The 17 hour flight from Auckland to Dubai was surprisingly OK. Then 5ish hours in Dubai. As boring as any airport in the world. A brief moment of excitement when I remembered that there’s almost boiling, desert heated water in the toilets so when you sit on the loo your bum gets steamed. A gentle wake up. I ate steak and drank beer and bought really strange Arab perfume. Then the short 4 hours to Istanbul.

I’m staying Besiktas. Which is fantastic. Very busy. Restaurants and bars and coffee places. There are 20 million people in this city, so there are more people just hanging in this hood than in all of Auckland. Super busy and crowded and fun.

My hotel is very, very strange and loopy. Tourism has completely changed in Istanbul. Western people don’t come here anymore and Arab tourism has taken over. All the tourists are from Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, UAE, and Saudi. And they really like bling. So my hotel is all gold and neon and gaucheness. I feel quite at home.

And its Eid this week – a 10 day long public holiday here because it’s combining 2 things – so all the Turkish people are away visiting family. So there’s just me and every Arab person in the world. Its weird.

Turkish people think of Arab tourists the same way with think of bus loads of Chinese.

Flying over Iran was gorgeous. Turquoise rivers. Lapis lakes. And an amazing huge bright pink lake near Tabriz which I entirely failed to photograph.

My first night here I just wandered around the neighborhood and then had dinner on a rooftop near Taksim. Really good Turkish red wine. Beautiful fried fish. Lamb cooked with eggplant. I’m going to get so fat.

The next day I walked for a thousand miles. The Museum of Innocence which I’d always wanted to see. Sublime. An antiques festival which was torture. SO MUCH STUFF. Three thousand years of bric and brac. Lots of stops for tiny coffee, beer (its 30 degrees so its a medical requirement) and continuous eating.

Lavish breakfasts of 20 dishes and liters of black tea. Really interesting cheese. Somewhere between mozerella and feta in long curly twisted strips or pulled tubes or sliced. Watermelon. Strawberries.

Walking along the Bosporus you could be in the South of France or Italy with beautiful tall ice cream colored buildings, seagulls and promenades. Interspersed with palaces and thousand year old crumbling walls. We walked to Bebek and stopped for stuffed potatoes and Ayran (yoghurt) and tried to get rice stuffed mussels from the most famous places – but the queue on a Sunday afternoon was too long. Everything was calm and elegance. I’m learning a lot about the hisoty and current politics. A lot about Ataturk and his life and values. Went to a museum near the Dolmabahce Palace and saw all the furnishings from the last Ottomans and Ataturk’s time there.

Dinner was exactly the sort of deep fried thing you have anywhere in the world after 8 beers talking philosophy and politics. 🙂