Travels to Turkey

Sunday morning, I didn't wake up and think, "Oh hey, I'm going to Istanbul today!" Instead, I begrudgingly got out of bed, turned off my alarm, and instantly went into frenzy mode to get all of my stuff together and get to the airport. I took the bus to the S-tog (train) to the metro to the airport, had a croissant filled with ham and cheese (delicious) while I waited for the rest of the group, and then got my ticket and started on my journey!

First of all, the food on Turkish Airlines is fantastic. We got grilled eggplant with tomatoes, Turkish-style beef and chicken with rice (delicious), a roll, and chocolate cake. And it was only a 3-hour flight. Amazing. We get into the Istanbul airport, and it's a little hectic. We all get the 15 Euro we need to buy a visa into Turkey and then go wait in the MASSIVE line for passport control, where they have like 2 people working. Great.

We all get through the airport okay and we find our guide Koray (pronounced like Core-aye), who takes us on a bus to our hotel. He asks the driver to drive by the sea and take the scenic route. You can see small boats bobbing in the water and, oh hey! Mosque lit up at night. The lit marble is breathtakingly beautiful, unlike anything I've ever seen.

Our hotel is really nice, and we get to choose our roommates. Some pictures to follow in a later post, because this one is already huge. We check in, settle, and go back out for dinner. Dinner is on a rooftop terrace overlooking: ta-da! The Blue Mosque. Again, it is amazing. Words cannot describe. I couldn't take pictures through the glass at dinner, but here are some pictures from our walk:

Lit-up street near the Blue Mosque

Blue Mosque, lit up at night. Breathtakingly beautiful.

Words cannot describe our dinner, either, but I'm going to try. Koray told us about the different parts of a Turkish meal, and we had almost all of them at this dinner! Our first dish was like stuffed grape leaves (delicious), but they also stuffed tomatoes, pepper and eggplant with the same mixture. Loved it.

Second in the line-up were two cold dishes to be put on bread: this pea-carrot-yogurt mixture (gross) and a tomato-eggplant-zucchini mixture (so delicious). Next was a hot creamy soup (possibly from lentils) with salad (insignificant), followed by the main course: spiced beef cubes in broth/sauce with carrots and potatoes, with a side of really good rice. Wonderful. After we had all stuffed our faces, they brought out dessert plates for each of us. We got to sample four different desserts--one was baklava, one was a really sweet sponge cake, another was a sweet custard, and the last had ground pistachio nuts in it. Sadly, I couldn't even finish all of mine because I ate so much at dinner.

Our four desserts, accompanied by Turkish tea

We had a speaker talk to us during dessert about secularism in Turkey and the current government's handling of Islam, but I think most people were deep in a food coma by that point. The guy was pretty interesting, though: a journalist for a Danish newspaper, he was Turkish by birth but raised in Denmark.

After dinner we went back to the hotel and crashed after a long day of traveling, ready to get up for day two! Will put that in a separate post, because this one is already getting long.