Merhaba Istanbul!

Two days into our honeymoon, we are starting to adjust to the time change. We hit the ground running yesterday; after a nearly 10-hour flight, Tay’s cousin and his wife (who are our age) and an aunt met us at the airport and brought us back to their apartment for lunch. We also visited with his grandfather. Gung ho, I greeted each of them with a nice big “Merhaba” (hello) and kisses on both cheeks. This might have misled them a bit, as they then answered in Turkish, and I replied with a completely blank look. I have been studying some Turkish, but there is little use for numbers, dates, or phrases such as “the old house is big; the new one is small” in everyday conversation. Shocking, I know.

They dropped us off at our hotel around 2pm, where we discovered that they did not have our exact specified room prepared, and gave us one with two twin beds. We were too exhausted to care, and promptly dropped our stuff and napped for several hours. After showering and changing out of our traveling clothes, we met Tay’s cousin and his wife, who took us out for the evening. They showed us some streets with very good shopping and took us to a delicious restaurant with live music and, starting at 11pm, belly dancers. Oddly enough, the women in the restaurant were more into the belly dancers than the men, getting up to dance with them and continuing to dance near the tables even after the dancers had moved on to (and I do meet up onto) the next table.

It was a lot of fun, although the jetlag and language barrier made things more difficult. Tay is very attentive to me and translates as much as possible so that I can take part in the conversation, but this becomes incredibly difficult when multiple people are speaking at once; by the time I get the translation, I have no idea which of their gestures accompanied which words, and the laughing over a joke is over.

We had trouble sleeping through the night despite our exhaustion because our body clocks were so off. We were laying awake at 5am when we heard the muezzin doing the call to prayer. It’s done in Arabic, and the sound, especially in the otherwise-silent night, is haunting. A few hours later, the cousin and his wife picked us up again this morning and took us to a park with a 6km trail running through the forest. It felt quite remote, but was technically still part of Istanbul. We walked and ran. It was beautiful, with occasional water fountains with water from mountain streams. Running isn’t that big in Turkey, and everyone who looked serious and wore running tights seemed to be of different nationalities – American, Scandinavian, etc. A lot of people were out, though, especially the middle-aged.

Afterwards, we went to breakfast at a famous place right on the Golden Horn. A typical Turkish breakfast consists of tomatoes and cucumbers in olive oil, various types of cheese, bread, eggs, honey and very sweet cream, and, of course, tea. I love Turkish tea and the adorable little teacups.

We returned to the hotel and sat in the lobby and they gave Tay about 2 hours’ worth of information on how to spend our time, going over the things we had planned to do and giving us advice on what to skip, how much time to spend at different sites, and some new suggestions we hadn’t known about.

Luckily, at that point the hotel had a new room for us, so we moved all of our stuff and crashed once again, with no alarm set this time. Around 6pm, we woke up, showered, and unpacked everything and got settled into our room. Then we went out strolling and found a little place for dinner. Now we are back at the hotel, me writing and occasionally translating bits of the movie playing on the French TV channel.