Turkey- it's not just for Thanksgiving. (Day 1)

How do you eat an elephant? -One bite at a time. In order to record my voyages over the last week, I'm just going to take each day at a time.
First off, Istanbul is beautiful! The mosques here are done in a different style, with huge domes and minarets. Turkey is a very modern country, and  aside from a risk of getting sick from the water, I felt pretty much like I was in... well I was going to say Europe but I've never been there (except while in Turkey)... but it felt just very modern. I really felt like a tourist while there so I'm glad now to be back in Israel and feeling more like a student. However, while there it was great. Istanbul is huge with tons to do! Sometimes I felt like we were rushing all the time. We are the first group in many years to come to Turkey, the second group ever, and so we had some scheduling acrobatics to do, but in the end it was fun. We all arrived in Turkey after about a 2 hour flight after passing through Israeli security. Security in Israel is known to be the best in the world. They profile you, ask you difficult questions, but at least you don't have to take off your shoes! We got to Turkey and went to the Cartoon Hotel in Istanbul. Basically they've taken tons of Disney characters and made statues and pictures of them and put them up everywhere. Some of the rooms were funny because they took regular paintings and stuck some cut-outs of Donald Duck and other random characters in them. Our showers were really weird in that they had nice glass doors- that only covered half the tub! In several other hotels they also had curtains that only covered half. I never found out why that was. We had the best dinner ever on the roof of the hotel! There was several courses, and excellent food. This was probably the best food we had the whole trip, and we had lots of fun talking and eating together.