Day 2 in Istanbul. Saturday. Actually I had three todos on my schedule: Visit the Grand Bazaar, attend a LIONS/LEO activity in a shopping mall in the eastern part of Istanbul and in the evening meet LEOs in the northern part of the european part of Istanbul. So let’s get up early and experience the real!
The Grand Bazaar
Close to my hotel – maybe just five or six minutes of walk – there it was: the entrance of Grand Bazaar. A place, where around 4.000 little shops offer various goods. Everything from spices to carpets to clothes and faked Michal Kors accessoires.
Carousel Shopping Mall
After walking around in the Bazaar for around two hours I took a taxi to the Carousel Shopping Mall where I had an appointment with LEO of district 118-E there. The taxi ride took me around 25 minutes for 14 km and was actually pretty cheep. Something like 20€ or so, which is pretty good for such a long ride. Well. When I arrived at the shopping mall I tried to explore the place a bit. I found the space where LIONS set up their information desks, but no LEOs in sight. So I had some lunch and waited a bit. After some time the space got crowded and as well LEOs appeared 🙂 I joined and got to know them. Unfortunately I could not stay longer than three hours so I could not meet a lot of people. But you can find more pictures about their activity on their facebook-page
Fun evening
At 16:00 I had an appointment with LEOs from Zeugma Leo Kulübü (118-Y). They planned to visit „Dialogue in the Dark“ with me, but unfortunately the tickets were sold and no chance to get some. So what to do with a tourist? Right: show him the beauty of the city as well as the real face of Istanbul. We toured through the famous as well as „secret“ parts of new part of Istanbul as well as we took a ferry to the asian part of the town later. What a feeling. Crossing the Bosporus to another continent! Hell yeah, and I enjoyed this crazy and crowded beer-pubs and the people there so much. We had such great fun, met superb people and really enjoyed this night so much!
Thank you for that tour my friends!