But What Have You Been Doing?

Our adventure started 14 hours before our scheduled flight time.  We left so early because we didn’t know what to expect on long island considering the damage from the hurricane the week before.  Our trip down I-87 was blissfully uneventful and our drivers got out of NYC on the leading edge of a snowstorm.  After a 4 hour delay because of the snow storm I had already watched an “in-flight” movie, got to see firsthand what it looks like to de-ice a plane and gotten very excited because we were finally on our way!

This is the ground crew spraying what looks like Rain-X on the wing

We arrived in Istanbul on Thursday night.  By the time we got here the people waiting at the airport to meet us had left because Turkish airlines never posted that the flight was late.  I was excited by the challenge though of getting all 3 of us from Europe to Asia.  In case you didn’t know Istanbul is the only major city in the world on two different continents.  The airport is on the European side and our apartment and most of my friends are on the Asian side.  I got the privilege of getting a cab at the airport at which point my Butterfly thought I was impressive for telling the cabbie where we were going and figuring out the cost in Turkish.  So we went from the plane to the cab and from the cab to the “Deniz Otobusu.”  This is Turkish for “Sea Bus.”  The Sea Bus is a double hull, high speed, ferry boat that took us from the shores of Europe to Asia where some friends were waiting for the approximately 10 block walk to our apartment for the next few days.  These 3 friends are artists and musicians that we’ll get to know better later in our stay.

A street of beautiful restaurants that we found just after we ate at a diner.

It’s now Saturday night and we’ve spent two days in meetings that I won’t go into the details of here and doing a bit of sightseeing.  I think for the most part the sightseeing is an excuse to get some exercise and fresh air.  We’ve so far been to the Blue Mosque and the Grand Bazaar and only gotten lost a little bit in the streets surrounding the Sultanahmet area of Istanbul.  It has been a great few days with some profitable conversations and perhaps a little Cokokrem.

Breakfast of champions!