Birthday in Istanbul

Yesterday it was my 24th birthday! I'm getting old...hopefully also wiser. Together with friends we had a nice dinner and party. I prepared dinner at my place and after that we went to a Türkü Bar on Istiklal. Since I've never been to such a place before I didn't know what to think about it. I told Hasan, my flatmate, about it and he suggested we could also go to another place instead. On the other hand Miryam was so enthusiastic about it I thought we had to try it. If only for the cultural experience. It turned out not to be bad at all. There was this lovely Turkish woman singing and two musicians; one with an saz-type of thing and the other with a keyboard. It was a repertoire of melancholic and up-beat songs. The melancholic ones were a bit too much for me in the end but the other ones were perfect for dancing. Even our student coordinator from Holland also joined us to dance some kind of version of the halay.
For now I only have the pictures of the dinner at my place, I'll post the other ones later.


The cupcakes that became one huge cupcake




Happy face, not so happy face ;)

Hasan, Polina, me, Marina, Marina's friend, Esther and Miryam