Boating on the Bosphorous

Excited as I was to venture off, I spent the first part of my trip living it up in Istanbul. I was fortunate enough to be there when my friend Yosun, a native Istanbul-ite, was there, so got the experience of staying with her family, seeing the Asian part of the city, and living it up with the city Yuppies. The first day I arrived, we met up with some friends for a chartered boat ride up the Bosphorous. The air was clean, the water sparkling blue, and we got unsurpassed views of the mansions and old ottoman-style houses on some of the most expensive property in the world. As I sat at the front of the boat, sipping sour-cherry juice, I thought "if the rest of the trip is a dud, it still will have been worth it to come to Turkey just for this."

Turkish delights in Instanbul's markets

Over the next several days, I did the standard tourist route of mosques, cisterns, palaces, and bazars. With its beautiful old building, ornately tiled mosques, cramped shops in the bazars, and crowded streets, Istanbul was pretty much what I expected; the only surprise was that everyone thought I was Turkish and that Yosun was Spanish. I'm guessing it is probably because she had the nicer camera.