Back to School
On Monday the kids headed back to the Bridges School in Istanbul. We dropped the kids in the library, tried to get them hooked up to the internet and Noah’s computer just got right on, but Drew’s computer wouldn’t connect. Drew is the one who really needed to have her computer connect to keep up on her geometry, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Ilise and I left the kids at the school and headed to Ortakoy, an area of Istanbul on the European side of the Bosphorus with excellent views of the Asian side of the city.
We took a taxi from the school and he dropped us off in a touristy area that had lots of shops and about 10 of them were selling stuffed baked potatoes. These weren’t any stuffed potatoes, they were “mutant” potatoes according to Ilise. They were HUGE. We filled ours with cheese, butter some yogurt, olive past, mushrooms and a few other goodies. The weather man said warm weather on Monday, no rain and a nice day. He LIED! We got to school and the clouds came and we got to Ortakoy and the drizzle started. We took our “lunch” down toward to water, while it was drizzling, and ate it while watching some ships pass by. We were told by Hemi, the husband we met at Friday’s Seder, that this was a must see area of the city. Since it was rainy and overcast I don’t believe we got the full effect.
We started to walk up the Bosphorus, which is what Hemi told us to do. He said that their is a really nice walk for about 5-6 km. We started walking and with the rain couldn’t find the nice area of the walk, so we headed back toward the area we came and decided to head back to the subway to go back to school to pick up the kids. We still had close to two hours as the kids decided to stay after school to practice with the basketball team. So, we asked a few locals how to get to the Metro and they told us to take a bus. We said no, we wanted to walk. They started laughing, saying you can’t walk there. We then found someone else who also told us to take the bus as well, but finally gave us directions if we wanted to walk. We spent the next hour walking, with a large portion of the walk straight up a small mountain. Did I say that Istanbul is really hilly? Well, we found one of them on this walk.
Ilise and I powered through the walk and got to the top of the hill after pulling off a few layers of clothing. We found the Metro and headed to pick up the kids. We got there about 4:30 and the kids were just finishing their basketball practice. We decided to head back to the apartment from there, grab a cooked chicken for dinner and have a quiet night. We also planned a down day for today. We were told by another world traveling family that for every two days you are touring or active you need a down day, and we had not had a down day in about a week. We were all pretty tired and decided to relax today. Today I did some more exploring but will share that in a separate post.
‘Til next time …..
Larry Kesslin 