Back from Istanbul

I returned late Saturday night from a weeklong holiday to Istanbul, Turkey, where I headed with several friends. It was a busy and crazy week, as we were looking after other friends' children as well as touring the city ourselves, but we had a fantastic time.

We flew from Birmingham, England to Zurich, and then from Zurich on to Istanbul, and flying over the snowy Swiss and Italian Alps was simply stunning. So was looking down on Croatia and other far Eastern European countries. As we neared Istanbul we were covered in cloud, but as soon as the plane dipped below the clouds all of us gasped--we were hovering above a shimmering sea that was illuminated by the setting sun and punctuated with very Middle Eastern-looking islands jutting out into it. We were over the Sea of Marmara, or Marble Sea (so named for the marble deposits within it) and that sense of having magically entered another land stayed with us all week.

It stayed with us when we arrived at the very nice looking but not quite Western hotel, where the hot water never worked and where the Turkish staff seemed less than thrilled by our presence. It stayed when we were awoken at 6.15 each morning by the recorded muezzin, a voice singing a call to prayer from the mosque on the hill across the road from the hotel (and just beyond the sewage treatment plant whose fumes emanated unpleasantly with that of other guests' cigarette smoke). It stayed during our hard but fun work of hanging out with kids and eating elaborate meals of salads, olives, fresh breads, soups and stews in the hotel dining room, and when we toured Old Istanbul, seeing sights like the Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque and Grand Bazaar. We even felt it when we ventured down the road our hotel was on, searching for fun but encountering nothing more exciting than a pack of wild dogs who were hiding in the bushes next to the sidewalk. (They just stuck their heads up out of the leaves and looked at us, nothing too frightening, though a few of my friends were terrified--I have run across far more people in England who are scared of dogs than I ever knew in America. I don't know why).

The whole week was like being in a truly exotic land. At the moment I'm a coughing, snivelling, sore-throateded mess--the victim of too much excitement and not enough rest over the last few weeks, I fear, but tomorrow I'll post photos and stories. It was a fantastic experience.

Despite the lack of hot water and other difficulties, nobody wanted to come home. On our return flight we stopped again in Zurich, and were charmed by the newly snow-covered Alpine villages we flew over. There was some talk about "accidentally" missing our connecting flight and renting an Alpine cabin through Christmas, but in the end we resignedly boarded our plane back to England and landed in foggy, rain-soaked Birmingham a few hours later. It was quite a come down, I must admit, but our Istanbul journey made even the anti-climactic return home worth it.