Istanbul Apartment Renting: Not Quite the Pits

We always try to find apartments to rent when we travel, for the value, space, and convenience compared to a hotel. Istanbul has a unfortunate dearth of apartments for rent for tourists, so our choices were limited.  We found an agency called Manzara Holiday Aparments, and despite our early legwork we only found one reasonably priced apartment open for the week we were there.

Kitchen sans microwave or toaster

The St George apartment is downhill about 2 blocks from the Galata Tower, and is across the street from a hospital.  The building is very old with a lot of character including well worn and slick marble stairs and a faintly sewerish smell in the stairwell. The apartment is on the second floor (a treacherous proposition with luggage) and is simply furnished in a very small space. There are no bedside tables and only one wardrobe in one of the bedrooms. The curtains do not block out the streetlight just outside the window. There was no toaster or iron but the staff kindly brought these to us. The bathroom is nicely redecorated but the shower leaks and does not drain like anything resembling normal, there is no soap shelf in the shower, no countertop for bathroom items, and no hooks or towel racks.

To top it off, the apartment directly above us was being remodeled. No, that’s too kind. They were using jackhammers to rip out the drywall and concrete to the posts, for 10 hours a day. With a 2 year old child who needed naps, the construction workers were kind enough to stop for a mid day break, but would you rent this apartment at all in these circumstances?

Upstairs apartment gutting

The rental fee was reasonable relative to hotels, but other associated costs were quite high. The transport from the airport was twice the cost of a taxi. The staff kindly had arranged for a meal to be prepared for our arrival, but 3 little eggplants for 50 euros? The staff was generally helpful and attentive, but overall this experience was not ideal or a relaxing place of respite. With some more specific questions upfront, a different apartment and different plans for food and transportation, Manzara might be able to redeem itself in another experience. In retrospect, the advantages of having an apartment while traveling with a toddler far outweighs the risks of getting a dud like this.  There’s probably nothing we could have done to prevent the downsides, but we did our best to make the most of it and would still recommend renting rather than paying more and getting less in a hotel.

Enter the Kids Go Global Travel Contest and Win an Ergo Baby Carrier!

In celebration of our recent launch, we are thrilled to announce our first ever travel contest! The grand prize is a complete Ergo baby carrier travel system, complete with carrier, infant insert and backpack valued at over $170!

Second prize is a passport travel bag from Bambootique, Beth’s fair trade company, valued at $22 PLUS a copy of the excellent travel book Travels with Baby, signed by author Shelly Rivoli and valued at $20.

Third prize is a copy of the Lonely Planet’s helpful guide Travel With Children, valued at $15.

The prizes are great and entering is super easy, but you have to do before the end of July to qualify, so enter now! Just submit a comment at the bottom of this post in one of the following three categories:

1. Best Travel Destination – Tell us about the most interesting place you have traveled with your child(ren), why you chose it and why you would (or wouldn’t) recommend it for other families.
2. Best Travel Tip – What is the most useful tip you have learned in your own experience to help make traveling with kids more enjoyable for everyone?
3. Best Travel Story – What is the most exciting, craziest, most unbelievable, or most hysterical travel story your family has experienced?

Please indicate at the beginning of your post which category you are entering. Be sure to include your email address (won’t be made public on the site) so we can contact you if you win! Regardless of which category you submit for, please keep your entry somewhat brief. Please only one entry per household. Entries close July 31st, when we will choose our winner in each category. From those three winners we will randomly draw from a hat to decide who gets which prize. Thanks for entering and good luck!

Welcome to Kids Go Global

If we had a dollar (or a euro or a peso or a yen) for every person surprised that we travel the world with our daughter, we’d be able to retire at one of our more exotic travel destinations. For all the many things most people do with their young children, it seems travel is rarely one of them. We’ve heard many reasons not to travel with kids ranging from wanting to wait until they are old enough to remember their travels to security issues to just not wanting to deal with the hassles. We take exception to these excuses – how many other things do we do with our children they won’t remember (music classes, outings to the zoo, feeding them only organic vegetables)? Yes the world can be a scary place but it can also open up whole new ways of thinking that you can’t get staying at home. And absolutely, there are hassles taking children on the road (and in the air), but for us the joys far outweigh the headaches.

Before our daughter Grace was born we traveled throughout Asia, Europe, Canada, the United States and Latin America. The excitement of travel and the perspective it gives us on the world are so important to us that we intentionally decided to continue discovering the world with our baby. Children begin to acquire their worldview from birth and we wanted our daughter’s to include an understanding of the places, people and issues beyond her backyard, not to mention wanting to have fun with her. By the time she reached 16 months Grace had already traveled to four countries and five U.S. states, and all three of us thrived on our trips.

This blog has its roots in a recent two-week trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina, one of the most elegant and exciting cities in the world. We were pleasantly surprised at how, with a lot of forethought, we were able to pull off an enjoyable vacation for all three of us in a fairly off-the-beaten-path location. While strolling with Grace through some of Buenos Aires’ beautiful parks we were reassured in our belief that our children can grow up excited about all this planet holds. While planning for the trip we were surprised at how little information we found for parents who wanted to travel with their children somewhere beyond the all-inclusive resorts (which we also love, but not for every trip). We decided to create Kids Go Global to document our experiences as globe-trotting parents and to hear from others who do or want to do the same.

Thanks for visiting our blog. We hope you find our experiences helpful and we really love to hear your perspective through comments on this blog. Remember kids do go global…if only you’ll take them!