During the week from Monday to Friday, my coworker and I did our job thing at an industrial park in a tiny town in Belgium.  There are pictures, but the pictures are of things like my dosimeter readings and cyclotron pinouts, and I assure you, neither are of the slightest interest.  I may post some pictures of Nivelles, the town where I was staying, but all together, they’ll probably make one post right at the end of the stay.

Let’s therefore jump ahead to Saturday, the 21st, and my first day in Turkey.  First off, I’d like to point out that Turkish Air served me a whole ass meal on a relatively short 3.5 hour flight from Brussels to Istanbul.  It was really good, too.

On arrival in Istanbul, a nice person from the company I would be visiting picked me up from the (ridiculously enormous) Istanbul airport and took me to my hotel.

Now, I had selected this hotel because a) it was relatively near the customer and b) it was on the “approved” list in the expense reporting software. But it turned out to a) be a really nice hotel of the “uniformed bellhop refuses to let you touch your own luggage at any point” variety and b) 100 meters from the Theodosian walls. (More on the walls in a later entry.)

Got up to my room and was struck by the view.  Also immediately misidentified the largest building visible from my window.

The large mosque on the horizon is not the Blue Mosque, built by the Sultan Ahmet I between 1609 and 1617.  Don’t be absurd.  It is clearly the Süleymaniye Mosque, built by Suleiman the Magnificent from 1550 to 1557.  I don’t see how any reasonable person could have gotten that wrong.

Also holy crap was the view from my room amazing.

Since it was now dinner time, and I didn’t plan on doing any complicated sight seeing, I decided to take the metro to the waterfront and see if I could locate a fish sandwich, or Balık ekmek.  This particular variety of Istanbul street food had been mentioned on several travel videos we watched before arriving.

The first interesting thing is that the metro station where I disembarked, Haliç, is actually in the middle of a bridge across the Golden Horn.  Definitely not where I expected to find myself on debarking the train.

I wasn’t complaining, though.  And sure enough, basically as soon as I got off the bridge, I found a nice person on a boat willing to sell me a fish sandwich.  It was delicious, and I have no idea why I look so grouchy in this picture.  Not great at selfies, I guess.

Oh, that’s also a super famous tower in the background.  I’ll climb that later.

Sandwich consumed, I just walked along the waterfront enjoying the ambiance, the view, and the sunset.  Along with precisely 35,231 other people.  Istanbul is a BIG and populous city.

But you know what?  Everyone out enjoying a nice summer evening had a remarkably similar vibe in Istanbul than it did in Belgium two nights earlier, or in Vancouver the week before.  Which is pretty cool when you think about it.

I mean figuratively, of course.  Literally it was hot.  Not Tokyo in August hot, but still hot.

Here’s one more sunset shot from the north side of the Golden Horn, because why not?