What makes Istanbul so special?

The ques­tion can not be answered eas­ily. Istan­bul has many facets and there is much to be dis­cov­ered. We started our jour­ney on the very first evening. We took the bus from Sabiha Gok­cen air­port to the Bosporus, on the Asian side. A ferry took us to the Euro­pean side, and to sweeten the ride, we drank a Turk­ish tea, which was served by friendly wait­ers. From the ferry sta­tion we walked through the old part of town, Sul­tanahmed, to our hotel. On our way we passed beau­ti­fully lit his­tor­i­cal build­ings, as well as some very invit­ing restau­rants and cafes, which show­cased their turk­ish delights in their shop win­dows. We could not resist and tried them on the spot. A taste sen­sa­tion, mmmh.

The next day we started our ‘expe­di­tion’ buy­ing trans­par­ent umbrel­las. An invest­ment that paid off, since it rained almost con­tin­u­ously. Now we were ready to explore the his­tor­i­cal town and sur­round­ing area. If the queue seemed too long, we admired the build­ing from the out­side and asked about a good time to come back, so that we could do it later or the next day. This way we got a good impres­sion of Istan­bul and vis­ited all the famous build­ings and explored them with­out any crowds.

Have a look at the fol­low­ing images to get an idea of the beau­ti­ful things you can find in Istan­bul. We will def­i­nitely visit Istan­bul again.