Since we moved over here, Istanbul has been on the top of Heather's list. After almost 3 years here, we have finally made the journey. We tried to go last year but could not find tickets to my price liking. We finally found some very good priced tickets and great hotel rates that convinced us to go. It is not the best time to be in Turkey, in January, but it really is not that bad considering we are at least moving toward the south.
We debated leaving the kids behind but since we were traveling to a more problematic part of the world, I figured it would be better to have the kids with us. On the flip side, Istanbul, we thought, isn't necessarily a convenient place to lug around 3 young kids, so we figured we would bring Whitney along with us and she could help us with the kids (and enjoy the beautiful city with us!). We left Wednesday afternoon on a direct flight to Istanbul. Everything went very smooth, we landed, we purchased our visas upon arrival (I didn't realize we needed to do that, but it was a lot cheaper than our expedited Russian visas from a few years ago!), almost got persuaded to take a taxi to our hotel, but opted for the cheaper and more adventurous route of public transportation, which turned out to be just great. We arrived at our hotel, checked in, and then headed out to find a restaurant to eat dinner.
This would become our challenge the entire weekend, finding food that we would actually look FORWARD to. The food we tried was not bad at all, just not something we craved. We found a quaint, local restaurant and ordered Doner Kebabs, which turned out to be not the sandwich I was expecting, but just a plate of some meat with some vegetables. Again, not bad, but not what I expected. When I later ordered a Doner Kebab sandwich, it was fine, except that cucumber (tzsiki) sauce is not something they put on them (even though in Germany they do!), but rather ketchup and mayo, which for some reason grossed me out. So bottom line, we learned that night that food might not be as exciting as we were hoping. But we learned from living in Mexico a few years ago that this certainly beats Mexican food in Mexico, which is just pretty nasty (except for Tacos Guerro, of course, which is the best Mexican food EVER!), it's just not as good as Italian food in Italy, or Greek food in Greece.
Day 1 behind us, we went to bed. The girls and Whitney slept in one room and we slept with Ryan in the room next door. It worked out perfectly and we had the hotel and pool basically to ourselves the entire time.
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