Istanbul - first day

We're sitting in our hotel in Istanbul, a small hotel with 10 rooms in the old city, aptly named Hotel Miniature.  Very comfortable and located within short distance of 4 of the major attractions here, the Agia Sofia basilica (an ancient cathedral), the Blue Mosque, the Egyption Spice Market and the Grand Bazaar.  While the distances ae short, the city is not flat and the walk back from the spice market was testing.

Our flight over here was long but otherwise pleasant with excellent food and an overnight stay in Seoul.  The hotel there (Grand Hyatt) is beside the airport terminal and caters largely I suspect for the transit passengers.  With 2 towers of 10 storeys, each with 3 wings, the number of rooms is huge and they have 60 seat buses providing.a shuttle to the terminal every 15 minutes - the scale of international travel is hard to envisage from a New Zealand perspective.

Our first impressions of Istanbul are confused.  On the ride from the airport we passed areas with pleasant gardens, apartment blocks with nice tree lined streets but masses of road works which seem to have been abandoned for some time with dusty areas of the road cordoned off and no sign of activity.  Arriving in the old town area the roads are generally narrow and shared by vehicles and pedestrians. Buildings are generally nondescript and the street level are small shops and cafes spilling out to the edge of the road.  While the outer areas are pleasant and well kept the central areas feel gritty and a bit down at heel.  There are a number of empty and apparently abandoned buildings with broken windows ands boarded facades.

Today we walked down to the tourist area of the Sultanahmet and caught a bus tour that took us across the Golden Horn (an estuary), past the main town area and across the Bosphorus into the Asian side of the city and back, getting off at the Egyptian Spice Market. This is a market building with small stalls selling nuts, sweets, dried fruit, herbs abd spices, dinnerware, gifts and local items like glass tea sets.  To my surprise the merchants haven't been too pushy yet. I have noticed that most shops do not show prices against displays and we have been advised to bargain for everything and expect to pay no more than 60% of the first price quoted.

We plan on finding a rooftop restaurant tonight dependent on fine weather. In this area there are cafes everywhere with kebabs and seafood predominating.