Galata Bridge

Various views from Galata Bridge

Where we had our grilled fish sandwich

Turkey felt much like Indonesia. The similarity was how you could sense that it was still very much a developing country from the infrastructure and the way people behaved. There were different parts of Istanbul where you can really feel the discrepancy: there was definitely the gap between the rich and the poor. However, the city was pretty clean - quite unexpected to me - and the transportation was pretty well done. The people could sometimes be very pushy and annoying especially in the touristic areas (very imaginable in Indonesia too). They did not want to do you any harm, they just wanted to make a living. At night and early morning, girls were the rarest scene to be seen on the streets of Istanbul. Although it is a neutral country now, the Muslim root is still palpable, especially in the old part of the city. That was why I got hit and followed by guys there because apparently there were not so many other girls wandering around in the morning just before the sun rises. There were tourist traps in the city, so it was to your intelligence that you could outsmart those unnecessary expenditures. Have dinner somewhere else, not around Sultanahmet, for you could get better food for better price somewhere else.