Fuzzable Blogs: August 24 – My trip to Istanbul

Just as promised in my last blog, I am here to talk about my trip to Istanbul.

It was a student trip, so thankfully it wasn’t too pricey. Literally everyone in my family visited Istanbul at least once, and this was my turn. To be quite honest with you, I was really looking forward to it, since I’ve always loved Turkey. Alanya and Kemer have been my vacation destination for over ten years, but recently my family has been way to busy for a vacation, and so I haven’t stepped on Turkey ground for three or four years.

There were about 1000 people signed up for this trip, and I’m not even exaggerating. There were 19 buses, each one of them filled with about 65 people. Luckily we were arranged to stay in a student dorm, since otherwise I doubt that any hotel would be willing to take in a thousand young adults. This trip was basically hell if you’re an introvert like me, since we were forced to interact with a lot of people. And I only knew five people out of a thousand of them. I’m no good at math, but I’m guessing that that’s less than 0,1%.

The thing about Istanbul is that it’s nothing like I imagined it to be.

With it being such a major city and a popular tourist attraction, I have to say I was expecting a New York vibe- tall skyscrapers, millions of people, locals running around in suits with headsets, and generally a modern look. Istanbul wasn’t quite like that, and if I had bothered to look up at least one picture on Google, I probably would’ve known that.

The first word I’d use to describe this city is tropical. I don’t even know why, it’s got that tropical look and vibe going on. As soon as we entered the city that was the word that came to mind. It reminded me of a bigger and more modern Alanya.

Then I’d use either proud or traditional. There were Turkish flags everywhere we went, you couldn’t move ten meters without seeing at least one flag. This gesture did kind of warm my heart though, to see a city that is so proud. You could probably walk around for hours in my country, Bosnia, before you see a single flag. Now the traditional bit I was used to, since Bosnia had a lot of history with the Ottoman Empire, and their culture and traditions did rub off on us.

Another thing I didn’t know about Istanbul was that there is so many things to see there! We ended up visiting multiple monuments and tourist attractions in one day, meaning that we were beyond exhausted when we came back to the dorms. I went to the Çamlıca Hill, the Bosphorus cruise, the aquarium, the Aya Sophia, a theme park, an adrenalin park, a historic cistern, a panoramic museum, and a lot of mosques. A few of our planned trips were cancelled since we couldn’t get free tickets, but that’s just the way it is when you’re going on a trip with an organisation like this.

If I were to write about every single place I visited and every single thing I saw, this would be a very long blog. So I’m just going to cut it off here and leave you with a few pictures of all the amazing sights I saw in Turkey.