We have an apartment now (since Wednesday)! And internet (since about an hour ago)! Both were a bit of a struggle with various false-starts and side-winding adventures. Anya and I are now located in a district called "Sakanat Maadi," which is a nice tree-filled suburb south of the city center. The areas further away from the Metro are very "liberal"... there are a lot of foreigners living there, and both the foreigners and the Egyptians have a very different dress code (shorts seem acceptable for guys and tanktops of various kinds acceptable for girls). There's also a lot less harassment. Just as I found in Medinat Nasr two years ago, the fact that there's no chance that a tourist would ever visit the area means that people assume you're a resident. Life is certainly more pleasant here, and the metro ride is very manageable.
In any case, I now have a chance to catch up on the blog, which I will do bit by bit to avoid super-long blog posts. For now, it's picture time! Thanks to Stacey, my new friend from the trip who is now in Kazakhstan doing research, I have pictures from our foray into Istanbul. Istanbul now ranks as one of my favorite cities, and I'm definitely going back. It's like San Fransisco with medieval architecture!
This last shot is the "San Fran" one... except there's a beautiful out-door teashop that goes along this hill.
Matthew, We loved Istanbul. We were only there 2 days at end of Greek trip. Had a hotel between Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque. Wish the trip had been longer, but we had already been away 2 weeks. I need to figure out ho0w to join this.
ReplyDeleteJerry
Hey Jerry! Thanks for the comment!
ReplyDeleteI can't wait to get back to Istanbul and actually explore the Hagia Sophia etc. It's also just such a pleasant city overall with really nice public transportation. It's one of those few really big cities where I think the quality of life would be very high. Not to mention all the Mediterranean vacation spots you could get to from there!