Just before booking our tickets to Brazil we found out that Turkish Airlines offers free hotel accommodation if wait time for the next flight is more than 10 hours in economy class. So we decided to use this offer and spend a few hours exploring Istanbul as flight from Vilnius was arriving 17:40 local time leaving us a couple good hours to do that. Flight to Sao Paulo was scheduled at 9:30 next morning. Another reason was that Turkish airlines was the cheapest option (475 EUR) and it’s also famous of great service. And that’s true, even from Vilnius the food service was perfect, better than any other airline I tried in my life.
Flight from Vilnius was delayed for an hour, so we landed later than expected, however all other procedures didn’t take that long, so by 20:00 we were ready to go.
Tip: If you ever need to use this service and find Turkish Airlines Hotel desk, just go right after you leave custom control. Desk is next to Starbucks.
Hotel was pretty good, 5min drive from airport with free shuttle. There is also a metro station next to it, so reaching the city center was easy. Metro costs 4 Turkish liras and takes ~35min to go to Aksaray metro station. From there it’s another 25-30min to walk the main street to all main sights like Blue mosque, Hagia Sophia etc. The metro runs until midnight, after that you would have to take taxi which might be expensive.
Our main goals in Istanbul were to see the Mosques, eat kebab and try some turkish sweets which are really good and we had a good opportunity to make sure of that once again. We managed to achieve all of these and by 23:30 we were back to hotel.
In general Istanbul left a really good impression: public transport is great, it feels completely safe and the city itself is beautiful. There were lots of people outside even if it was Monday night, but it might be that it just seemed to us so after living in Vilnius for a month which is not really crowded city. It was also pretty surprising to see kids in playgrounds even at 23:00 which would be impossible in Lithuania.
If you’re looking for some photos go here: Our Small Adventure on Facebook