The party people hit the streets

On the night before our last night, we went to a trendy section of Istanbul, for stuffed baked potatoes and ice cream, overlooking the Bosphorus. Much tea was consumed. Then, most of the group piled back into the van, and back to the hotel.

A few of us set off with Huseyin, our erstwhile guide and cat-herder-in-chief, on foot. At about 11 pm, we cruised through the back streets of the old city, and off to a little place on the fifth floor of a corner building. It had a rooftop level view of the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia, and the waterfront.

This tiny place pioneered a dessert that was something like a cross between vanilla-rice pudding and creme brûlée, made from--of all things--chicken. It was yummy, if a bit wierd.

For reasons nobody could quite explain, it is now popular across Turkey (newspaper article in photo), and made the inventor a lot of money.

What struck me as interesting wasn't the chicken pudding, so much as the whole business of late night carousing in a Muslim country. There we were, bopping around Istanbul, eating ice cream and drinking tea like there was no tomorrow.

The view of seagulls circling in magestic floodlit flocks high above the (enormous) Blue Mosque was other worldly. The ships twinkled on the Bosphorus as we drank tea after tea.

The raucous conviviality was familiar from college days. The utter absence of (trés un-Islamic) intoxicants made it all kind of surreal.

We walked all the way back to the hotel, and I was in bed by 1am, marveling at the incongruity of it all.

Update: The hundreds of snowglobe-like white reflector birds swooping gracefully in the floodlights above the Blue Mosque may have been bats, not seagulls. It's the best theory I've heard yet for what these were. The floodlights only made them look white.