After what seemed like the longest day of travel we've ever experienced, we finally touched down in Istanbul.  We endured a 45 minute line for passport control and we were on our way to our hotel--Seven Hills Hotel in Sultanahmet.  Despite absolute fluency in Tukish, I had difficulty in conveying our destination to the taxi driver.  I fell back on giving the name of the hotel across the street and he understood.  Istanbul has 15 million residents and they all seemed to be on the road from the airport to the hotel--but the driver was a trooper and wove his way through much stopped/slow traffi

The hotel is absolutely charming and the staff incredible from the get-go.  Like most of the small hotels in Sultanahmet, the building is a former Ottoman mansion converted to a hotel.  There are easily a hundred of these in the neighborhood.  Our location couldn't be better--we're, quite literally, across the street from Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque (and the tram line that winds its way across the Golden Horn to Taksim.    As soon as the doorman had deposited us in our room, we experienced our first 'call to prayer'.  The window was open and a voice began an exotic chant.  After  about five minutes, the voice fell silent and business continued on the street.  Actually, it didn't appear that anyone on the street paid any attention to the call--they just kept hustling to get wherever they were headed.

We headed out to get a feel for the neighborhood.  If there are 15 million residents in Istanbul, there are half-again as many tourists.  Within our first 15 minutes of wandering, we were asked to take photos (Terry used an iPhone!) and were asked for directions--twice.  After marveling over the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque from the enormous, and very crowded park surrounding them, we followed the tram tracks down the hill, past Topkapi Palace, Sirkeci Station (the old Istanbul terminus of the Orient Express) and ended up in the bedlam called Eminonu (magine that I've figured out how to add umlauts).  Eminonu is an absolutely crazy nexus of ferries to Asia, tram lines, the subway line to Asia (brand new) and half the busses in the city.  It was also where we decided to get a bite to eat.

 

Bobbing on the Golden Horn, a series of 'Fish Bread' boats sell the greatest fish sandwich at an amazing pace.  The boats look like a fishing boat in the same way that Liberace looked like a simple piano player.  We joined the hundreds of others seated at freashishly-small tables and chairs to enjoy the chaos (and the fish).  We were starting to fade fast and headed back to the hotel to catch up on our missed sleep.