A few short observations from the trip to Istanbul.

Food

The food here is either extreeemely sweet, or tastes of lamb. It doesn’t matter whether you order chicken, fish or even vegetables — it tastes of lamb.

Service in restaurants

The first case happened in a restaurant downtown. A waiter brings a meal to a customer and accidentally drops it on the floor. He quickly picks up all the fallen parts from the floor, puts them back to the plate, looks around to make sure that the guest hasn’t seen this incident and brings him the meal. 10 minutes later a similar incident occurrs! Another waiter at the same place drops a similar meal on the floor! This time, however, the customer saw it and refused to eat the food from the floor. The waiter, for about 10 minutes, tried to convince the guest that nothing bad had happened and the fallen parts of the meal are not even edible and could be put to one side.

The second case happened in another restaurant which is located a few kilometres away from the downtown. After the lunch we asked for our bill but it seemed that the cash register wasn’t working. A waiter wrote down the amount from memory on a piece of paper. Our first thoughts were: they are going to cheat us, but before we paid the bill they fixed the cash register and it turned out that initially they wanted 200 Liras less from us than we should have paid.

Btw, it’s enough to go only 2-3 kilometres away from the main tourist routes and prices in restaurants will be 2-3 times cheaper.

Hammam

A Turkish sauna isn’t as hardcore as a Russian one: the temperature is lower and the humidity is higher. But you spend more time in the sauna (15-20 minutes), and that’s more than enough to warm you up from the inside out. Nice experience.

Cats

You can’t talk about Istanbul without mentioning street cats. They are literally around every corner. Both tourists and locals feed them and the cats here are calm and confident. They allow themselves to be petted. They boldly and sometimes brazenly jump onto the laps of tourists sitting in street cafes and may even demand feeding!