I’d been planning my trip for nearly 3 years by the time I flew to Europe, but the first thing I officially booked was a group tour to Turkey. I took a group tour to Morocco at the end of 2019, back when Covid was already spreading around the globe but before I’d yet heard of it. I had such a great time that I knew I wanted to take another tour with the same company, Travel Talk Tours. Travel Talk has excellent sales a couple times each year, so when I woke up before sunrise on Black Friday of 2020 and saw that tours were 60% off if you booked that weekend, I immediately woke Michael up and asked him if he wanted to come with me to Turkey. We were at my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, sleeping in a tent on their porch because we were nervous to go inside and risk infecting them. This was a time when the cautious among us (me, me right here) were still living in lock-down mode, and vaccines hadn’t been released yet. Michael and I decided to be optimistic. Surely within a year, things would improve. We booked a tour for fall of 2021. As it turned out, my mom received a cancer diagnosis that summer, and she was going through chemo in fall of 2021 at the same time the Delta variant was causing new restrictions around the world. We canceled our tour and rebooked it for a year later, afraid to be too optimistic this time. Finally arriving in Turkey felt surreal. I kept waiting for something to derail our plans, and I felt a little stunned to finally be there after 2 years of imagining it.
Michael and I originally planned for him to fly into Istanbul to meet me, so I booked an Airbnb in Istanbul for two nights before the tour started. I figured this would give him a chance to recover from jet lag and for me to rest a bit before starting the tour. Even though Michael ended up joining me earlier in my trip, we were glad to have those extra nights to explore by ourselves. Istanbul is so huge that you’d need two years to feel like you’d fully explored it, but those two days at least gave us a better glimpse.
Our Airbnb was just a couple blocks from the Galata Tower, but the street felt peaceful and hidden from the crowds. It was a small studio—really just a bedroom with a small bathroom—at the top of an old building with stairs so steep that my foot could barely fit on them. It was a bit dilapidated with a knob falling off the terrace door and a handle falling off the bathroom sink. There was a bit of a termite situation, and I wondered a little if the floor might fall through while we were sleeping. But an artist and designer owned the place, so it was beautiful enough that I forgot to be bothered by those details. And we had a top-floor terrace overlooking the street that could have been reason enough to triple the price. We washed our clothes in the sink, rinsed them in the shower, and hung them around our balcony among the cacti and painted tiles. Istanbul is exponentially more expensive than any other city in Turkey, but even so, a gorgeous Airbnb like this only cost us $40 per night.
For those first couple of days, we wandered around Istanbul half-delirious from the sleepless night on the night-train. It took us a little while to figure out the layout of Istanbul and what continent we were even in. The complexities of Istanbul are fascinating to me. Istanbul is twice the size of New York City, and it’s made up of dozens of different neighborhoods that all feel distinct from one another. The official dividing line between continents runs through Istanbul, so part of the city is in Europe and part is in Asia. In the central part of the city that most tourists find themselves, there’s the “Old City” (what used to be Constantinople with structures as old as 2,000 years) and the (relatively) “New City.” Europe/Asia and Old City/New City are divided in different places by the Bosphorus Strait. So you can cross a bridge and feel like you’re in a different century, or you can ride a ferry across the water in a different place and feel like you’re on a different continent.
Picking what to do with infinite options and so little time felt overwhelming, but we ended up picking the best choice that one can possibly make in a new city—we ate. A lot. We ate all the things. We ate Turkish breakfast and menemen (like an egg and veggie scramble) and pide (like pizza) and Turkish delight and meze (small plates). We drank Turkish tea that people kept forcing upon us for free, and we tasted Ayran, which is like a hot yogurt drink that I hate to tell you was both pretty and disgusting. We, or actually just I, ate like 12 pounds of baklava. You can’t imagine how much baklava. So, so much baklava. And amid the eating, we wandered around the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Market and the Basilica Cistern, and we marveled every time we heard the unearthly beautiful call to prayer. We petted a lot of stray dogs, and we fed the stray cats that sat with us at all of our outdoor restaurant tables. I bought a couple new journals since I’d filled up my first one by that point, and I bought a scarf that I knew I’d need to cover my head when I visited mosques. And then on our third day in the city, we headed across the river to the Old City to meet our tour group.
