Istanbulled Over

    Turkish Airlines (voted Best Airline in Europe, betcha didn't know) offers a delightful perk if you have a long stopover in Istanbul. Let us take you on a bus tour of our fair city while you're here! And we'll throw in breakfast and lunch to boot! They offer a quarter-day, half-day, or ful-day tour, depending on the length of your stopover. Yes, please!

    Sign up online, meet at the kiosk by Arrivals, get your lanyard and pass. I landed safely at 6:30am (my brain still blipped as "after midnight"), and I met my group at 8:30, the appointed time. People from all over the globe, literally, with one thing in common. We all had answers to two questions: Where ya from? and Where ya headed?

    We filled a full-size bus, at least fifty of us. Our tour guide was a young, local man (never got his name) who started off brusque on his portable mic rig, but he warmed up over time. And distance. There was a lot of time and a lot of distance. He warned that we'd be walking about two kilometers today.

    My group of world travelers soon learned we had another thing in common. We were all exhausted from the jump because we all had just finished really long flights. Two kilometers on busy, uneven streets (imagine if Times Square was paved in thousand-year-old cobblestones) in the hot sun makes for a long afternoon.

    Still, the day was delightful and exotic and energetic. I met an young Israeli man who was traveling from Indonesia to the Netherlands (we were bus-mates), two girls from Malaysia traveling to Germany, and a wonderful young woman named Abby from Singapore traveling to Slovenia. Abby and I met at our breakfast stop (okay, three different cheeses to start your day is the way to go; this should be a thing!), and we kept gravitating toward each other on the walking portion of the tour. Abby was truly a world traveler, determined on her 25th birthday to visit 25 countries; Slovenia would be Number 23.

    The highlights: buying Turkish ice cream with Abby from a wisecracking sidewalk salesman, and meeting all the feral cats strutting and lounging in every public corner. The architecture was incredible, the energy was intoxicating, the sharing of the cobblestone roadway between cars, trolleys, mopeds, and pedestrians kept us on our toes.

    Abby and I agreed that it was a great start to an international vacation, but maybe better if we could've rested up for it first. The tour bus brought us back to our starting point, and back to the sterile air and manic hurry-and-waiting beehive of a major international airport. We said our good-byes and drifted into the mayhem, maybe all looking for a bathroom and a place to sit to remember what day it was.

    Waiting for my evening flight to Cairo. Thank you, Istanbul, hope to  see you again soon.