27 April 2024

We arrived early in the morning, and had a relatively chilled out day, and the hotel was nice enough to set up my room early so I got in at 11am. My friends had paid the for the night before so they got in when we arrived from the airport.

We were to have dinner at the 360 Panorama Restaurant. Our hotel is around 15 kilometres from the area where the attractions are. It being a Saturday there was to be a lot of traffic so we left early. A couple of hours early. The roads were choc-a-block full of cars and our taxi driver took us around side streets, what looked like some peoples’ back yards and across perpendicular traffic. We named him Peter Brock.

We drove past a number of old fortifications along the waterline. These all have long histories around the various battles over the number of empires that Istanbul is replete with.

It was enjoyable walking around the streets, seeing the different shops and selling techniques of the touts. We went into one Turkish carpet shop and my friends bought a small piece of carpet for their wall.

The restaurant was very well situated, and the 360 restaurant provided around 250 degrees of viewing. But it was high up so I got some good photos especially of one of the mosques across the road.