Pip: Simply O lands in Istanbul, and Adekunle Omotayo does what any sensible traveler does on arrival — immediately wonders if there is a bigger airport anywhere on earth.
Mara: This episode covers the full arc of that trip so far: the first overwhelming impressions of scale and arrival, and then the deeper, layered city that starts revealing itself the next morning. Let’s start with what Istanbul looks like up close, on day two.
Istanbul and Daily Life
Mara: The second day in Istanbul is where the city stops being enormous and starts being complicated — religious, historical, human, all at once, sometimes within the same block.
Pip: The post opens with a quiet moment that sets the whole tone. The context is simple: it’s early, the city is barely awake, and then — “I woke this morning to the call to prayer. It was still early, and for a few moments I simply listened.”
Mara: That stillness matters because what follows is anything but simple. The post traces how Istanbul has crossed religious and political boundaries across centuries — churches became mosques, mosques became museums, some became mosques again — and yet the country is a secular republic.
Pip: The word the post reaches for isn’t contradiction. It’s layers. And that framing does a lot of work — it’s the lens for everything that comes after, including a statue that turns out to carry real historical weight.
Mara: The statue depicts a man bent nearly double under an enormous load. Before learning anything about it, the post names him informally — the human camel. Then comes the actual history: he is a hamal, one of Istanbul’s traditional porters, who carried goods on their backs through streets too narrow for any other transport.
Pip: Sultans get palaces. Faith gets mosques. Conquest gets fortresses. And the people who actually kept the city moving get one bent figure in a city corner.
Mara: From there the post moves to the Bosphorus, where the scale shifts back outward. The strait connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, runs a two-layer current due to differences in salinity, and places Europe on one shore and Asia on the other — with about 97 percent of Turkey sitting on the Asian side.
Pip: Rumeli Hisarı, the fortress Sultan Mehmed II built before taking Constantinople, went up in four months. Thousands of men, day and night. That number lands harder than any date.
Mara: And then the pivot to the present: bridges now span what ferries once crossed, and Istanbul responded to the first Bosphorus bridge, opened in 1973, by producing considerably more traffic.
Pip: The post notes a local radio host called Istanbul traffic therapeutic. The author, who is from Lagos, is not entirely convinced therapeutic is the right word.
Mara: The two posts together — this one and the arrival piece — build toward the same conclusion: first impressions are invitations. Day two is where Istanbul starts making its case.
Pip: Which means the airport was just the opening argument.
Scale and Arrival in Turkey
Mara: Before the layers, there was the sheer size of the place — the arrival post captures what Istanbul feels like before you’ve had time to think about what it means.
Pip: The post leads with a single sentence that frames everything: “My first impression of Turkey was scale.” The airport, the roads, the bridges — all of it reads as supersized before the city has said a single word.
Mara: And then, above the traffic, something cuts through. The call to prayer — ancient words carried over a thoroughly modern city — lands as the post’s earliest real impression of Istanbul: old and new occupying the same space without apparent difficulty.
Pip: The hotel is 120 years old and only recently became a hotel. Before restoration it housed a curtain shop, small stores, someone who made spoons, and a repair shop for radios and remote controls. A luxury hotel today. A spoon maker yesterday.
Mara: That line earns its place. The post is honest that almost nothing of the landmark city has been seen yet — Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi, the Grand Bazaar are all still ahead. But first impressions are doing real work.
Pip: There is also rakı — ordered specifically because it was unfamiliar. Water turns it from clear to cloudy white, a transformation the post finds genuinely fascinating. The taste, which is very definitely anise, produces less enthusiasm.
Mara: The post closes with the city at night: a bridge lit up across the Bosphorus, its lights suspended between two continents. The conclusion is that first impressions are not conclusions at all. They are invitations.
Pip: Day two, it turns out, is where the city starts accepting its own invitation.
Mara: What stays with me is that word — layers. Not contradiction, not tension. Just depth accumulated over centuries.
Pip: And the hamal. Someone still had to carry the load. More from Istanbul, presumably, in the next episode.
