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I’m going to Istanbul by mistake and I’m terrified

Spymaster said:
Cor blimey, do you reckon you could get any more saccharin into that post, Dess?
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Not said anything that isn't true. Like many on this site there's lots of really amazing people who I greatly respect, and admire.
 
miss direct said:
Safe yes but do tend to drive very fast and sometimes try to rip tourists off. I've never worked out how Uber works and there's a strange conflict going on with Uber and the normal taxis here (plus they're more expensive) so can't recommend them. What's the name of your hotel? It's literally a 5 minute walk from the last bus stop. I would honestly go for the bus and feel safer doing so. I am fed up of speeding, smoking taxi drivers here (and I have the language ability to tell them off).
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It's called Sarnic Suites. Address above! Thanks for the advice.
 
Re: the mind bomb Edie ...

I totally get why you'd not want to experience something that's a sudden shift or that might feel like a shock. But just breathe through it, watch it all go into kaleidoscope, and then see how it settles back into something you can recognise. Like jumping into cold water. It's more scary in advance, and the shivery fear of actually doing it turns into a kind of exhilaration in the doing of it.
 
If you don't travel a lot, contact your bank to let them know you're going. Sometimes, they put a block on the card, if they think it's been cloned and used by fraudsters overseas, which can be a ball ache. And check what the crack is with your phone charges in Turkey.
 
SheilaNaGig said:
Seeing as it's him, make sure it's the right phrase and nor something that'll cause an international incident.


And I've always found "I'm sorry I don't speak >insert language here<" to be useful too.
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teşekkür ederim

Pronounced: T’ shek kou eh derim

For short you can also say:

Teşekkürler

Pronounced: T’ shek kou la

Is that what they said? I have them on ignore.

I also like ‘how are you?’ which is nasılsın
 
You'll be absolutely fine, I loved Istanbul when I visited last, it's a beautiful city and people are nice and welcoming.

Taking a headscarf may be a good idea if you plan to visit any mosques (and there are some lovely ones you should visit!), just to cover your head to be respectful when visiting. I mean you can usually get a scarf outside of the mosques popular with tourists, but having your own is preferable I reckon.
 
Another app that I've found useful is Maps.me. it uses your phone signal to locate you on the map offline.

Glad to read this thread as I'm planning a visit for October.
 
Magnus McGinty said:
I’d be put off by the current regime. That aside it’s probably perfectly safe.
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The current regime has been warming up to the situation we are in since the late 00s. noone in europe cared then.

vociferously disagree with the politics on display here but worth posting:

Guilty Men - The American Interest

A large part of the reason Western observers got Turkey under the AKP so wrong is probably that they were fixated on the wrong things. Those things had to do first with a war gone haywire in Iraq and then the Syrian civil war, both of which, seriatim, turned Turkey in American eyes into a subsidiary consideration of more central geopolitical concerns. It seemed unwise to many to reprove what we hoped would be a useful ally in a pinch.
Probably even more important is that after 9/11 a lot of people in the West got Islam, Islamists, and the like on the brain to the exclusion of nearly everything else. So it followed, sort of, that many came to see that the most significant thing about the AKP was its “moderately Islamist” character. Many were perhaps so thrilled that they didn’t begin hanging homosexuals from cranes that they uncritically accepted the rest of the AKP’s story about itself: It was opening up an ossified system that was, in its words, “radically secularist.”
There is much truth in the criticism that the system was ossified, and it was also true that it was unfair to the visibly pious. It was even true that developments deep within Turkish society, well described by Ernst Gellner’s term “neo-fundamentalism,” explained the AKP movement’s rise and legitimacy. But this was the wrong focus. The same tunnel vision caused others to dwell hysterically on the impending prospect of sharia, which never arrived, even as they failed to notice the bog-standard authoritarianism that did. They had sweated exotic dictionary bullets to learn words like taqqiya, and they were going to use them, damn it. The concept they really needed—kleptocracy—eluded them.
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The phrase “privatization,” too, so beloved by authors of investment-advice newsletters, really meant the sale of state assets to Erdoğan’s relatives and sycophants. Anyone who agreed in exchange to lend their political and financial support to the party could buy stuff up; anyone who didn’t, couldn’t. “Improving the investment climate” meant improving it for AKP loyalists. For everyone else, there were punitive tax fines and exclusion from public procurement and tenders.
Beginning in 2008, the government promoted policies to stimulate the consumption of durables. This created the appearance of an energetic population with rising purchasing power. Credit card and consumer debt stood at three percent of GDP in 2003; ten years later it was 21 percent. In short, the AKP ran the economy on construction, credit, and surging capital inflows, mixed with a dash of crime. It worked well enough, but was nothing like a miracle. Now the capital is taking flight again. Years were wasted, with nothing really to show for it but a bubble of unsold housing and a balding, furious Sultan in a thousand-room palace, busily scheming to kill his enemies.
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a credible investigation that unearthed the truth about those years would have served the country. But the trials held instead were notable for their contemptuous—and obvious—mockery of the principles of sound jurisprudence. The international media—prompted or echoed by timid, blind, or corrupt Western politicians—found this unworthy of remark.
That the United States failed to express displeasure about this was particularly bizarre given that many of those arrested were senior figures in the Army and Navy. Turkey’s NATO allies had every right, if not an obligation, to ask what effect this would have on the alliance’s military preparedness. Clearly, it couldn’t have been enhanced with some 10 percent of the land and air force officers and as many as 80 percent of the naval officers charged with defending NATO’s southern flank in prison. Perhaps this question was posed in private, but journalists from NATO countries neither asked the question nor speculated about the answer. Our Ambassador, Frank Ricciardone, offered only that he was “confused” by the trials. I am sure he wasn’t confused when a senior AKP official retorted that he shouldn’t “piss on a mosque wall”—an idiom meaning, roughly, that his demise was coming and that he had hastened it.
In the wake of this past summer’s failed putsch, the government undertook a fresh set of purges, targeting a different group of military officers, bureaucrats, judges, and civilians. You’ve read all about these purges. But why, actually? That our media put these purges on the front pages when it was blasé to the point of stone silence about the earlier ones leaves many Turks with an odd taste. It doesn’t suggest to them that we’ve suddenly developed an abiding interest in the integrity of their justice system and the quality of their democracy. The conclusion they draw from this is wrong, but it is natural. They figure our boys lost. They reckon we’re infuriated by it.
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Ordinary citizens were muzzled every bit as much as professional journalists. Some were arrested and subjected to years of legal harassment for drawing cartoons, waving a banner, or recycling a thought crime on Twitter. These things happened before Erdoğan came to power, and he expanded the tradition on his ascent. What was galling, though, is that without repealing or changing in substance the laws upon which these arrests were predicated, Turkey ceased to be a country of concern.
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The evidence, after all, is only a Google search away. Also just a Google search away: the dates on which the governing party took control of the police, the higher education board, the directorate of religious affairs, the Turkish statistics institute, Turkey’s science funding agency, and Turkish Academy of Sciences. That is how democracy dies—not with thunderous applause, but piece by piece, with widespread international indifference, or “mild concern” followed by grudging acceptance. This includes the indifference of many Turks who registered their objection to their democracy’s death by posting the Amidala meme. I know who some of them are and what else they did: nothing. They should have been fighting when they still could. Instead they rolled over. But I can’t really blame them. It was a juggernaut; they were just kids. Besides, who wants to wind up in a Turkish prison?
It was disgraceful, though, that those outside of Turkey, who were at no risk at all of winding up in a Turkish prison, didn’t notice, didn’t care, or applauded democracy’s death. The George Marshall Fund’s expert commentator on Turkey, Joshua Walker, after offering the obligatory paeans to Turkey’s vibrant democracy, surveyed the situation in 2011 and decided that “one-party rule does not necessarily equate to weakening democracy and can often be a welcome formula for consensus-building, economic success, and political stability.” That Cuba, China, and North Korea were the most notable examples of this welcome formula did not trouble him.
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Istanbul is great, once you get over the shock you'll have a great time.

There's a hop on hop off bus tour, I'd buy tickets for yourself and the boy for one day, they're generally pretty helpful to orient yourself in a strange city and they stop at all the big tourist sites too.
 
Now, Baghdad is somewhere I'd love to go :)

Whoever it was who said there is no need to tick off sights- spot on. Some of the cities I love most I have never done some of the must-sees. Sit and drink coffee and watch the people for a bit, soak it in, meander... I spent about four hours watching old men fish last time I was there!

And honestly even if you hate it (I can't believe you will, it's an incredibly beautiful and fascinating city and people are, generally, lovely) you are giving your boy such an amazing experience and the chance to catch the travel bug.
 
The blue mosque is actually closed to tourists at the moment anyway. Go to Suleymaniah, the whole complex is amazing and you can eat rice and beans for next to nothing there. Go to one of the cafes there with a terrace like Mimar Sinan - amazing views and full of local students and cheap.
 
Get an Istanbul card (like an oyster but you can use for multiple people. How olds your son?) which you can use on almost all public transport. Take lots of ferries, drink tea on them and throw bread to the seagulls.
 
Wow just a day! What time do you arrive on the Friday?

Plan your day carefully to make the most of it. See if you can get your aya sofia tickets in advance to avoid queuing. Tourism has really picked up and Saturdays can be manic around the bazaar area. Maybe just go to the spice bazaar which is smaller and more manageable. Avoid the small streets behind the spice bazaar, they are uncomfortably crowded on Saturdays. I got stuck in a crush of people there last year and it was horrible.

So kadikoy - boat to eminonu or karakoy - market - tram or walk up to sultanahmet, aya Sofia, then go to suleymaniah (you can walk - steep hills but worth it). See the mosque complex, have a drink in a terrace cafe. Then you could head to taksim to see the other side of the city. I’d recommend a walk down İstiklal just to take in the atmosphere of buskers singing in Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish.

I’m assuming you want a really good Turkish meal in the evening? Do you prefer fish or meat? You could do worse than go for fish, meze and raki on the fish street in kadikoy.

Turkish baths are ok but will eat into your precious time.
 
miss direct said:
Wow just a day! What time do you arrive on the Friday?

Plan your day carefully to make the most of it. See if you can get your aya sofia tickets in advance to avoid queuing. Tourism has really picked up and Saturdays can be manic around the bazaar area. Maybe just go to the spice bazaar which is smaller and more manageable. Avoid the small streets behind the spice bazaar, they are uncomfortably crowded on Saturdays. I got stuck in a crush of people there last year and it was horrible.

So kadikoy - boat to eminonu or karakoy - market - tram or walk up to sultanahmet, aya Sofia, then go to suleymaniah (you can walk - steep hills but worth it). See the mosque complex, have a drink in a terrace cafe. Then you could head to taksim to see the other side of the city. I’d recommend a walk down İstiklal just to take in the atmosphere of buskers singing in Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish.

I’m assuming you want a really good Turkish meal in the evening? Do you prefer fish or meat? You could do worse than go for fish, meze and raki on the fish street in kadikoy.

Turkish baths are ok but will eat into your precious time.
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Thank you so much.

I’m gonna literally print out your itinerary and take it.

Turkish baths are a concession to the boy. Obviously I won’t be having one!

Ta miss direct

And yes, fish
 
It's Güneşli Bahçe Sokak. I can't recommend any restaurant in particular as I go to ones on the European side. Another possibility is going to Akin Balik, which is in Karakoy (just next to the Galata bridge). The mezes are amazing and you sit out in a garden area under trees. Avoid the restaurants actually under the Galata bridge, they are notorious for ripping off tourists.

The best hamams are said to be Kilic Ali Pasa: Turkish Bath in Istanbul | Kilic Ali Pasa Hamam and this one in Sultanahmet; Ayasofya Hurrem Sultan Hamam
I go to neighbourhood, cheap ones and wouldn't pay the prices at those but they certainly look fabulous from the outside and probably have excellent service. If you send him to Kilic Ali Pasa, you can enjoy wandering around the narrow streets of Karakoy while he's in there. Another trendy area full of street art and Turkish hipsters.
 
I've never been to Istanbul but I think my best travel tip would be....do the things you want to do. Don't feel like you have to do and see everything. Just pick a couple of things and do them and take it slow. Take in the atmosphere of the place rather than doing all the sights and never actually experiencing the place you are in. If you find yourself in a cafe and you're enjoying watching the world go by....just do that and don't stress about not seeing everything. I've sat for hours at cafes in Paris and Miami just people watching. A day spent feeling happy and relaxed is better than a day charging around seeing everything but experiencing nothing.

Having said that, if you only have 1 day, get up early and make the most of the short time have there!
 
It will be awesome...and I'm jealous...but I'm coming back to Europe and Istanbul has always been on my to do list.
 
Mrs Miggins said:
It will be awesome...and I'm jealous...but I'm coming back to Europe and Istanbul has always been on my to do list.
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I was there a few years ago. It's nice enough, but I wasn't as excited about it as I thought I'd be. But at that time I was travelling a lot and was starting to become bored with endless hotels etc.

I should go back for a proper look.
 
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