We didn\u2019t hear any prayers during the night, and so we took the chance to sleep in a little later than usual.\u00a0 Heading downstairs one of the lights on the landings was burned out, and with no other light around I slip and fell on my ass as we walked down the stairs.\u00a0 Luckily it was a minor fall, and it didn\u2019t come back to haunt me later.\u00a0 We did advise the hotel staff that it might be a good idea to change the light before somebody more fragile than I slipped and fell.<\/p>\n
After breakfast we walked across town to the harbor.\u00a0 There we caught a cheap ferry ride to the Asian side of Istanbul.\u00a0 We sat outside along the water since it was shaded from the morning sun by the bulk of the ferry, and we were joined by a local family with a cute kid smiling and making faces at us.\u00a0 The view from the ferry was very nice and it was refreshing to be on the water instead of walking around everywhere.\u00a0 After about 15 minutes we arrived on the Asian side, and we initially took a wrong turn and ended up on the grounds of a religious university.\u00a0 After backtracking a bit we found a shopping area with plenty of stores to look through.\u00a0 We were really surprised at the prices – things were about half the price that we were paying over in the historic (touristy) district.\u00a0 It would be cheaper to ferry over here for dinner every night.\u00a0 We worked up a thirst walking around in the sun, so we stopped at a place selling bubble tea.\u00a0 It was a little different than the regular bubble tea with tapioca balls.\u00a0 This place you could choose exactly what flavor the little gelatin balls would contain.\u00a0 We ordered a pineapple\/yogurt drink with passionfruit bubbles in the bottom.\u00a0 It was an interesting texture – loved it.<\/p>\n
We continued walking through town, and especially enjoyed the street markets with rows of spices, meats and fish, vegetables and fruits.\u00a0 We had ice cream from a stand that seemed pretty temporary, and I tried a strange yogurt drink from a guy selling them from a truck.\u00a0 We were still full from snacking so we skipped lunch and instead took another ferry to the newer downtown of Istanbul, back on the European side.\u00a0\u00a0 As we crossed this time we passed some more of the harbor where some enormous ships were docked.\u00a0 The scale of the ships was completely different from what we had seen so far.\u00a0 Once we arrived at our next dock, we caught a funicular train up a hill (glad we didn\u2019t decide to walk it!) and emerged right at the center of Taksim Square.\u00a0 This was the epicenter of the protests against the Turkish government a couple of months ago, and it had given us a scare since at the time we weren\u2019t sure if it would be safe to go or not.\u00a0 As it turned out, we had nothing to worry about.\u00a0 The place was emptied out, clean and safe.\u00a0 There was no sign at all of any demonstrations, but we did notice a giant Turkish flag hanging next to a huge poster of the president.\u00a0 Rubbing it in?<\/p>\n
While I took pictures Kuniko wandered into the shade to avoid the heat of the sun.\u00a0 As she walked through the edge of a park I followed to catch up and saw that she was being trailed by two young Turkish guys.\u00a0 They were calling out to her, but I couldn\u2019t hear what they were saying and it appeared that Kuniko couldn\u2019t hear either.\u00a0 One walked on ahead, but the other got pretty close to Kuniko before his friend saw me coming.\u00a0 He backed off quickly but they stuck around to see what we were doing.\u00a0 They made kissing faces at me while I watched them, and eventually we got our bearings and moved off.\u00a0 Everything was cool.<\/p>\n
I bought a small cup of lemonade at a nearby stand, and I made the tourist mistake of ordering it before asking how much.\u00a0 The guy took the liberty of doubling the price to two euros.\u00a0 That\u2019ll teach me.\u00a0 I noticed that most stands had no prices posted so they could adjust them as necessary based on the customer and the demand.<\/p>\n
From there we walked down a long shopping street that felt a lot more like Beverly Hills than Istanbul.\u00a0 There was a lot of money on that street, and I could see how sensitive the government must have been to the demonstrations considering they were happening right next door to the high rent district.\u00a0 Again the men were very aggressive and they gave us lots of looks, but generally people were very friendly.\u00a0 At the end of the street we found a train station where we could catch a train ride back to the area around our hotel.\u00a0 The train ride was quick, and I guess we probably could have walked – I didn\u2019t realize how close things were.<\/p>\n
We took a break at our hotel and then set out to find a restaurant for dinner.\u00a0 We were running low on Turkish lira, and didn\u2019t want to change much more money since we were moving on the EU after this.\u00a0 We found a street near our hotel lined with restaurants that seemed to serve the youth hostel crowd.\u00a0 One restaurant said they would take credit cards, but they made it seem like they were doing us a favor by accepting them.\u00a0 We drank lots of ice cold beer, had some decent (but not exciting) food, and watched people walking by.\u00a0 Cities like this are great for people watching – there is a such a variety that I found myself never losing interest.\u00a0 After drinking all the beers we thought we\u2019d do a little bit of shopping before we headed back to the hotel but suddenly realized we were low on lira.\u00a0 The last thing we wanted was to be asking the street market sellers to accept Visa, so we went on back and headed to bed.\u00a0 Lots of mileage today, and we were pretty sure our feet would be sore the next day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We didn\u2019t hear any prayers during the night, and so we took the chance to sleep in a little later than usual.\u00a0 Heading downstairs one of the lights on the landings was burned out, and with no other light around I slip and fell on my ass as we walked down the stairs.\u00a0 Luckily it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-HN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}