ISTANBUL TRAFFIC IS A NIGHTMARE

I had promised to meet up with Eylem Abla at Sisli Mado Café that night. Eylem abla was a close family friend of ours that used to live in Sydney 8 years ago. She decided to move to Istanbul 8 years ago to start a new life. Hence she inspired me as 8 years later she was still here.

It was around 5:30pm hence peak hour traffic when I walked out of Sude Konak. I jumped into a cab and it took approx 20 mins to go around the block. The cab driver was pretty frustrated by this time. I was on the edge of my temper as well following the whole sim card slash ATM incident a few hours back.

My cab driver stupidly decided for some reason to cut in front of a moving tram. It wasn’t even our way for a start. The worst part was the traffic in front of us was bummer to bummer. Hence our taxi couldn’t move forward. We were trapped from all sides. The tram slammed on its breaks but still lightly hit the side of our taxi, being the side I was sitting on. This is when I lost my temper and screamed my head off while opening the other side of the taxi door. I got out of the taxi, slamming it shut. The fuck wit was about to kill me. If the tram couldn’t stop it would have dragged the taxi along the tram tracks.

Trying to calm my nerves down, I managed to convince myself to jump into another taxi. It took me over an hour to get to Sisli compared to 15 minutes.

I found Eylem abla sitting at Mado Café. The poor thing was stressed because the waiters have been harassing her for over an hour to order something.

We grabbed a quick coffee before her hubby picked us up to take us to Taksim. We arrived in Taksim to have dinner and catch up on 2 years.

Hence it was my first visit to Taksim this year…