the Blue Mosque at night, as seen from Sultanahmet Park
(hearing the call to prayer for my first time was beautiful and something i stopped to listen to all through our travels in small towns, even though the Imams with the nicest voices are definitely concentrated in the bigger cities)
~
after a few hours sleep at Schiphol airport (despite the 5 euro espresso), we arrived at Atatürk airport in a state of surreal realization that i was suddenly in Turkiye...and although the burka had been outlawed with Atatürk's reign, many women were wearing tessetür ...everything suddenly seemed so foreign...
we got our packs and tried to fumble our way through the metro and tram system to make our way in to the old city centre, Sultanahmet...
our hostel/hotel was this dingy little place called the Sultan Otel, where, after showering in the toilet (literally), we immediately left to soak in more atmospheric sounds and flavours (thankfully, the one thing it did have going for it was the smoky man-filled pub across the street, which had the cheapest beer in the city, and no tourists...equally thankful that "beer" in Turkish is "bira").
seemingly always on the quest for food, our first dinner was traditionally shared on cushions, crushed up against our newly met neighbours smoking a nargileh.
the food was everything i had dreamed and more, and i decided then that it was my mission to take a photo of every single thing we ingested during our 2 week adventure
(of course, that was after we had already devoured our first meal of eggplant kebap and tomatoes and dips and flatbreads and deliciousness...and the sticky (sickly) sweet Sultan's tea which burned my tongue from the seal created by the nutmeg and cinnamon in Sultanahmet Park)
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