Our 14 hour day at the Istanbul airport

Okay so continuing the previous Istanbul post, Michael reached out to a friend, Hamit, who lives in Istanbul. He brought us to a lovely restaurant overlooking some of the best views in the city for dinner. He said we needed to be Turkish for the night and proceeded to order 4 courses for each of us and said we weren't allowed to leave until we finished our plates. Holy moley it was delicious but so, so filling. I wish I could name each item we had but the spelling would be laughable. After dinner he drove us down by the Bosphorus bridge and talked about different Turkish traditions and characteristics that he liked and disliked. He was so kind it made the entire city feel like home. The next morning we ventured out on our own again to see the Galata tower, Grand Bazaar, and Spice market. Spoiler...if we love you you're getting tea and spices as gifts. We bought enough for years :) Something to take into account when travelling to Istanbul, the traffic and the taxi's ability to take advantage of jet lagged travelers. But hey, you live and you learn and lose a little cash along the way, all in the name of adventure right? So we went to bed early this night thinking we had to be up for our 6 am flight. Arriving at the airport two hours early we breeze through customs, security, check the monitor for our gate, and we do not depart until 6pm. Woops. We then attempt to change our tickets to an earlier flight and are gobbled up by the labyrinth of the Istanbul airport, go in and out of customs twice until deciding this was ridiculous and we could save the transfer money for another occasion turning today into an "airport day date." So here we are at bar number two, 9 am, cheers! Croatia we'll see you soon. ish.

Love,
A&M