New City, New Country, New Continent

Eventually it was time for me to move on from Greece. Next up: Istanbul.

When I began planning last year’s trip to Serifos, I thought about where else I could go that was easy to access from Athens. Istanbul was the obvious choice. I’ve wanted to visit the city ever since I took a course in Byzantine history a lifetime ago.

Once there, though, I was pretty overwhelmed. For starters, I thought I had transited through some of the world’s largest airports. (London’s Heathrow come to mind.) Turns out the Istanbul Airport dwarfs them all. It’s the largest terminal building in the world, with five concourses all under one roof. I had arranged to meet my friend at Passport Control and realized I had grossly underestimated the country when she messaged me: “Which Passport Control are you at?”

Thankfully, we soon found each other and once they let us into the country, we were ready to conquer Istanbul together. I took the above photo a few hours later.

Now, a year later to the day, I look at it and think, I was there? It looked like that? Our first glimpse of Sultanahmet Square was after dark and we had little sense of the scale of the mosques we were walking past. And when I was woken at 6 am the next morning by the amplified call to prayer, I rolled over and went back to sleep, thinking, “That’s different.”

I had five days in Istanbul, three of them with my friend. We jammed as much as we could into the time we had and yet we barely scratched the surface of this amazing city.

Stay tuned to see what I mean.