Tea on the Ferry, leaving Asia...for Europe

In the photos above we are drinking tea on the ferry from Üsküdar, the very normal non touristy area in Istanbul on the asian side where the hotel for the conference was...to the Eminönü pier on the European side where many of the famous historic sites are, mainly in the Sultanahmet area. The Turkish people drink this tea all day long. I even saw bus drivers in Üsküdar stopping to have an afternoon break right on the curb, with a nice relaxing glass of tea in their hands. Also delivery guys bustling trays of it to shopkeepers through the Grand Bazaar somehow managing not to drop the trays. I found it lovely that even on the ferry you get your tea in a delicate glass with a pretty saucer rather than a paper or plastic cup. At the first hotel I had quite a headache throughout the day because I drank only tea at breakfast. There was no coffee there. When Luis' meetings were over, we planned to cross the Bosphorus to the Sultanahmet area where we would stay in a little hotel there to see historic sites over the weekend. According to the one of the organizers of the meetings it would be possible for us to simply take the ferry over drop our suitcases at the hotel and take the ferry back to join everybody for dinner in a restaurant. Finding the hotel turned out to be more complicated than expected and we weren't able to make it back to Üsküdar in time for dinner. Once we found the hotel we ate dinner at a very nice restaurant where we both had delicious vegetarian kebaps and apple tea. We heard more English than we've heard in a long time, since we were in a very touristy spot and we enjoyed sharing stories with a neurologist and his wife, from Oklahoma, and a Scottish man and a man from Liverpool at another table. The neurologist was funny and had a lot to say. It was both hilarious and embarrassing when he found out that the man next to him was from Scotland. He immediately started asking him about his opinion on Sean Connery and the conversation turned to the James Bond movies. The Scottish guy took it all in stride and we learned that the new James Bond movie coming out will have scenes from Istanbul. Istanbul was also one of the locations in "From Russia with Love," one of the silliest movies I have ever watched the first half of. But, there is nothing like a motor cycle chase scene through the winding, narrow passages of the Grand Bazaar with tables of colorful scarves and pottery crashing everywhere and angry carpet salesmen shouting with their fists in the air. I look forward to watching Daniel Craig hopefully live that fantasy in the next movie...