I loved to hear the sound of the Muzzein chanting the call to prayer, and I really love the custom of removing your shoes before entering a person's home. (I often have to fight with my roommates about this, in the US, as I also prefer to have no shoes on the floor inside, but it is not an American custom, so it is difficult, living in the US.) I also love Turkish music, which, happily, has not yet been completely crowded out by American music, as in other parts of the world. Music seems, to me, to be more important in general to Turkish people than it is to most Americans. I really like that.
I also loved the food. There was no need to worry about pork, and I even did not see any shell fish while I was there, so keeping minimally kosher was pretty easy. I have already gotten used to eating eggs and yogurt with olives for breakfast in the morning, and continue the habit now that I am back home! Also, I felt very safe in Istanbul. No matter where I was, no matter what time of day, there was always the feeling that people were around, and nothing felt menacing (ok, except for the guy in the tea shop who would not take no for an answer as he tried to invite me to dinner -that was scary).
The nicest thing about Turkey is how everyone says "If you share tea with someone, you will be friends for 40 years." And they offer you tea, if only you will take the time to talk with them, listen to their story, learn about their lives, and join in their lives. Turkish culture is so wonderfully open, hospitable, and honest. When you meet a Turkish person, the very first questions he will ask you are how old are you, are you married, do you have children, where are you from -the very questions we wait weeks in the US to ask, for fear of offending each other. And, contrary to popular American opinion, at least in Istanbul, women are not second class citizens. I watched in amazement as a woman yelled at a man on a public bus for talking on his cell phone. As everyone on the bus watched, he put his phone away, and sat down, with an apologetic look on his face!
It is also so nice to see fruit stands everywhere. And I could ask people to hold my food while I went to the restroom and no one looked at me funny, as in the US, since Turks also have the custom of not carrying food into a restroom. By the way, restrooms in Turkey are generally cleaner than in the US, but there is also generally an attendant outside waiting to be paid.
Another nice thing is that the custom of walking guests to the door, and even down the street, is universal there, where it is only sporadically practiced here. Just like Jewish tradition, which specifies that you should always accompany your guest down the street aways, or even to the town line. One person I had just met actually waited with me at the bus stop and saw me onto my bus!

Ok, now for specific details:
When I arrived in Istanbul, I took the HVAS bus to Taksim, where my first hostess met me at the bus stop and took me to her apartment. Did I mention that many apartments have heated floor tiles on random parts of the floor? This would, of course, be useless if people wore shoes indoors...

My first hostess is a nice teacher from Austria. She showed me around Taksim, the neighborhood of Istanbul which used to be the posh European section. Now it has lots of shops, and long interesting street, sort of like Las Ramblas in Barcelona, but different. :-)
My second hostess is a wonderful, wonderful person who, despite being a day host, invited me to stay overnight with her family. I noticed that everyone seems to have hot-water-on-demand heated water -a much more sensible alternative to large hot water tanks (mostly done in the US). We had a wonderful dinner, and talked for hours. I was not able to go to Shabat services due to lack of sufficient pre-planning on my part, but dinner and conversation with my host family more than made up for it.
Over the weekend, I attended a large Servas meeting in Bursa, where I got to meet lots of Servas hosts, and a few travellers, from Turkey. It was great! We sang, ate, drank tea, danced, and toured Bursa together. Bursa is a nice little city, with a fascinating village on a mountain. I really felt comfortable in Bursa, and prefered it to the hustle and bustle of Istanbul. We saw many beautiful mosques, a puppet show, a museum dedicated to silk and weaving, and a large bazzar, among other places. The photos should be up on the Servas Turkey web site very soon, along with some video!
Back in Istanbul, I stayed with a host in Mecidiyekoy, a residential neighborhood north of Taksim. He gave me great directions and several maps, which helped me to take the bus down to Sultanahmet, the old town, where most of the well-known tourist attractions are. After taking the bus through Taksim to Eminonu, I got off and took the tramway to the stop before Sultanahmet, where I met a very nice shoe shine gentleman named Hassan, who works in front of the Aya Sofia Pension , who watched my food for me after showing me a nice restroom to use. He has two grown children, two more in college, and one living at home with his wife, who works out of their home. It was such a miserable cold and wet day, and of course there was no business, so I offered to advertise a little bit for him.
Then I met a new and good friend of mine, Yusuf , who is a tour guide at the Hagia Sofia. He is a really cool guy. We talked for a while in front of the Aya Sofia, then he invited me to a Madressa nearby where he likes to go for tea. It was wonderful. We sat in a small room, after taking our shoes off, of course, with low couches and a square table in the middle, with a heater on to warm up while we drank tea together and talked about everything in life. One of the more interesting things that he told me was that in Turkey, if you have $100 and your brother has a problem, you give him $50, and you don't worry. You believe that everything will work out alright. I think that that is something we see more rarely here in the United States.
I met another nice fellow that same day, as all of the museums were closing, who will be coming to the US to live in Austin, TX, to study. He already has a degree from Turkey, but it is from a lesser known school whose accreditation is not accepted in the US, so he will have to start almost all over again. He is a wonderful person, and we drank tea together as we talked about his upcoming move to Texas, what life can be like in the United States, and relations between men and women. He showed me some more of the area, including the Blue Mosque, and the areas set aside inside the pillars in the entryway where people used to leave food or money for the poor. He commented that the poor only took what they needed, but that life has changed, and so now the custom of leaving gifts for the poor is no longer in use (I think about that in respect to mSchlach Manot, since it is Erev Purim as I am typing this...). It is amazing the similarities between Judaism and Islam. The also have an ark that points the direction of prayer, called a Mihrab, similar to our Mizrach, and a separate section for the women to pray in (I wonder if there is such a thing as an egalitarian mosque?). We walked and talked all the way to the bus station, from Sultanahment to Eminonu, which is almost half an hour! :-)
The next day I took the bus down to Eminonu and simply decided to walk along the tramway tracks to get to the Topkapi Palace, and see what was there along the way. Not far from the Sultanahmet stop, there is a very nice young man named Erhan, who sells carpets, and is the most knowledgeable person I have ever met about carpets, their making and design, and where the various designs and types of rugs come from. We began talking about his sister Shilan, who lives in Ohio, and he invited me to tea. While I was not able to buy any carpets, I did promise to put his information on the web for him in the hopes that others going to Turkey to buy carpets will seek him out and buy some of the very high quality rugs that he sells.
I eventually found my way to the Palace, and spent the day looking around the grounds and rooms. Then I wandered over to the Grand Bazaar, which was amazingly huge, noisy, crowded, and overwhelming. I met a fellow from Kazakhstan who works for a human rights organization. Then I found myself back at the bus station. I went to meet my host, and we went to a supermarket with another American traveller to buy all the various things we needed to cook a Southern Fried chicken dinner. I found myself thinking that I really prefer the small specialty markets and stands to the large supermarket. Just as in the US, I found the supermarket to be a bit overwhelming. (At least it is not as bad as a Wal-Mart, which I find to be tremendously overwhelming.) We had several friends over for dinner, and I had the dubious pleasure of explaining to my Turkish friends exactly how one makes gravy. One comment was "that's what we throw away!" when I explained that you take the drippings from the fried chicken and mix in flour and water to make the gravy. :-) I will admit that I have always preferred Mediterranean food, and now I see why! :-)
My host got a taxi for me and made sure that the price would be affordable, even giving me some money to buy food at the airport, and sent me off at 3am! He was wonderful! I hope that I will be able to invite him to my home in Turkey someday, to offer some small measure of hospitality. All of my Turkish hosts were so wonderful, they are like family. My biggest problem in Turkey was that the large number of zeroes in the money made my eyes go crossed, and I had a very difficult time telling the denominations of money apart from each other. The colors are different, but not bright enough to jump out at me, so I was always afraid that I would give a much higher bill than I ought to.

The main lesson I can think of from my trip to Turkey is to be sure to set a Tzedakah budget. I noticed this problem particularly in Barcelona, but also in Turkey, outside of the Mosques, sometimes, and especially if you buy anything or accept a shoe shine, be prepared to give extra money. There were not nearly as many people begging alms in Turkey as I saw in Barcelona, but there are many people selling things, and the price is really discretionary. Depending on how much extra I had in my budget, I would be willing to pay more, but then you run into the problem of running out of money fairly quickly. While everyone needs to make a living, I do have a limited budget. So, I decided that any extra I was willing to pay for a service or an item being sold would come out of my Tzedakah funds, thus preventing me from overpaying too much.