My first impression of Istanbul was as we were landing. The city is enourmous, incomprehensibly big. All the bulildings looked the same from the air, just rows and rows and rows of red roofs with tiny narrow streets in between. There was a thick layer of brown smog covering the city unlike anything I have ever seen before. The trip was uneventful, just an hour by train to Basel airport then a 3 hour flight. My first mission when arriving was to find the place where I was staying. I had 3 pages of directions and 2 maps but finding it was not the difficult part. After catching two buses I was dropped of about a 20 minute walk from the house. On the way I passed a fairly empty looking stadium surrounded with hundreds
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