June 2025 – Page 2 – Trums Travels

We were in Istanbul for six days and packed a lot in, too much to write about in a post or two so I am going to concentrate on photos so you can see what the city looked like and what we did. It was a great experience. Above photo I took in the Cisterns which was built in the 4th century to supply water to Constantinople (now known as Istanbul) It’s amazing to think it’s survived all these years and we were able to tour the underground cisterns. Interesting fact – part of the James Bond movie, From Russia with Love was filmed in the Cisterns.

It was cool down here and quite beautiful
A spooky shadow made from the statues

Some other things we saw were the Galata Tower, a couple of markets, a boat ride on the Bosphorous river, some mosques, Hagia Sophia, and lots of street walking. We saw a lot of cats on our street walks and a lot of other somewhat unusual things, it was an interesting place. We went to the Orient Express office but you had to have a ticket for the train to eat/drink at the cafe but at least we were there. At the Galata Tower, everyone was taking a photo of themselves with this particular cake in front of the Tower. The cake is Instagram famous and is called the San Sebastien cheesecake. I did not have any of the cake, it looked too gooey to me so Clint ate it and then took a photo of me (sans cake) in front of the Tower.

We also met up with friends for dinner (photo below). We had met Halim and Chris when we went to South East Asia with them earlier this same year. Halim is from Istanbul but they live in England. They were there on holidays and as we kept in touch with them, we were able to get together and had a fantastic dinner and a great time exchanging news. Halim did all the ordering as he could speak the language which was impressive indeed.