Highway to Istanbul. Donkey-driven carrages. A busdriver misses his exit. With elegance he solves the problem, making a 3-point turn and blocking the highway. The fact that we are still 60 km outside of Istanbul doesn't hold these thousands of houses back from covering the coast. We are thankfully dropped off by our german-iraqi chauffeur before we get totally sucked up by this massive 16-million city.
We find the houses properly organised along straight streets towards the coast, each one with an obligatory street-portier and an own "village"-name. Some scary dogs and a nice chat with the locals later we find ourself somehow in front of a delicous dinner in a villa eating 9-month-long sun-dried beef and drinking wine. Enjoying this very nice welcome to turkey we fall into our first bed in 3 weeks.
Being even accompanied to the busstop - which pops out to mean to go to the highway and stick your thumb out to stop a minibus - we get highly excited about turkish hospitality.
After 2 hours driving with the bus in an endless city i am convinced to have seen for the first time in my life a million people. This IS in fact a hell of a lot of people! Turkey's population growth - being almost as high as india's - is about 1%/a. One can indeed feel this in every corner. And we are heading towards the center of its megapole.
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