So I made it. Rebekah and I found Engin, (my aunt’s colleague’s best friend), who is an Istanbul native. He graciously picked us up from the airport, took us to his house a few miles from the airport and brought us to his family’s apartment. They served us a wonderful meal of kofte, rice, salad, french fries, Turkish cola, and something resembling Persian doogh<\/i>. At the end of the meal, following five rounds of tea, two tangerines and a pear later, R and I each received generous gifts from the family. She got some awesome homemade woven socks with little balls on the top of the foot and I was given some factory made socks and a button-up shirt. Engin said this was a custom to give gifts during Ramadan (which here is called Ramazan). He then proceeded to drive us practically across town to the biggest tourist trap in all of Istanbul, a neighborhood called Sultanahmet. It’s full of backpacker hostels and restaurants with their menus entirely in English. I need to get out of this neighborhood as fast as possible. Fortunately we’re staying with a friend from Columbia (Ben) tomorrow, which should be much better. <\/p>\n
R and I meandered, trying to navigate our way through the touristy nastiness and eventually found ourselves at the famed Blue Mosque and Hagiya Sophia Mosque, both lit up at night. There were the Turks, out in full force for late night Ramazan partying — or as Ben says: “A Turkish County Fair”. Roasted corn seems to be a popular item (available for 1 YTL [$0.72]), as is kebap<\/i> (3 YTL), cotton candy (1 YTL) and all kinds of other things that you would find in a street fair sort of atmosphere, except with a late-night fun quasi-religious context. <\/p>\n
I can’t actually believe that I’m in Istanbul. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I made it. Rebekah and I found Engin, (my aunt’s colleague’s best friend), who is an Istanbul native. He graciously picked us up from the airport, took us to his house a few miles from the airport and brought us to his family’s apartment. They served us a wonderful meal of kofte, rice, salad, french fries, Turkish cola, and something resembling Persian doogh. At the end of the meal, following five rounds of tea, two tangerines and a pear…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[199,200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-travels","category-turkey","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-cW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}