Saturday morning we arrived at the Paris airport at 8:30 am (though it was still Friday in Utah). The first thing we did was buy some macaron cookies. Oh how I miss living 30 minutes from the French border. I used to love popping over there in the morning to get macaron cookies. The cookies were 100% worth the price. I’ve missed them. We made our way to the next gate so we could catch our flight to Istanbul, Turkey. We got there with 3 hours to spare so we found some couches & took a nice nap since we didn’t get much sleep on the plane. At 11:30am we hopped onto our next flight which was only 3 hours to Istanbul. It was a rough flight. I had a lady next to me (next to the window) who decided to leave the window open the entire flight while the sun was setting. Trek & I had the sun directly in our eyes for nearly 3 hours straight. She also insisted on taking up her entire seat space & half of mine. Her leg/feet were in my space & her arm was over the seat divider & in my lap for most of the flight. But, eventually, the flight was done & we could get away from her. They did feed us some “cheese sandwiches” on the plane which consisted of bread, some cream cheese & a cucumber.
Once we arrived in Istanbul, we had a hard time getting through passport control. Something was wrong with Trek’s passport chip & we had to wait while security investigated him. After about 30 minutes, they finally cleared him & we were able to get to baggage claim. We picked up our baggage no problem & made our way out to the airport exit.
The Air BnB we rented sent a private driver to pick us up at the airport which was super nice. We met some random men at one of the exits & they told us to follow them to the parking lot. There we got into an unmarked white van with a driver. I swear this whole situation read like a kidnapping movie, but luckily, it all went according to plan. The driver was super nice even though he didn’t speak very much English. We drove about an hour & a half to our apartment. . . the traffic in Istanbul was pretty crazy so it took forever once we got into the city part. But our apartment was smack dab in the center of the Golden Horn of Istanbul & within walking distance of all the amazing things worth seeing there. We couldn’t have asked for a better location. Our apartment was small, but perfect. It was just the two of us & it had a bed & a private bathroom which is all we needed.
Though we were completely exhausted, we decided to take a walk around the area so we could try to stay up as late as possible so we’d sleep well to help relieve the jet-lag we knew would hit us the next day. We walked 2 minutes from our front door to the Hagai Sophia & just marveled at it’s size & beauty. Then we walked a little way more & found ourselves at the Blue Mosque which was equally beautiful. It was amazing to hear the prayers from both mosques singing to one another. It just made the night even more magical. I couldn’t believe I was in Instanbul. What a treat.
We found a little restaurant that had doner kebaps (similar to the ones we loved in Germany, but slightly different). We got burrito style doner wraps & enjoyed dinner with some baklava, apple tea, & our wraps. The family that ran the restaurant was incredible & the food was great.
After that, we knew we couldn’t stay up any longer so we made our way back to our apartment & went to bed.
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