| It was a while since my last foreign
vacation. I usually like to leave Seattle when the winter weather
starts turning wet and dreary. During the last two years, both my
parents passed away during the fall - my father in the fall of 2010
and my mother in the fall of 2011. My travel these years was limited
to several trips home for parental care and the unhappy trips
for their funerals. Now it was 2012 and time to get back into the travel scene. Following my own general travel rule to seek out places I hadn't yet seen, I narrowed down the list to a few places. I was interested in Istanbul and had read about the city's rich history. I made my flight reservations and booked a hotel in the old historic section of Istanbul. I left on October 31st and returned back on November 14th. I flew from the USA to Paris and then on to Istanbul. While taking off from the Paris airport in a storm, our airplane was struck by lightning. This got my attention because I had a window seat next to the wing and I saw a bright flash of light out my window and heard a loud explosion (thunder). Fortunately the plane and all passengers were OK. I was hoping this was not a portend for the remainder of my trip. Starting my vacation, I could tell that my international travel skills were a bit on the rusty side. I didn't learn a single word of the local Turkish language (no excuses for this, but I still got along in English). I over-packed and never wore some of the clothes I brought to Istanbul. I wasn't interested in shopping and didn't purchase any personal items or gifts, even though I saw some things that I needed and would have to purchase back in the US for a higher price. I never toured out of the city, except for my Bosporus cruise, and there were opportunities to see outlying sites such as Troy. Notes for These Vacation Web Pages There is so much history involved with the Istanbul area, that a mear six web pages cannot do it justice. This web description is not going to attempt to explain the rich history of Constantinople / Istanbul, but will only describe my tourist interactions with the place. I have included a footnote on each page for further reading, and I recommend anyone with an interest try the "Recommended Further Reading:" links. You might learn something new for your next vacation or for your general education. Some parts of my trip are completely left out of this description because they didn't fit into the outline of the six web pages. This includes some of my better photos. The parts omitted include walking through the Grand Bazaar, with 4,000 mechant shops under a single roof, the Suleiman the Magnificant Mosque (visited twice), watching the finish line of the Istanbul Marathon 2012 which ended in my neighborhood, visits to the University of Istanbul and the Roman cistern and aquaduct. For this trip I was trying out my new Sony compact camera which had a GPS function. Most of the photos in this vacation have been GEOTAGGED with the geographical coordinates of their location. I took about 800 photos on this trip, but only a small number are presented here.  Aerial photo of the City of Istanbul. It is home to about 14 million people and is contained in both Asia and Europe  Visiting the Topkapi Palace overlooking the Bosporus Strait Recommended Further Reading History of Constantinople-Istanbul from Wikipedia Turkey's Ministry for Culture and Tourism --brochure for Istanbul (12 MB, 138 pages PDF) Interactive Map of Metropolitan Istanbul area from the City's official website (select the English tab on the map page) |