We have just completed our first week in Istanbul, Turkey with 4 nights on the Asian side, and 2 nights. We will next go on a photo tour of Western Turkey, before returning here to Istanbul to stay a couple months.  This post is therefore just our first impressions of the city.  We are doing an 11 week home exchange with a couple that lives here on the Asian side, and who is now staying in our home in Cuenca, Ecuador.  If you would like to meet the Turkish couple in Cuenca, send me an email and I will forward their contact information to you.

Our very first impressions? Extremely friendly people, fresh seafood, clean, and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. There seems to be a fruit, vegetable and/or fish market every couple of blocks. The strawberries looked so good, I had to buy some — and they tasted every bit as good as they look, for only 5 TL (under $2 US) for a Kilo.  One note though — other than Gulistan, there was almost no English spoken in this neighborhood.  When on our own, we did a lot of pointing and pantomiming.

Gulistan (seen above with Evelyn) is a friend of our Istanbul hosts, and took it upon herself to show us the neighborhood.  After several evenings of her showing us where to shop, helping us get a Turkish phone number, pick up some extra Advil at the local pharmacy (we have been doing a LOT of walking…), we took her out to dinner.  As seen above, the feast was over-the-top in volume and variety.  Fortunately, the tastes were every bit as good as it looked.

The second impression? Cats!  And more cats!  Dogs are rare in Istanbul, but cats are everywhere.  I expect many (most?) of them are feral, but they don’t look underfed. Gulistan tells us of “her” cat that visits Starbucks, going from table to table, knowing who will give her milk.  Seems the cats are universally loved and cared for as a community.  We saw several bowls of food and water put out on a sidewalk, clearly helping any cat that passes by.

What do you bring back from Turkey?  Rugs, ceramics… and spices. A trip to the Spice Market was mandatory, and almost overwhelming.  Covering less than a city block, it is crammed with vendors all selling pretty much the same thing.  Spices and candy are everywhere you turn. Some have it in bins, some in large piles, and a few in pre-packaged collections obviously aimed at the tourists. The vendors will talk to you in German, Cantonese, Japanese, English, whichever language to get you into their store.

English is the universal language here, and we often saw Middle Easterners talking in English to the vendors.  We were told they were probably from Iran or Syria, or other neighboring country, and that English was the common language for them all. This seemed true everywhere we went within the European commercial side of Istanbul.

We have several spices on our shopping list, but were warned to buy them at our local neighborhood seller instead (for better prices), so we left empty handed other than cameras full of images.

Just outside the spice market, sharing the same public square, is a garden center on one side, as well as a fish market, plus fruits, vegetable, and other items.

Yesterday, we joined up with Mehmet Ozbalci (Fantastic Photo Tours) and 4 other tourist-photographers to start a 10 day photographic tour of Turkey.  We started in Instanbul, on the European side, and opened with a tour of some mosques in the area.  Above are images from the outside of some we visited.  Since there are 2,944 active mosques in Istanbul (in a city of 15 million), we obviously only sampled a few of the most ostentatious ones…

We then visited the underground Basilica Cistern, created in the 6th century by the Romans.  We then moved on to the interior of the New Mosque. The bottom image above is looking directly up, next to a column (that anchors the bottom of the photo).  Gotta admit, I didn’t even see a photo there, until Mehmet went to the column, shot looking up, and came to show the rest of us what it looked like.  We then all clamored to that location to get it too!

We had to start before dawn to get the best photos, so off we went at 5:30 — the true cost of being on a tour with other photographers…! The Blue Mosque was the most picturesque of the mosques from the outside.  The lower image above was from our hotel room balcony, just before we left to explore the landscape and shoot the sunrise.

After leaving the New Mosque, we walked across the Golden Horn on the Galata Bridge.  This is a popular spot for local fishermen to toss their hooks, and made for a pleasant photographic crossing.