Last day at Intanbul

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Geo: 41.0138, 28.9497

This wraps it up for us at the capitol of the Eastern Roman Empire. Off very early in the morning for Athens.

A little about our impressions of Istanbul and the Turkish inhabitants. The setting is spectacularly beautiful. Blue water all around with often steep hills. Climate is also wonderful, low humidity and moderate temperatures. Highs were uniformly in the mid 70's.

The inhabitants are profoundly diverse in appearance, at least the woman. The men generally are dressed alike, most with some degree of a beard, but otherwise dressing as folks would in the U.S. or Europe. By contrast the woman vary from full Burkas, who represent perhaps five per cent, to women wearing rather provocative attire. The Turks seem to accept this as a matter of course. We saw no signs of disapproval due to attire at either extreme. But this is a male dominated culture, at least what we saw. We did not venture into "the new town", which the travel guide implied could be mistaken for any major city in the west.

We generally would not label these folks terribly friendly, although there are certainly exceptions. Whenever a Turk starts a conversation with a tourist, you can be sure it will involve the attempt to sell something. Interestingly Bird and HP were discussing this yesterday, and not ten minutes later a gentleman offered his assistance. We declined, and as we were walking away he inquired, "do you know why I am talking with you?" to which Bird flippantly replied, "because you want to sell us something". His dejected response as we increased our distance, "yes". We had a giggle. There were no less than five men who attempted to accost us into accepting their sales pitch just for carpet. Naively, on the first day we were in a carpet shop before we knew what was occurring. But we can be quick learners and it didn't happen again.

Finally, did we mention the eerie, for us, call to prayer that blasts out (yes loud) five times per day?

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