Istanbul, for the week or two you are here

Getting in from the airport

The single part of arriving that goes badly if you improvise. Both airports are a long way out, the taxi rank is where visitors lose an hour and get overcharged, and the metro reaches most of the city for the price of a coffee. Put your destination in and it gives you the actual route, the changes and the cost.

You will want an Istanbulkart within the first hour — one card, tapped for metro, tram, bus, funicular and the ferries. The page explains where to buy one and how to top it up.

Where to eat

118 places across 9 categories — Favorite Restaurants, Michelin Guide, Cocktail Bars, Best Burgers, Sushi & Japanese, Best Pizza, Kahvalti, Brunch, Raki & Meze — picked by someone who lives here rather than scraped from a ranking. It is the part of this site visitors use most.

27 of the 118 are open with no account and no payment — the first three in every category. The rest sit behind a $4.99 subscription. Saying that here rather than letting you find it after tapping is the whole point: the free 27 are genuinely the ones I would send a friend to first, and if you want the full list it is a month of coffee.

What is on while you are here

Live listings for concerts, exhibitions, theatre and nightlife, refreshed daily from the venues themselves.

One thing worth knowing before you click: most listings are in Turkish, because that is how the venues publish them. Concerts, exhibitions and festivals travel fine without the language. Theatre, comedy and workshops mostly will not — that is not a translation we can honestly fake, so the titles are left as the venue wrote them.

If something goes wrong

112 — ambulance, fire and police all go through it, and there is English on the line. Put it in your phone now rather than looking for it while it matters.

Deliberately written here as text instead of behind a link: nobody in trouble opens a website, and nobody in trouble installs an app. If you want the longer version — nearest hospitals with English-speaking staff, the tourist police, what to do about a lost passport — it is on the site.

Not getting quietly overcharged

21 of them, written up plainly, and the ones that target visitors are the first few: the airport taxi that takes the long way and the meter that starts high, the restaurant bill with a cover charge nobody mentioned, the carpet shop your friendly guide happens to know. None of this is common enough to be afraid of and all of it is easier to refuse once you have read it once.

Enough Turkish to be polite

Twenty-odd phrases that actually come up — ordering, asking a price, thanking someone properly. English is common in the centre and rare outside it, and the effort is noticed either way.

The pronunciation button uses your phone’s own voice, so it reads the Turkish out loud only if your device has a Turkish voice installed. If it does not, nothing happens and the phonetic spelling is what you use. That is a limitation of the phone rather than something we can fix.

And if the reason you are here is to work out whether you could live here — some people book a week to do exactly that — then the rest of the site is for you after all. Start with what 90 days without a visa actually means, because it is the rule visitors get wrong most: the 90/180 day counter. Leaving the country and coming back does not reset it, whatever you have been told.

Written and maintained by Arek, who was born in Istanbul and still lives here. Every fee and rule on this site carries the date it was last checked, and the record of what changed is public, including the times I was wrong.