I almost missed my connecting flight in Istanbul because I stopped to buy a simit from a cart inside the airport and then could not find my gate. That was the first fifteen minutes. It did not get less chaotic from there. But somewhere between getting lost in a bazaar on day two and eating the best thing I have ever put in my mouth on day four, Istanbul stopped being a trip and started being something I am going to spend years trying to explain to people who were not there.
I should say upfront: I did not plan this trip well. I had a list of things I wanted to see, most of which I did not see, and I stumbled into things I had never heard of that turned out to be the whole point. That is probably the most honest way I can describe Istanbul: it punishes your plans and rewards your accidents.
Blue Mosque at Dawn
The call to prayer woke me up at 5:30 in the morning on my first full day. My first reaction, honestly, was annoyance. I had jet lag. I had not slept well. The mattress in my hotel was doing something strange to my lower back. But the sound kept going and something about it—the way it bounced off the stone buildings outside my window—made it impossible to just roll over.
So I went. Unwashed, wearing the same clothes I had traveled in, shoes untied. I walked the two minutes to the Blue Mosque in the dark and stood outside for a moment because I genuinely was not sure if I was allowed in at that hour. A man at the entrance waved me in without looking up from his phone.
I do not know how to describe what is inside that mosque without sounding like every other person who has been inside that mosque. The dome is enormous. The tiles, thousands of them, hand-painted blue and white, cover the walls in patterns that seem to move if you stare at them long enough. At 5:45 a.m., with maybe twelve other people in the whole building, the silence had a texture to it. I sat on the carpet near the back and stayed for almost an hour. I was supposed to be there for fifteen minutes.
I missed breakfast because of this. I do not regret it.
On Turkish Breakfast
I had been told about Turkish breakfast before I came. I did not take it seriously enough. You sit down thinking you are going to have some eggs and maybe toast and then fifteen small plates appear on your table and you realize this is going to take a while.
At a cafe near Eminönü on my second morning, I made the mistake of eating quickly because I had somewhere to be. The man at the table next to me, older, with a thick mustache, clearly a regular, watched me inhale my food and said something in Turkish. The young woman with him translated without being asked: “He says you are eating like you have a bus to catch. In Istanbul, breakfast is not a meal. It is an argument you have with time, and time loses.”
I had nowhere important to be. I slowed down. The kaymak with honey, the still-warm bread, the olives I would normally ignore at home, the tea that kept arriving without my asking—I ate all of it. It took an hour and twenty minutes. When I finally left I felt, somehow, like I had actually arrived in Istanbul for the first time.
Lost in the Grand Bazaar
I got lost in the Grand Bazaar for two hours. Not the fun kind of lost. The genuinely disoriented kind where you keep walking through the same carpet section and cannot figure out how you keep ending up there.
The Grand Bazaar is not what I expected. I thought it would feel like a tourist trap and some of it does, near the main entrances, where the shops sell the same evil eye keychains and the same I LOVE ISTANBUL hoodies in sixteen different colors. But if you go deeper, which I did mostly by accident, it changes. The smell changes first. Less perfume, more raw leather and old wool and something sweet I still cannot identify. The vendors stop calling out to you in English. The corridors get narrower. The light gets dimmer. You start to understand that this place has been here for five hundred years and has genuinely not noticed that tourists arrived.
A carpet seller gave me tea and we talked for forty minutes. He was not trying to sell me anything or if he was, he was very patient about it. He showed me the difference between a machine-made rug and a hand-knotted one. He told me his father had run this same shop. He told me which patterns come from which villages and what the symbols mean. I bought nothing. He seemed fine with this. “Come back tomorrow,” he said when I left. I did not come back tomorrow. I think about that conversation more than almost anything else from the trip.
The Bosphorus Ferry
Someone at my hotel told me to take the ferry from Eminönü to Üsküdar. She said it like it was obvious, like I would be an idiot not to. She was right, and I almost did not do it because I thought a fifteen-minute ferry ride across a strait could not possibly be worth rearranging an afternoon for.
It cost me almost nothing. I bought tea from the cart on the deck because of course there is a tea cart on the deck and stood at the railing as we pulled away from the European shore. The mosques and the old city stacked on the hill behind me. The Asian side is getting larger ahead. Seagulls keep pace with the boat. Schoolkids yelling at each other near the front. An old man sleeping in a plastic chair with complete commitment.
I do not know what I expected to feel when I crossed from one continent to another. Something more dramatic, maybe. But it was quiet and ordinary and the water was grey-green and the city looked the same from both sides, improbably large, improbably old, going about its business with total indifference to the fact that I was there witnessing it. That was the point, I think. Istanbul is not performing for you. It is just living.
Karaköy at Night
On my last evening I went to Karaköy because three separate people had told me to. It is the kind of neighborhood that used to be something else, a working port, I was told, and now has that particular energy of a place that has been recently discovered but not yet ruined.
I ate at a meyhane, a tavern where I sat at a communal table and ordered by pointing at what the person next to me was having. This worked out well. Meze kept appearing: smoked eggplant, white cheese with herbs, something with walnuts in a red sauce that I ate too much of. The rakı arrived and I drank it too fast and had to slow down.
The table filled up over the course of the evening. A filmmaker from Ankara. Two women who worked in textiles. A young architect who had studied abroad and came home. At some point someone ordered more meze without asking anyone and nobody objected. The bill, when it came, was split in a way that I still do not fully understand but that somehow seemed fair to everyone.
What I Got Wrong
I did not see Hagia Sophia properly. I went on my second day, joined a queue, got inside, looked around for twenty minutes, felt rushed and vaguely guilty about feeling rushed, and left. I was trying to fit in too much that day. You cannot do Hagia Sophia in twenty minutes. You probably cannot do it in two hours. That is a building that took a thousand years to accumulate meaning and it will not give you that meaning on a schedule.
I also wish I had learned five words of Turkish before I arrived. Not because people are unfriendly to tourists who speak only English—they are not, they are remarkably patient—but because the moment I said teşekkürler to someone and meant it, something shifted. They looked at me differently. Not as a visitor to be processed but as a person making an effort. It costs nothing and it matters.
Istanbul is not an easy city. The traffic is genuinely terrifying. The hills are steeper than they look on a map. The Grand Bazaar will disorient you. The ferry schedules make no sense until they suddenly do. But none of that is a reason not to go. All of that is, in fact, a reason to go.
I left on a grey morning with my suitcase slightly heavier than it arrived—a small rug that the carpet seller did not sell me but that I went back and bought on my last afternoon. I did not plan to buy a rug. I have nowhere to put a rug. It is currently rolled up in the corner of my room and I look at it every morning and think about a city that is still, somehow, going on without me.
If You Go
Where to Stay
- Hotel Amira Istanbul sits a short walk from the Blue Mosque, with a rooftop terrace and a breakfast guests consistently praise.
- For a splurge, Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul at Sultanahmet fills a converted early 20th-century prison just steps from both the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia.
Tours
- Hagia Sophia deserves more than twenty minutes, and this small-group tour of the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia gives each one about an hour with a guide and pre-reserved tickets.
- This street food tour opens with a proper Turkish breakfast of kaymak and honey, then crosses the Bosphorus by ferry to eat your way through the Asian side.
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Author Bio: Anam Arshad is a travel and lifestyle writer with a passion for exploring cultures, food, and human stories from around the world. Her writing focuses on immersive storytelling that captures the spirit of places through local experiences, meaningful connections and authentic moments.
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