Kauffman Commentary

We really enjoyed our time in Istanbul, maybe more than we expected. As we mentioned on the first day, we found the entire city to be extremely clean, especially for a city of 16 million people. Now, not Holland clean but very few places are that clean. Every shop worker, if not actively selling, is cleaning something, dusting, doing windows, sorting fruit at the fruit stands, etc. They don’t just stare at their phones. Across the city you see people cleaning, sweeping streets, picking up trash, and not just the large pieces but the smallest piece, cigarette butt size.

And there are plenty of cigarettes butts available as it felt like most people smoked; usually long, slender cigarettes. I don’t know if we don’t have as much of it in the states or the areas we hang out, if more Americans vape or maybe because there were so many people around, it just felt like there were more smokers. Who knows?

Another thing that stood out was the number of cats everywhere. We had heard that there were a lot of cats, but it’s hard to explain how many there are. There is always at least one cat in sight no matter where you look, in the bazaar, in the gardens of the palaces, nearly everywhere except inside the mosques, of course. People put out food and water for these cats, even cat houses of different types. Most of them seemed pretty fit and clean, but skittish and not approachable.

Apparently growing plants and flowers isn’t too difficult in Istanbul because all along the highways, every little park or open area and especially in the palaces, there were beautiful flowers and shrubs. Either it’s easy or the Turks are just very good at it. We just missed the peak of tulip season because we saw many tulips just loosing their blooms. There are all types of trees all leafed out, including palm trees even though they get snow sometimes in the winter.

In many small towns in the US, it’s easy to find the churches because of the steeples. Just look at the skyline and you’ll see the steeples. In Istanbul, it’s easy to find one of the 3700 mosques because of the minarets. These are the slender towers adjacent to the mosques that are, or were, used to issue the call to prayer, which is done five times a day. Some mosques have one or two minarets though the large mosques have four.

Istanbul was much hillier than we expected. We expected hills, but not this steep. We were always walking either uphill or downhill and usually on steep grades, not the hills of Amarillo or even Kansas City. In some ways, it was one of the more difficult cities to walk because of the hills. Or maybe after 16,000 steps, anything would be difficult. It definitely wasn’t hard to get your cardio work in.

One thing that made us feel bit more and less safe at the same time was the presence of police. There were frequently larger numbers together, usually with what would be called riot gear; guns, shields, etc. They also seem to have different types of police. We saw tourist police and traffic police, at least according to their insignia. We’re not sure what the difference is, maybe the areas they work as some were around the attractions and others were directing traffic. One thing that Bryan appreciated was adherence to rules. The first day, near the Blue Mosque, someone stepped over a rope around a grassy area to take a picture. Immediately, there was a tourist policeman blowing a whistle making them get back on the correct side of the rope.

The best thing about Istanbul, without a doubt, is the people. Everyone was extremely friendly and willing to help strangers. They would talk to us and tell us about themselves and their back stories, fighting through the language difficulty. On two instances, we had complete strangers help us related to the tram cards, which we had heard could be confusing. Once you purchase the card, you can reload them and we were struggling doing this because the machines did not have an option for English so we’re trying to decipher the Turkish language. A gentleman behind us showed us which buttons to push and helped us reload the card. In another instance, we were trying to scan our way into the tram system but the turnstile didn’t like our card. This time, guy saw our struggle and came up the platform and used his card to scan us in so we could board the tram. He told us what we owed him, which we paid in cash and then we went our separate ways. We figured out we didn’t have enough money on the card, but now we understood the process for reloading them.

A beautiful city with even more beautiful people!