During Thanksgiving, my family and I went to both the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. As I explained my trip to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, I also forgot to mention Istanbul Turkey!
On Friday, my family and I drove to the airport and boarded the plane to Turkey. The flight was 5 hours long, which honestly felt a lot longer. Surprisingly, the plane to Turkey was almost empty; there were rows of empty seats and everyone could move around and choose different seats.
The food they gave on the plane was honestly pretty nasty, the noodles were hard and dry but what do you expect? It’s airplane food. After those long 5 hours, we finally landed. I noticed right away how gloomy and dark it was. We went through immigration which took a while to figure out, but after we figured that out. We were lost, we didn’t know that the Istanbul airport is enourmous. We finally find our taxi, and we drove to our hotel which was like an hour long, and plus thr taxi driver was driving crazy so I was just waiting to get to the hotel.
We got there and checked in, the whole layout of the hotel was weird, like one part of the hotel was on top of a hill and the other part was at the bottom. But besides that, the hotel was really nice with great service. It was still pretty early so we decided to just walk around and go eat somewhere near by. It was packed, the streets wer buzzing with people and it was loud too. Which honestly we liked because there was life and it was good seeing how the people are in Turkey. We settled down and found a restaurant where they served us the traditional Turkish tea and seafood, and it was pretty good. It was late so we went back to the hotel and fell asleep.
The next day, it was pouring rain it was like 7 in the morning and it looked like it was 3 in the morning, it was still so dark, but we still got up and got ready to see what Istanbul has to offer. We ate breakfast and then got in a taxi where he took us to the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, it was beautiful in the inside and it was super busy. They made us take our shoes off to go inside, which caught us offguard. After that we just walked around and went to this palace which is now a musuem and it had all of the traditonal clothes from the Ottoman Empire. We kept walking and we got to the Grand Baazar, which is this huge marketplace, it has literally everything. From clothes to spices you can find it all. Inside of the Grand Baazar is the infamous restuarant Nusret aka Saltbae, which is where we ate for lunch. The food was amazing, great steaks and salads.
We just kept walking around, and realized that Istanbul is really pretty and is a good place to visit but we wouldn’t go back. The night ended and we finally packed to go back home.
