About
Welcome to Istanbul Trails – your personal Istanbul city trip & expat guide.
What is Istanbul Trails?
Istanbul Trails is a blog (weblog) dedicated to helping people making the most of their stay in Istanbul – whether you’re here as a tourist on a city trip or as an expat for a more elaborated visit.
You will find:
- Extensive coverage (including picture and video galleries) of all the spots worth visiting.
- Up-to-date information on the latest opening hours, taxi fares, customs, etc. A prerogative printed guide books don’t have.
- Listings of my favorite hotels, restaurants, cafés, bars and nightlife venues – all personally reviewed.
- A collection of tips & tricks – inside information if you will – that I have collected over the years.
Who am I?
At the end of 2004 I set sail for Istanbul for a sabbatical year off from work. Why Istanbul one may wonder? Back in 2001 I visited this cosmopolitan for the first time and I was immediately charmed by its beauty, its cultural inheritance, and the hospitality of the people and last but not least the melodious language of the inhabitants.
Not that I was acquainted with the latter, on the contrary! Although it sounded (and still does) as music to my ears, it proved to be one of the biggest hurdles I had to take. Aside from all the shortcomings I encountered along the way, I gradually fell more and more in love with this city where continents meet. Someone once told me:
Istanbul is like a drug: when you have it, sometimes you consider to get rid of it. But when you don’t have it, you desperately want it back!
In a way he was right! So I took one more year off from work to explore this ‘wisdom’ in depth. A year in which I met the love of my life, hence made me decide to permanently relocate to Istanbul.
It goes without saying that these events (marriage, in-laws from different countries/cultures, house hunting, job hunting, etc.) together with my previous ‘tourist’ experiences resulted in an invaluable amount of information. A treasure that I want to share with the world to make the life of future tourists, expats or immigrants easier.
Of course you don’t want to miss a thing!
To get the most out of Istanbul Trails and keep up with the latest posts, I highly recommend that you subscribe to our blog. It’s for free and takes less than a minute! This way you don’t have to surf to the site multiple times a day to check whether or not a new article has been posted. As soon as new material has been published, you will be notified automatically.
For those among you who are familiar with RSS feeds, you can subscribe by clicking on the 
Subscribe icon at the top right of the blog, or alternatively on Articles via RSS at the top of the left sidebar.
How to Subscribe to Istanbul Trails Via E-mail?
If you are not into RSS feeds, no need to panic. There is still the good ‘old’ e-mail, so you can subscribe to our e-mail notification service! Also free, quick and painless.
Just click on 
Articles via Email, fill in your e-mail address and press the Subscribe button.
A new window will appear, asking you to copy some random letters to prevent spam. Once done correctly, you’ll get a confirmation mail from noreply+feedproxy@ google. com, with in the from-field: ‘FeedBurner Email Subscriptions‘. Be on the lookout for it, so it doesn’t end up in your spam folder! That mail contains a link to activate your subscription. Click on it and you’re all set. From that moment on, you will be notified by e-mail as soon as I publish a new article. And only then will you receive an e-mail. I can assure you that there will be absolutely no spam messages sent out!
Welcome to Istanbul Trails!
To enhance the look of a blog, there are many free WordPress design templates available, but I chose a design called Thesis. There is a one-time small fee to be paid, but the support is great, the updates free and the customisation options endless. You can check out the Thesis live demo here
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