They Might Be Giants was stuck in our heads all weekend. “Istanbul, Constantinople, Istanbul, Constantinople… Nobody knows but the Turks!” There are other words to the song, but we don’t know them. 🙂 Actually we just looked it up and we even had those lyrics wrong.

Elisa and I took a flight to Istanbul on Saturday. Todd and Linda and Julia were already there. Julia’s on semester at sea so she’s been stopping in all the cool places you’ve ever wanted to visit–Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, Egypt, etc. Todd wasn’t feeling good so they hadn’t seen too much of the city yet.

Daniel also made his way to Istanbul to meet us. He has gone to all these other cool places in the Balkans that I didn’t know I would want to visit. His stories make us want to see them–Romania, Albania, Macedonia, etc. It was a lot of fun hearing from both Julia and Daniel all the cool places they’ve gone.

• Daniel’s photos so far
• Map of cities Daniel has visited so far

I had been sick. So we had just planned to take it easy anyway. Plus we had heard that it was supposed to rain all weekend. We ended up all going out to dinner to a really nice seafood restaurant. We called it a night and then Daniel and Julia partied until the early hours of the morning. Our hotel room was so loud! Luckily I had brought ear plugs. That’s the only way we slept. There were loudspeakers out in the streets, plus the horns, plus eventually Daniel’s snoring. 🙂

The next day we got some good pictures of the tourist attractions. The weather was great for us. We managed to get ripped off by a cabbie. He had his meter running twice as fast. Then he wasn’t satisfied with that, so he thought he would try to convince me that I had given him the wrong bill. I wasn’t amused enough to play along with that part. Not to mention he almost killed us on the way home. He was a terrible driver. We found really good local Kebabs and Turkish pizza. I was really impressed by how huge the mosques were. It was cool to hear them calling for prayer from nearby. Todd and Linda had to leave before we could see the Topkapi Palace. But Daniel and Julia came with us and we really enjoyed seeing the harem. Everything was really ornate.

Julia had left by Monday. And we needed to leave in the afternoon to catch a flight. We window shopped at the Grand Bazaar. It’s thousands of shops under one roof. We got lots of practice ignoring people. But it wasn’t near as bad as Kusadasi. There were all sorts of random trinkets that we almost decided to buy.

The best part was seeing family. It was a little unreal to be in such a foreign place with such familiar people.

• Our photos of Istanbul