Over the past two weeks, I’ve had two amusing encounters with the German police.

On one day, I was riding my bike along my usual route. It turned out that part of the road was closed due to construction, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it. After riding about 100 meters, bang!, a female police officer stops me and starts speaking in German. I ask her to switch to English, and she calmly explains that due to the roadworks, you’re not allowed to ride there and shows me where I can take a detour.

On August 19th, there was a supermoon, and I wanted to photograph it in Treptower Park. The idea was to capture the moon behind the Soviet War Memorial. So I went there during the day to scout out the best spot. I should mention that my photography gear isn’t the most professional, but it might look that way from a distance: tripod, camera, 300mm lens. About five minutes later, two police officers approached me and started asking what I was doing there and if I was shooting for commercial purposes. I explained about the supermoon and that at most, I’d post the photo on my little blog. The guys said they had no issues with what I was doing but warned me that the monument and park are under Russian control, and if “they” (it wasn’t entirely clear who exactly) don’t like my photos, “they” might ask me to delete them. I hope it won’t come to that :/ Below is the supermoon photo I took that evening.

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!

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