheeses, tomato, cucumber, bread, Nutella (traditional??), some mystery meat, hard boiled eggs, and tea or coffee. Then we headed out and visited the Grand Bazaar, where I didn’t take any pictures but I’ll be back to actually do some shopping since we didn’t want to have to deal with breakables for a week before we leave. It was an enjoyable bazaar full of textiles, lamps, figurines, tea cups, jewelry, demin, shoes, and sweatshirts (those three were all knockoffs I’m sure). We ran into two friends from the hostel (and ran into two friends at the ATM) – so popular! We had some tea and baklava and then looked for the spice bazaar, but most likely went in the wrong direction, since we wandered for a bit and ended up at a different mosque. It was unfortunately rather rainy so I didn’t take many pictures during the day, but at least my nice raincoat keep me dry.

We walked back down to a different main street and enjoyed a more commercial and non-touristy environment (as well as a fantastic candy shop where they insisted on giving us free pieces of the best Turkish delight ever!) and then went further into a new neighborhood which was moderately residential, while keeping in mind that every building was at least 8 or 10 stories high, with the ground floor being a shop or restaurant. I liked this area a lot because it was real and clearly not a place where most tourists go. This city does feel remarkable safe for being so large –13 MILLION people—and we are rather pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to be two girls traveling around, especially compared to Ecuador where the national motto could possibly be “machismo”.

We turned down a different road is discovered that we were suddenly in fish restaurant district, complete with raw fish being feed to several of the city’s 37,000 cats (no Nick, this time I’m quite sure I’m not exaggerating, and I will prove this by showing you more pictures of cats than anything else except mosques—there must be at least 38,000 of those here…) in between at least 5 different restaurants with enormous outdoor seating areas. Obviously this city sees a lot of tourist traffic in the summer.

Two blocks later, we were standing on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. The color of the sky exactly matched the color of the water, and it wasn’t blue. Luckily, I happen to find this incredibly beautiful, which helps me through the 9 months of grey in Seattle. We made more cat friends and really enjoyed getting to hang out by a body of water, since it’s been a while for either of us. I do not know what the following balloon structure is for, but we saw several!