Istanbul, Turkey – 08/31

(Michelle) Friday night we went out in Taksim again. Our “Time Out Istanbul” has been very helpful to us, not only with food but other items we wouldn’t have found in a standard guidebook. I really should have read “Time Out Chicago” more often. It pointed us to the free book exchange run by an American woman who has lived in Istanbul for 25 years. Two hours a night she opens her doors as a hobby for those of us who would like to trade one for one on books. She actually gave us more than one for one, maybe because she liked our travel story and we had stopped in to talk to her twice in one week. She has a very nice collection and this is by far the best book exchange we have been to.
The Time Out also told us which bar has the cheapest beer in Taksim. Also very helpful! So we went to our cheap bar, which was down this sort of bizarre side street with decent people watching.
We met a French couple that we spoke to for a while, they were very nice and it turns out that the guy is a professional street performer. He performed for the bar in exchange for a beer. He has a video on youtube I think, so I will have to find it and link it in here.

(TJ) The street performance was really good. He had some glass balls that he could roll over his whole body, then juggle them and not have them drop, pretty impressive. God knows how many hours you would have to practice to do some of the moves he was doing. He even said later on that he was leaving some of the harder moves out since he had a few beers already.