The World Needs More Ninjas

Last week my work travels took me to Istanbul, Turkey for another recruiting trip. This time another lady from my work went with me, and it was so much fun to not be alone this time! Unfortunately I started getting a bad cold just before we left so that sort of put a damper on things, but we still had a good time.

After about 20 hours of traveling we arrived to our hotel about 5:00 on Friday evening. We were really wanting to go to the Grand Bazaar, but because it was a holiday weekend the Bazaar was closing early and we didn’t have time to make it. We were pretty disappointed about that, so we set off to try to find some other local shops so we could get some souvenirs. Along the way we met up with a girl from Holland who was there for recruiting as well and she hung out with us for the evening. We started out walking to Taksim Square (the main point of action in the city) and then walked down the main shopping street which was very crowded with young, hip people hanging out. We found a little mini-market and did some shopping there.

Next we decided to take a taxi over to the Blue Mosque. It was super crowded and people were pushing and shoving to get inside where they were having some kind of prayer service…probably something related to Ramadan. We put some scarves over our head and took our shoes off so we could go and see the inside of the building. We only stayed for a few seconds since it was so crowded. After that we walked across the street to Hagia Sophia which is a Christian church originally known as the Great Church because of its impressive size. Some web page I read said that the reason the Blue Mosque was built so large and grand was because it was across the street from the Hagia Sophia and it had to compete. It’s cool to think how old it is and how many people have been through those doors. Unfortunately I didn’t get to go inside Hagia Sophia because it was night by the time we got there and it was closed the next day for the holiday. (BTW, Hagia Sophia is now a museum.) Sometime during all of this we stopped for dinner at a cute little restaurant decorated with all types of pretty colorful hanging lights. By this time we had been awake for more than 24 hours and so we decided to head to the hotel and go to bed.

On Saturday morning we slept in for a bit and then had breakfast in the hotel. We had to do our recruiting event all during the afternoon and it went pretty well. Afterwards we met back up with our friend from Holland and took a taxi out to dinner. We ate at this really cool place with big windows overlooking the Bosphorus. I had some hummus and Turkish meatballs. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat hummus in the US again…the hummus at this place was SOOO good that the stuff from the grocery store would just taste like a joke now. After we ate dinner it decided to pour down rain which put a damper on our plans to take a riverboat across the Bosphorus. Instead we walked back up to Taksim Square and went to have hot chocolate and brownies at Starbucks. We hung out there for a while just relaxing and talking. With really nothing else to do in the rain we just all went back to the hotel and looked around the shops in the lobby.

We had to check out of our hotel at 3:00am to get to the airport in time, so we thought we’d try to get a little sleep beforehand. Unfortunately, neither of us could get to sleep because of our jet lag so we ended up watching football on TV at 1:00 in the morning. We also took the covers off our beds and sat out on the balcony for a while and watched the city nightlife. We were so giddy from lack of sleep that it was actually pretty fun. Finally around 2:00am we got our showers and got ready to leave the hotel. We were excited to find out we’d been upgraded to first class on our 3 hour flight from Istanbul to Amsterdam. We were hoping to be in first class back to Detroit too, but no such luck. By this time my cold had turned into me coughing my head off, but luckily I found some cough syrup at a drugstore in the Amsterdam airport. The cough syrup worked but it was the most horrible tasting stuff ever! Too bad I didn’t have some more of that hummus to chase it down with. The rest of our trip was long and uneventful, and we made it back to Champaign about 6:00pm Sunday evening. I think we spent more time in the airplanes than we did in Istanbul.

Oh, one of the coolest parts of my trip was this BEAUTIFUL rainbow that appeared on Saturday right over the Bosphorus…at one point you could even see a little bit of a double rainbow. Pictures of the rainbows and the rest of my trip are in the photo gallery.