Arrived in Istanbul…

So… we are officially on the first stage of the big trip. Arrived yesterday afternoon in Istanbul, to find our hotel had unexpectedly cancelled our booking — yikes! But they found us another one quickly and, once re-housed, we had time for a neighbourhood walk and an authentic Turkish dinner.

Today we strolled in the old part of the city, and took a bus tour that crossed the Bosphorus a time or two, taking us from Europe to Asia and back — they boast it is the only city tour that covers two continents, and it might well be so. Since our time was short for in-depth sightseeing after that, we decided to tour the Hagia Sophia, a very old mosque that started life as a church in 537 AD.

The old city is pretty, with lots of life in the streets, and street vendors selling chestnuts and corn-on-the-cob from grill carts. Quite a few stray cats as well, but they seem healthy and adequately fed, to my great relief.

As we made our way through this Islamic city, we heard periodic prayer calls. The sound is very haunting, and I learned something interesting today. The prayers are not always at the same specific times of the clock, they depend on the movement of the sun, so — if I understood correctly — they are related to sunrise, the highest point the sun reaches each day, the beginning of sunset, and the moment the sun vanishes. That means prayer-time shifts over the weeks by some minutes, and will be at different relative times in different time zones.

I was excited to see the Pera Palace Hotel today, didn’t get a picture because we passed it fairly quickly on a bus, but that’s where Agatha Christie wrote “Murder on the Orient Express”. She stayed here regularly when she and her husband Max Mallowan were travelling back-and-forth to Syria and Iraq for his archeological expeditions. How cool is that?

As usual, we are working to learn a few phrases in the local language, Turkish in this case, along the lines of hello-thank you-please-goodbye.  Geoff of course already knows how to ask for “a beer, please”, but he was asking the waiter JUST THEORETICALLY about how to ask for “another beer, please”, and the waiter misunderstood and quickly brought him another beer. Can you guess what happened to it? Well, I mean, it would’ve been rather impolite to send it back, right?

We are now in the airport, leaving late tonight for Kyrgyzstan, and meeting up with our tour group in Bishkek tomorrow if all goes well. There is a very surprising amenity in the Turkish Airlines Lounge. Look at this…