We just returned from a family vacation to Europe. Travel Notes are at the end of this posting.
The Fourth of July for me this year won’t be just any holiday — my parents will be over for dinner celebrating their 60th anniversary with us. Can you believe it? I’m 59 and they are married 60 years.
Is Elmo a spy? We were talking in the apartment and mentioning a particular product of face cream. A few minutes later, my wife who is watching Amazon prime, sees an ad for that exact product on the TV screen while pausing the movie. What’s going on here? Coincidence?
Let’s talk about cats for a moment. I know nothing about them. But I saw a cat chained to something next to a homeless man on the street. I can tolerate a lot of things I see and I’m not exactly an animal person, but something didn’t feel right about this. I felt this was cruel and I asked some “cat people” if I should report it. Let the cat decide if it wants to have a chain around its neck and stay with this guy walking around in blue tights and a burger king crown. I got different responses. One person said it was normal. One said it was cruel if the cat were trying to get away, but I figured the cat had long figured out that escape was futile. One said it was cruel and told me where to report it. But the winning argument in my opinion was this: If the cat were to leave the owner on the street, it would likely get killed quickly because cats on the streets don’t survive. If it were picked up and taken to a shelter, it would likely get killed there.
Back in my single days, I would go around on the eve of a Jewish holiday buying myself treats. It was bittersweet; I felt the pain of being alone and buying myself treats to make up for it. Nowadays, it’s quite nice that I have a wife who spends the holiday eve preparing treats for our household. This holiday we had a dinner feast including such treats as a blackberry jam pie and a pistachio apricot tart. Sometimes we think about what our lives would have been like if we had not gotten married to each other.
The US Supreme Court will someday come to regret its empowerment of Trump and its actions against abortions. One day the political tide will turn and it will be Democrats doing what they want, empowered by these same court decisions. Same thing in Congress. The Constitution wanted a system of checks and balances and what you have now is not that. It is not healthy to see a president steamrolling the rest of government. What’s interesting is that when you appeal to the public about democracy, people don’t care. They think it’s someone else’s problem and that it doesn’t matter to them. They care about making a living. They only care when they lose their rights and can’t get them back.
In Florida, real estate agents have been going off the hook with inquiries from New Yorkers after a socialist won the Democratic primary for NYC mayor. All in all, most important decisions about New York City are taken at the state level because the city lost the right to control many levers of power over itself after it was bailed out by the state in a city bankruptcy 50 years ago. Most of the things this person wants to do would be blocked by the governor of the state of New York. But it’s not a happy moment to have someone with his ideas and no experience in charge of a large city. Many Jews are uncomfortable with his stances on Israel, but many others don’t care. It is a testament to Israel’s current government that a person who wants to “globalize the intifadah” does not seem any more objectionable to them than a government in Israel with racists and Messianic religionists in cabinet positions and an army and vigilantes supported by the government beating up in Gaza and the West Bank and that does not recognize the religious rights of non-Orthodox Jews from America at Israeli sites of religious pilgrimage, all of which does not earn the respect of American liberal Jews. Wow, that was a mouthful. By the way, Israelis are already trying to take advantage of Mamdani’s pending election. They are preparing something called equity swaps for New Yorkers to trade properties in New York for vouchers to use to buy properties in Israel. It’s a great idea and one that will scare Florida; it will drive a lot of money out of New York and into Israel instead.
Why don’t we put turbins on Trump and Vance and call them the Taliban? They don’t believe in science or health. They are against progress and think that knowledge is both elitist and stupid. They are acting like total jerks in the world and I’m ashamed of our country because I can see everyone else passing us by and the Chinese laughing at us. Frankly, what’s the difference between MAGA and the Taliban?
I’d love to see some foreign leader being ambushed by Trump in the White House push back and say “I don’t need to sit here and listen to your bullshit.” That foreign leader would be the hero of the world that day and probably start a chain reaction of foreign nations putting Trump in his place.
I still view Trump as a great asset for Putin overseeing the decline of the US as a great power destroying the secret sauce that built the US’s power over the past 75 years. Trump is basically doing a Brexit and it took a full decade for Britain to realize it was a mistake. Putin, Xi and the leader of North Korea will all be around long after Trump is gone.
Anyway, in my last edition I said that if Trump bombs Iran, all else could be forgiven. When I was writing this draft, I was writing that Trump was looking pretty weak because on all fronts, he wasn’t getting anything done. I guess he put that to bed now for a while with the latest strikes on Iran. Trump is an unusual character and the kind of person that just might be counted to do it; I have said that he was the one president in 50 years that might have actually agreed to do this – this attack was the first time Israel and the USA both attacked another country working together, by the way. That’s pretty historic and gutsy, considering that nobody really resisted him and all the doomsday scenarios put out by the MAGA folk and Foreign Affairs columnists didn’t happen. I’m sure being called TACO by Wall Street traders (Trump Always Chickens Out) must have gotten to him too. He bombed Iran, so I gotta give him some credit here. Besides, after all the huffing and puffing in the first few months, he seems to be easing up on NATO and tariffs, and the tax bill that gets through the Senate will not be crazy. I predicted and continue to predict that within a year he will be more traditional Republican presidential. Trump will be a nuisance but at least he has some balls to take risk and lead by doing something not popular with his base. At least he could say that MAGA is what he says it is. I always like a leader who is not afraid to lead and bring others along.
Kids growing up read news on the internet and see enough stuff out there till they believe what they read or at least are influenced enough to reconsider what they think based on all the stories out there. One method is to turn everything into a complicated matter equating two points of view (and then debunking one side or the other). I assume that in another decade kids will say that the Holocaust is a complex issue that has two sides to it.
My daughter reports that a friend in Israel was in basic training which involved one session of firing a gun at a stationary target in the middle of a desert in daylight. A few days later she was given night-time guard duty at a base and given complex instructions about shooting a human that would not stop when asked. She was told to scream something like “walla walla” (or whatever) which is supposed to mean “stop” in Arabic, and then to shoot at the legs, then the torso, and then the head. Her response: From my one hour of basic training, I’m supposed to shoot moving humans in the middle of the night exactly as directed? Friends, if you want to know the shit-shows that militaries can be, there for your consideration is Exhibit A.
AI is becoming a joke. Kids don’t write papers and professors don’t grade them. Job hunters use AI to compose resumes that match job descriptions word for word and companies use AI to sift through the applications and even to interview candidates. I figure that AI will produce perfect kids and parent them and even do a better job having sex. Who needs us anyway?
I don’t know how effective this 12 day war was with Iran in terms of allowing Israelis to sleep a good night’s sleep and for how long (I figure 3-6 months, but the Iranians will have to be concerned now that proxy attacks will boomerang against them directly), but I’m certainly glad it happened because the situation of at-will missile attacks coming from Yemen and Iran was not offering Israeli citizens a bright future and Iran was threatening to disrupt the whole neighborhood if it got a bomb.
I am not very optimistic; I think Trump went for a ceasefire too quickly without getting Iran to agree to anything in return and that the present government will remain in place. From what I see so far, it looks like a repeat of Iraq after 1991. I think Iran will race for the bomb and in 6 months we’ll see rockets and fighter bombers in the air again. I wish the Israelis could live in an economy that doesn’t involve disruptions every 6 months, but I do not think it will happen even now. It’s not a place I recommend for investment.
If you’ve read the biblical Book of Esther, you read of a really weird plot from a crazy guy in Persia who wants to destroy the Jews along with a bit of an airhead King. It all comes crashing down on their heads. You couldn’t write a better story for Iran and Israel in terms of what happened this past year. Who would have thought that October 7th would have led to all this? Would Hamas or Iran or Hizbullah or Syria wanted to put that chain into motion if they could turn back the clock?
This 12-day war had its amusing moments. One was a story about Israelis bombing an army HQ killing hundreds of people who fled there after a bunch of military leaders had been killed. They all had went to their “secret” location to get away from the Israelis. I just could not believe what I was reading when I saw that story. Another story mentioned how Iranian pilots cut and ran when they saw Israeli planes flying. Israeli pilots were surprised that the Iranians didn’t even want to engage them. In retrospect, it is now clear why the Israelis were bombing in Syria and preventing Turkey or Russia from establishing any bases there. They wanted to keep the skies open for their flights to Iran since Saudi Arabia wanted to stay out and the Israelis were sympathetic to the Gulf states wanting to stay clear of Iranian retaliation. Phil Gordon, who I’ve mentioned before as Kamala Harris’s former national security advisor, would have been a disaster had Harris been elected. Just a few days before the US strike, he penned an oped in the NY Times saying that a military strike would not be a good idea and that negotiations were the way to go. Chuck Schumer and the Democrats also played this wrong; this is one time they should have backed up the president instead of crying foul over congressional approval for military acts. I have no doubt they would have supported the act had a Democratic president done it. Except that none would have.
The bigger question is what really happened? I was told that bombing the sites such as Fordow would not actually solve the problem. The Iranians moved the uranium to somewhere else and knowing where it is by itself will not solve the problem. It would take several rounds of bombings to actually destroy Fordow. You need commandos on the ground to make a difference. I don’t think the Israelis seriously expected to cause regime change as a result of aerial bombardment. That’s never worked before and the problem in Iran is that there is nobody to take over except the Revolutionary Guard. The Ayatollah is probably a lame duck at this point because all his proxies have been trashed and all that money was wasted for nothing, about half a trillion dollars on the nuclear program plus many billions supporting proxies – all wasted. They will make a dash for the bomb but the Israelis will probably notice. The Revolutionary Guard is most likely to take over the country and they might be just as bad or they might be more pragmatic. Tough to know, but it seems that the young ones are ideologically committed to continuing the Ayatollah’s program. A good number of leaders were eliminated but they have a deep bench of people to take over. The Iranians may well be fighting the Israelis again some time from now, but they had a rude awakening: When push came to shove, the Russians, Chinese and their proxies did nothing for them. All those deterrents and alliances came to nothing. They can face the Israelis all alone, and the Gulf countries don’t want to be disturbed and they don’t want to oppose Israel. It should be a sobering thought to Iranian officials and citizens; after nearly 50 years of wasting money and losing almost all their assets and keeping Iran as a third-rate country where the electricity keeps going out and offices and schools keep closing, they would be smarter to get with the program and move on from their holy war against Israel meant to distract the country from its real problems and to legitimize its rule, a country that Persian Iran has no quarrel with. Iran has a much brighter future if it would just move on.
I saw an interesting report just a few days after the Israelis starting bombing Iran that Israeli intelligence found Iran closer to the bomb than expected. Arab countries saw this report and urged the Israelis to get it over and done with. It may be one reason you heard not a peep of protest from Arab countries.
There are a few kernels of intelligence in the archives of Global Thoughts that should be recalled. A few years ago I asked a senior Israeli official (who at that time was out of office) if Israel could get the job done against Iran on its own. I had been wanting a definitive answer for the last 20 years. He said Yes, but that Israel was concerned about the day after and wanted to know that the US would cover its ass. Israel knew in 2021 when I asked that it could not destroy its nuclear program and that Iran would try to rebuild it after. It would need the US to keep the pressure on Iran, and it might not get it if it acted alone. Netanyahu performed according to this rule. The Israelis did 90% of the job making it easy for the US to do its part, and could have done more if they had to do it alone, but they had the US involved in the takeoff and also on the landing. This conversation was covered in Global Thoughts. Now the remaining question is what happens when Iran tries to race toward the bomb and Israel knows about it. Will Trump ignore it because he wants to declare victory and not let anything interfere with it? Or will they all be back at war in 6 months? Even if the Ayatollah falls, I’m not sure what comes next is better. Might be better to have a lame duck around. Problem is also that he may be making decisions based on faulty information being fed to him. Israel found out that part of what was behind Iran’s decision to attack it April 2024 was that people fed the Ayatollah a bunch of lies about what happened in Syria leading him to order the attacks against Israel.
One of the notes I wrote about a Washington Institute conference mentioned a military analyst stating that the Iranian air force is defunct and that Iran did not really have much ability to retaliate against an Israeli attack. I guess that turned out to be true.
The issue for Iran is that regime change was specifically not an objective of the attack. Nobody thought the regime would fall immediately upon attack. Things might change over the short to medium term though, but so far none of the fissures that you would need to see have occurred even though this regime is supported by only 20-30% of the Iranian population in the country.
Something to consider: General Kurilla (rhymes with gorilla), basically the guy who heads CENTCOM (The US military command for the Middle East), gets along really well with Israeli military officials and they wanted to do this attack before Kurilla’s commission in the Middle East ends at the end of the year.
Travel Notes Europe (Paris, Milan, Como, Istanbul)
This trip was to places I’ve been to several times but with family in tow. It was meant to be a capstone event after our kids have reached the end of teenagerhood. Elizabeth is about to turn 20 and Jeremy 18. Truth be told, family travel is not as much as fun as it was when the kids were smaller. This was no surprise to me; I’ve heard it from other parents. Now they have minds of their own and think we are too slow for them, especially Jeremy who wants to sneak out at midnight and ride e-bikes around a European city and wear what he wants to wear that makes us feel anxious. We won’t be doing much more of this, and I have no regrets that I “wasted” all that travel on them when they were younger – and cuter and didn’t complain when we took photos. I’m being unfair by lumping Elizabeth with Jeremy in this but at this point she probably has more fun hanging with friends than being with us, and Jeremy told me straight out that his favorite vacation ever was going to Boston for a weekend with his friends. So my advice is to take them while they’re young and not wait for them to grow up. On this trip, my son’s favorite moment in Paris with me was probably taking ice from the cold room, making snowballs and throwing them against the wall of the hotel’s steam room as hard as he could.
PARIS
Elizabeth was not meeting us for several days, so we were visiting Paris only with Jeremy. He had not been here for 10 years and wouldn’t remember any of it, but he didn’t seem to care much that he was here now or that he had us all to himself. His hotel room was his favorite site in Paris with the Do Not Disturb sign on. We flew to Paris on Air France whose food is so much better than the American carriers. The Charles De Gaulle airport (CDG) is huge and it’s not fun to connect to other flights there. It took us about half an hour just to walk out of there with carry-on bags. If you are in business class, you can get into the purple N1 line for passport control. You just have to know that. The ride into the city was 75 minutes on a weekday at lunch such as Coco Passion (88 Rue Saint-Louis on the Isle St. Louis) with the green awning next to the fruit store. I love having lunch at one of the cafes across the street from Berthillon on Isle St. Louis. The ice cream is the same and you have a menu of food besides and there is never a line. At Pont Nuef bridge, along the Seine River, there are 1 hour boat cruises (Vedettes de Pont Nuef and you can buy tickets online) and they go along the river down to the Eiffel Tower and up to the Notre Dame. We ate dinner at Le Tout Paris, which has an innovative and wide-ranging menu, on the 7th floor of the Cheval Blanc hotel right across from Pont Neuf bridge. The Cheval Blanc is in the 3rd arrondissement about 10 minutes walk from the Louvre, Line 1 metro and right at the Line 7 metro. If you walk across the Pont Nuef bridge which is right in front of the hotel, you can cross into the St. Germaine area which is a very student-oriented area. If you like being in this part of Paris, the Cheval Blanc is a flawless hotel but there are other options if you like being in the St. Germaine area such as the D’Aubusson which we came across but did not inspect. After dinner you can walk to the Louvre and see the pyramid at night, but not after 11pm in June.
In search of at least a few moments of art, we visited L’Orangerie. By 11 in the morning it’s crowded and you can’t really stand there and look at the art. Every time I walk along the Champs D’Ellyses to the Arch de Triumph, I underestimate how long it will actually take to get there. Allow about 45 minutes from Place D’Concorde. Getting to the top of the Arch D’Triumph is not that hard and it does not take that long to get in if you have tickets in advance. From a hotel concierge, you can buy open tickets for a certain day, but online you buy timed tickets. My wife went to this place to make her own pocket book (MiniMe Paris) about twenty minutes walk from the hotel, and that was probably the highlight of her visit to Paris. And she made a really nice one to go out at night with. We bought some pastries at Stohrer, the city’s oldest pastry shop, located about ten minutes walk from the Centre Pompidou. I liked their éclair, black forest cake and babka. Their permanent exhibits are already closed and will remain so for several years of renovation. We had dinner at a bistro in the St. Germaine area called Trouver Huguette, which was typically French and had a proprietor with an interesting personality. He came over to the tables, made dirty jokes, flattered the ladies, etc. We visited the Eifel Tower. Having lift tickets in advance is essential. Takes about 90 minutes to enter, go up and exit if you go to the top. The lines are not so bad but it takes a while with 4 elevator rides and 2 security checks. I wanted to see the Trocadero area nearby but that will have to wait till the next trip because we ran out of time.. It took an hour to drive to the airport at about 2pm on a Sunday. At CDG airport on departure, the security lanes move well, the flight left on time with ITA Airways (what used to be known as Alitalia), and they served pizza and dessert on board. But no WiFi. It’s just about an hour flying time to Milan’s Linate airport, which is much closer to the center of Milan than Malpensa.
MILAN
Elizabeth will meet us in Milan having finished her year abroad in Israel. Luckily, she will leave the country just 3 days before Israel attacked Iran and all the airspace there was closed, trapping a few hundred thousand people for several weeks.
It’s about a 30 minute ride from Linate airport to the center of Milan and the Duomo cathedral which is at dead center. Linate is a convenient airport used for flights within Europe to main destinations such as Paris. Most flights use Malpensa airport which is a good 45 minute drive from city center late night. Just off the piazza is the Galleria which is an indoor pass-thru area with lovely decoration and shops. Round the corner from the Piazza Duomo and just off the Galleria is the Park Hyatt Hotel. It’s best asset is its location and its breakfasts but otherwise it’s pretty expensive for what you get in a room and you might as well pay less to get pretty close to what you get there or go further away from the center of town. Even after 24 hours and calling in some help, we couldn’t figure out how to work the lights. Consider the Straf Hotel (a Marriott property) just off the piazza Duomo. We used to stay there years ago when it was known as the Casa Swizzara. Alas, that hotel along with our favorite restaurant Bruno’s are now history. When I was here on our honeymoon, we liked Bruno’s so much we ate there 3x. The Grand Hotel Duomo also no longer exists; it was right on the piazza Duomo and is now an H&M store. Milan has become a zoo with tourists and everywhere you go there are long lines and crowds. Forget about getting a gelato at 4 in the afternoon and almost all the places you see are the same chains you see back in NYC. We took a walking tour that included the rooftop spires of the Duomo and a visit to Castle Sforza which is nice to see from the outside. We visited the inside of La Scala opera house. We visited Pinoteca Ambrosiana which has a beautiful old indoor library where they were exhibiting manuscripts of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci of his various inventions. The shopping street Monte Napolean is really not worth the ten minute walk. It’s all international chains and it’s not a particularly pretty street. The Rinascente department store is right near the Duomo and it’s not what it used to be since it is mainly international brands and no housebrands. It was crowded with tourists paying very high prices for things. Has a nice food court at the rooftop level with views of the Duomo. We went to a kosher restaurant for a meat dinner called Ba Ghetto which is a few stops away on the Line 1 metro right from the Duomo and then a ten minute walk to 45 Via Sardegna. Even the metro here is designed with fashion in mind with cool looking seats and fashionably dressed people riding it. Or you can take an Uber ride 20 minutes. The restaurant was actually rather good; kosher food around here has vastly improved. This is part of a chain of kosher restaurants around Italy that someone thought to create. The main tourist attraction in Milan is the Last Supper. Tickets need to be bought a few months in advance. You can try getting high priced tickets through a hotel concierge but it’s not easy at all. There is a website that purports to sell official tickets 3 months in advance but you don’t know when the tickets will go on sale and they seem to be gone within minutes. The best way to do this is to buy a ticket on a tour such as Viator (just look up Last Supper Tickets on Google) for about $100 a ticket. The tours start there and after half an hour, you can just leave. It’s something to see, but my son couldn’t care less and I didn’t bother to get him a ticket. He did good shopping at OVS, an Italian chain selling cool clothes at reasonable prices. As one who has been coming to Milan for 40 years, it’s just not compelling to be here. We came here to meet up with Elizabeth and then to continue to our next destination, Lake Como.
COMO
It’s an hour ride to Como from Milan. We would have saved 100 Euros by reserving the ride on Uber the night before. I didn’t think the price would go up so much the next day if we bought it on the spot. We went to Villa D’Este, a resort on the lake that is one of the few real resorts in Europe. I was here with my mother and aunt, and then with my wife on honeymoon, and now here with our kids. For me this was a real coming home event. The resort did not disappoint; they upgraded us to the presidential suite, although truth be told, the kids had the better bathroom. Jeremy loved pizza by the lake. We took a boat ride for an hour. The lake is somewhat choppy so you don’t really need a speed boat here. The best views on the lake from the hotel side are at the end of the day. Dinner on the verandah lakeside is beautiful followed by music and dancing on the terrace till midnight, just like it was 20 years ago. The hotel has beautiful gardens and lots of facilities. You could stay here 1 or 2 nights; the concierge said the average stay is 3-4 nights. We went on a hike overlooking the lake from up high. It was very hot and we ended it early but got the best parts in. On Wednesdays there is a flea market in the village of Cernobbio which is where the hotel is located. Karen found nice clothes from the back of several trucks. The optical shop in town is now run by the children of the previous owner and they are personable and have great styles of eyeglasses. Next door is a good gelato shop. The Giordano hotel in town is a good place to have lunch at a cheaper price. We took an e-bike tour across the nearby border into Switzerland. It was an OK tour but not particularly interesting, but our guide lost us in the middle because he went very fast and didn’t look back to keep tabs on us. I fell crossing the border back into Italy over several bumps I hadn’t noticed; good to wear a helmet. Glad the optical store was open till 7; I arrived just in time to have them fix up my frames. The second dinner at the hotel was at a Japanese-Italian fusion restaurant which was surprisingly well liked. There was a wedding with an Azerbaijani couple and band below. It was an interesting dinner. This hotel has clientele from all over the world and it was nice to see that they are upholding their traditions and not turning into some chain property. You still wear a jacket to dinner and maybe soon even a tie. The evening photos on property are beautiful and it’s nice to look out your window at 7am and seeing the uniformed people making ready for breakfast along the lakefront. We noticed from the boat that the Mandarin Oriental was on the other side of the lake and looked like a nice property. I had been recommended another place (Grand Hotel Tremezzo) but it was a half hour further away from Milan and I didn’t want to go that far. The Villa D’Este has a reputation as being somewhat snooty but we didn’t notice any of that on this visit. From the hotel, it is a 45 minute drive to the airport on a weekday morning. Malpensa airport works well and they now use kiosks for the tax-free refunds instead of making you get a customs stamp and stand in a long line. Turkish airlines has a nice lounge but you have to do a lot of walking in this airport. Our 2 hour flight to Istanbul was quite nice and here the WifI works. This airline is big on food too.
ISTANBUL
Istanbul airport is also large and a walkathon to get out of. Because we had to wait a while for our luggage, VIP arrival service is not really useful unless you are carry-on only. Transfer to our hotel in the old city “Sultanahmet” district took about an hour. We went straight to sightseeing, because the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque close at about 7 to visitors. Hagia Sophia requires a timed ticket which you should buy in advance. They created a very nice visitors gallery on the 2nd floor and you get really nice views of the mosque below and exhibits about the history of the site. The Blue Mosque is free. The internet listings showing that the Underground Cisterns were closed for renovation were outdated and the site is now open again. You can also see the site at 7:30 in the evenings and they light up the place with colored lights and it’s a great site to see. All of these sites are just off the main square in that district, about 2 minutes walk from the Four Seasons Sultanahmet. The Grand Bazaar is also a few minutes walk from that square. If you go to the Bazaar, you should do your research in advance and know which shops you want to see, otherwise, you will just walk around aimlessly and feel that what you see is a bunch of crap with no prices so you have no idea what you are paying for. The hotel is a boutique kind of place centrally located in this district and I recommend staying in this district for a night so that you get the vibe of the old city, especially at night when you can walk on the square and see all the sites lit up. The next morning we went to Topkapi Palace which is also just off the main square. That site is huge and takes a good 2 hours to see. The site is cool because it was an Ottoman-style palace of the sultans and looks different from other palaces you would see elsewhere. The Topkapi palace tickets we could buy at a kiosk upon entry; if you go with a guide, you have priority entrance. At 11am on Friday it was not that crowded. The 7 Hills Hotel is across the street from the Four Seasons and has a rooftop restaurant and terrace with great views of the old city and the Bosphorus waterway behind it. It’s a great photo taking place. We liked the garden restaurant of our hotel and ate all 3 meals there over our 24 hour visit. It was just easier using the hotel as a base rather than using the limited time we had to figure out restaurants in the neighborhood.
Midafternoon about 24 hours after our initial arrival we transferred to our other hotel, the Ciragan Palace, which was along the Bosphorus in another part of the city. It takes about 45 minutes to do the transfer in a taxi which is much cheaper than a hotel car. Generally I found traffic to be less than I feared, except in certain places, such as the street in front of the Ciragan Palace heading toward Ortikoy (a night-time district) anytime 3pm or later. At the Ciragan Palace which is a Kempinski property, they have excellent facilities including also a huge outdoor pool and a breakfast fit for a Sultan with 3 rooms of food in it. We took a boat cruise arranged by Tours By Locals along the Bosphorus for 2 hours which is about what you need to cover the area. Using TBL is much cheaper than getting a hotel yacht plus you get an English speaking guide. You need a large boat on these rough seas or you might get seasick. The hotel had lots of weddings going on and it was a zoo with bands that looked like they belonged in the Super Bowl Halftime Show. After a mediocre dinner the first night (and walking out of the famous Tugra restaurant because of noise from a wedding), we ate out at a restaurant called Ruby’s in Ortikoy the second night with better food for 40% less. The main site in this part of town is the Dolmabache Palace whose highlights are the Grand Ceremonial Room and the Crystal Staircase. This was a more western-looking palace built by a Sultan who was more inspired by Europe than the East. This site requires 90 minutes. Buy water on the street before the entrance or bring a bottle with you. A few minutes walk from here is a funicular that will take you right up to Taksim Square, which is the central focalpoint of Istanbul. The main shopping street starts at the square on the left side and goes quite far. We went to a restaurant that offers lots of puddings such as rice and chocolate (taksim Sutis), and then bought some chocolates at a local chocolatier on the street “Tarihi Beyoglu Cikolatacisi”, and Turkish delight (Ali Muhiddin Haci Bekir) and made our way down the street toward the Pera Palace hotel which I had stayed at 25 years ago and wanted to see how they totally redid the place beyond recognition. It is now a very high end property; it was a dump when I was there. The Galatia tower was at the end of the walk and it is all lit up at night. The area also has Jewish sites of interest such as a synagogue. There we caught a taxi back to the hotel.
On a Sunday morning it is an easy 35 minute ride to the airport and again we used a taxi arranged by the hotel (we needed a van since we had some checked luggage) instead of a hotel car at about half the price. Check-in is a bit of a procedure so you might come early especially if you check luggage. Turkish Airlines has a beautiful lounge which is one of the best I’ve seen. People were lining up to get fresh flatbreads and burgers. Jeremy was quite upset when we were served rice and beans on the plane and the people across the aisle were getting huge lamb shanks. The flight home to NYC was about 9.5 hours. Turkish Business class has great food but middle seats if you are in the middle section (2:3:2). Unless you are sitting with your family, it’s not very private on board although there is plenty of leg room. For a day flight home, it’s fine. If I were returning to the Bosphorus area of Istanbul, I would look at the Four Seasons Bosphorus hotel (there are 2 Four Seasons hotels in Istanbul) if it were during wedding season (June-September) because the Ciragan Palace was too noisy and areas were cut off because of weddings. The Ritz Carlton is up on a hill somewhere in the middle of nowhere near the Intercontinental and maybe the Hilton; the Shangrila is not well located. The Mandarin Oriental is not in a bad place along the water. I never saw where the newly opened Peninsula was.
I’ve been to Istanbul a few times so there was no surprise for me. Karen and the kids had expected it to be more like Cairo – more dirty and chaotic. It’s not. The kids felt safe and welcome and look forward to going back. I think 3 nights was enough and we did not need more time, and splitting the visit between the two districts was the right way to maximize our time and get both vibes of the city. This is not a big shopping city. We did our best to ignore all the bad news back in America and in Israel, which is only just over an hour away by air. The war with Iran had kicked off pretty intensely by the time we got to Istanbul but we didn’t see it except for one guy in the street wearing a Free Palestine shirt. People we spoke to were upset about the economy and the fact that their currency has lost a lot of its value over the past few years. I don’t know if its leader Erdogan would survive a fair election but it helps him that he locks up all his opponents.
Google Translate is really cool. You can take a photo of a door sign or a menu or whatever and tell the app to translate it, as long as you know which language you are actually trying to translate.
Anyway, that’s this trip. Notes are shorter because I’ve been to all these places before and the whole trip was all of 9 nights. We covered a lot of ground quickly. Milan has really changed a lot over 40 years; Paris still has a beautiful vibe about it. Como’s Villa D’Este upholds its standards and Istanbul is a great exotic city and an appropriate place to end a grand tour of Europe, and Turkish Airlines is a cost-efficient way to get home with a 2pm flight from Istanbul that lands at JFK at 6pm.
