Day 2 - Saturday, August 23 - Frankfurt to Istanbul

 The flight arrive just on time at 7:30AM after a relatively smooth flight.

It was quite a walk between terminals. My Fitbit recorded 1300 steps and 22 minutes of exercise!

Our flight to Istanbul left at 9am for a 3 hour flight and arrived just on time at 1pm - there is an hour time difference.

The flight was smooth and most of the time it looked like farmland although as we got closer to Turkiye (now the politically correct spelling) it was much drier.

It was pretty straightforward to get through the airport, find our Viking group and make our way to the Conrad Bosphoros Hotel, part of the Hilton chain.

We are just 10 minutes walk up from the Bosphorus Strait waterfront.

Much of the transportation in Istanbul is based on ferries and taxies that run between many piers to get around as there are few bridges and the traffic is terrible. At the pier we saw ferries coming in regularly and it was impressive how fast they came up to the pier, suddenly stopped and let down the ramp for people to get on and off.

I made a mistake at an ATM and got a $100 bill instead of Turkish Lira! Tried again and got the right currency although paid $8 for the US currency.

After spending some time looking around we stopped at a cafe for a beer and fried calamari. The

It is interesting to see the dress of the women. Many Muslim women wear a headscarf but are otherwise fashionably dressed and made up. There are also many women with crop tops and fairly scantily dressed although I expect many are tourists. We saw one woman with a black scarf and dressed black head-to-toe with her arm around her friend who had no head covering and bare shoulders and back.

There are cats all over the place, very friendly and with food set out for them. Probably no problem with rats or mice! I tried to feed some cats begging for food with a piece of a sesame bagel but that was not at all interesting.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 4 - Monday, August 25 - Istanbul, Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia

Image
 The day got off to a good start with a drive under the Roman aqueduct and along the Roman city wall. The aqueduct was constructed in 373AD to supply water to the growing city of Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire under Constantine. Our tour guide joked that the Romans had taken care to make sure that the arches would be large enough to allow passage of buses. Along the way, our guide provided information on the development of the modern Turkish state. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is famous for the Ottoman success at the battle of Gallipoli in 1915 during WWI but the Ottomans were eventually defeated and since they had sided with Germany, were under English and French occupation - this was the beginning of the disaster in the Middle East when the borders of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine / Israel were defined without considering the history of the region. Ataturk was able to establish an army and drove out the British in 1923 and became president of the state of Tu...
Read more

Day 1 - Friday, August 22 - Woodstock - Newark - Frankfurt

Image
 We are finally off on our lower Danube cruise through Eastern Europe. We were supposed to go on this cruise in June 2021 but came down with Covid 3 days before departure and had to cancel suddenly. We are taking the Viking pre and post cruise extensions to Istanbul and Prague. Makes for a long trip but we don't know when we would ever plan to go there separately. A beautiful clear, sunny and not too hot day to start our trip.😁 We were relieved to reach the Lufthansa lounge for a beer, Bloody Mary and snacks after the trip down. The traffic on the Garden State Parkway was very heavy and Google suggested getting off and driving through downtown Newark to the airport. There was no TSA pre-check line for security at Newark and it took us about 40 minutes to get through. Now that passengers aren't required to remove shoes and belts I wonder if TSA pre-check is going away. We didn't even have to show a boarding pass to get on the plane - just look into a camera that took a phot...
Read more

Day 9 - Saturday, August 30 - Golubac, Serbia - Danube Iron Gates

Image
 Going into Serbia we had a time change to Central European Time so we gained an hour, 7am became 6am. Around 6am we came into the Iron Gates Lock, the first lock of the Danube and one of the largest. The total height of the lock is 35 meters, around 105', and needs two stages to get to this height. The ship pulls into the first chamber which closes and the ship rises to the top of the chamber. Then the gate between the two chambers drops down and the ship moves into the second chamber which then raises the ship to the top so that it can go further up the Danube. Each chamber is just long enough for the Viking ship but looks like there is room for two side by side. There is a set of locks on the Serbian side and an identical set on the Romanian side with a large dam for hydroelectric power and a road over the top. This was only built in 1972 and flooded a huge area upstream, flooding numerous towns, roads and Roman ruins. Towns had to be relocated and new roads constructed along th...
Read more