Istanbul

My host sister works as a flight attendant in Istanbul, so we spent the weekend of Bayram in Istanbul with her because she wasn't able to come to Bursa due to work. It's only about a two or three hour drive to her house, so we arrived in Istanbul late Friday night. On Saturday we had brunch as a family and then in the afternoon we drove into Istanbul and took a tour of the Bosporus. It was a really nice tour and I got many nice photos. After our tour we found a little kiosk that let my host mom, sister and I dress up as Ottoman princesses and they took our pictures! It was so silly, but we were able to dress up and laugh a lot about that. We then had dinner as a family and returned to my host sister's apartment for the night. The next day my host dad wasn't feeling well, so my host mom and I just went to a shopping center and walked around for a few hours then had dinner there. We just went to Sabarro (seriously half the restaurants in the food court were American restaurants) and there was an American couple walking around and I heard him say, “Why the heck do they put corn on the pizza? That's so weird!” I didn't say anything, but I was laughing to myself, and thinking, “yuuuup....” We then returned home for the night and the next day we just hung out at home and returned to Bursa in the evening. It was a very casual visit to Istanbul, but it was still all very nice.

These are a few of my pictures from the Bosporus tour, and you can see more of my pictures on Facebook, or here, on my Flickr account.

   

This is called the Maiden's Tower, and it's located in the Bosporus.  There's actually a really cliche, tragic story behind it.  Apparently the princess fell in love with a boy and wanted to marry him, but the king or sultan or whatever didn't want her to marry him so he locked her up in this tower so she couldn't be with him.  Because the tower was surrounded by water, the snakes from the sea were able to get into the tower and kill her.  The end. I know, it's a pretty bad story, but I thought I'd share anyways. 

The left side of this photo is Europe and the right side it Asia! Crazyyyy

This is European Istanbul, and the bridge connects Europe and Asia. 

Sunset over the Hagia Sophia and Sultan Ahmet mosques in Istanbul!