We arrived late in the day to Istanbul. The
taksi ride to the hotel was harrowing. We wound through impossibly narrow roads that had cars parked on both sides, traffic moving in both directions and improbable angle and pitch to the road itself. This is the state of all the roads in the Sultanahmet section of town where were staying. We checked into the hotel and were a little shocked. Istanbul is hot and sticky and we found ourselves in a non-air conditioned room with two twin beds on either side of the room and a bathroom emanating the aroma of an outhouse.
We were hungry and wanted to get outside to the relative cool comfort of the evening air and realized we had no way to contact anyone else we were meeting. We were able to communicate with the hotel staff just enough to find out our friend plus a large group had left for dinner a while ago. We set out ourselves and wandered around Sultanahmet Square past the obelisks in the Hippodrome and outside Mosques. As we made our way back to the main drag- Divanyolu Caddesi where we saw promising places to eat, I recognized a few faces, "Look! isn't that one of Gün's friends? Oh wait! Look! There's everybody!"
Sending the rest of the jet lagged gang back to the hotel, Gün joined us for another late dinner. We went to a place that had only two dishes to order:
köftes seasoned meat balls and
fasulye piyazi a simple salad of white beans with olive oil, lemon juice and onions. With plenty of bread and spicy red pepper sauce this made for a satisfying meal.
We were not quite ready to go to bed in the sticky stinky hotel room so we planted ourselves at a bar around the corner, people watching and nursing our cold drinks until we decided to head in. We also were not nearly as jet lagged, Turkey is two hours ahead of England and we had a fairly short three and a half hour flight. We headed back to the hotel for an uncomfortable night of sleep and Mark getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. We decided in the night to find a different hotel.