Istanbul

When we got currency to take to Turkey we couldn't buy Turkish Lira, not in Denmark or Iceland so we brought Euros since the doctor and the hotel were accepting it.

I asked in the fb group about nose surgery and quite a few people there said that you could pay in euros everywhere.

But when we arrived we found out that in fact most places did NOT accept euros. 

But we had brought all of the money we were going to spend in euros but then we couldn't buy anything in all of the many little stores around the hotel. So we decided to try to find a place to buy liras.

The hotel (Bricks Hotel) said in their folder in the room that the reception would exchange euros. So we went there and then the receptionist said that we need to go down the street to a square and there should be places.

Day one we walked there, in the BLISTERING heat and went to the square.

When we got there the square was full of Riot Police officers!

They were standing in groups of probably 15-20 officers each place, in multiple places. There were also barriers being put around some buses that had been placed there.

All the of police was just standing and waiting, for what we don't know but we knew something might happen so we got out of there!
I wanted to take pictures to show my family but because the culture there is so vastly different from mine, I didn't know how the police would react to that and certainly didn't want to stir up trouble so I didn't take any pictures.

Next day we tried again and there weren't any riot police so we walked for 1-2 hours looking everywhere but we could not find a single currency exchange place. It was very frustrating.

Third day we tried again, this time we had marked in google maps all the currency exchange places in the neighborhood. 

We visited every single place and each one was either not where it was supposed to be, or it was there but closed despite the opening hours on google maps saying it should be open. 

We spent another 1-2 hours of walking around everywhere trying to find this with no luck.

The friendly pet shop guy

On our way back to the hotel we stumbled across a pet shop. We went in to look but didn't have any liras and every other place we went to didn't accept euros. The owner was there with his around 8 year old daughter and he was so friendly, he almost didn't speak any English so we communicated with him using the google translate app.
We looked around and then left and decided we would go back when we could exchange our euros. Walking away from the store we decided to ask the friendly pet shop guy if he knew about a currency exchange place. So we went back and he said that he could exchange our euros. We were a bit skeptical at first but then asked him if he would give us the rate that our currency app showed. He said yes almost the same. So we gave him some euros and he gave us liras. We could then shop in his store.

 We talked more to him, he told us about his family, wanted to know what we thought of Istanbul and what we had seen and he laughed when we said we had only walked around the hotel since arriving. 

When we were about to leave he invited us to have dinner with his family....we were so surprised haha! 

He was very friendly and having his young daughter there made him seem more trustworthy and maybe it would have been totally fine but it was just me and my mom and I was not about to let us two women go to a stranger's house in a foreign country xD so I politely declined his kind offer telling him we had other plans.

But his store was very cute, clean and had pet supplies for good prices (he even gave us a discount for everything and I thought it was cheap enough already!) so I do recommend stopping by and having a look.
I got that see through backpack for pets much cheaper there than anywhere I have seen on the internet.

Day four we were very frustrated in not being able to find ANY currency exchange place and the reception not doing the exchange service they should have. So we thought that maybe the mall would have exchange places. So we decided to go to The Mall of Istanbul.

The Mall of Istanbul

We arrived between 1 and 2 and the mall was pretty empty. The mall was GIGANTIC. I kid you not it was like the size of a small city. We had to go through security and x-ray our bags before getting in. It was a little scary that this is needed, tells you what the mall/government knows can happen but it also gives you a sense of security that they will probably catch people if anyone tries to take in a bomb/gun or something.

The sketchy restaurant

We wanted to grab some lunch before shopping and saw this american themed restaurant on the top floor above the main entrance. When asking to see the menu the lady that was showing people in just showed us a QR code to scan, when we did it led to a page on the internet. We didn't have any internet (because data roaming is INSANELY expensive for us in Turkey) so we had to try to connect to the local wifi, the lady from the restaurant told us which one to connect to. I could, my mom with her iphone could not, it just did NOT work, she never received the text message that you need to receive to go online. But I got online on my android phone so we could see the menu. We decided to eat there. Food was ok, nothing special. My nachos were more cheese with a few nachos xD
After I got the bill, a black book containing the receipt for the bill, I snapped a picture of the receipt because me and my mom were going to share the cost but one of us was going to pay.
I paid. I paid with 200 lira bills because that is what I had, the waiter came, took the book with my euro bill and then returned it with my change, a bunch of smaller bills but this time the receipt was not there. 

I decided to count the change and I checked my picture of the receipt and counted twice, there was money missing.

I am thinking maybe the waiter took it for himself and usually I would always say something but being in a foreign country where the majority of people we met hardly spoke English plus the different culture, that seemed like such a hassle and who knows what drama might come up. Plus, we will probably never go back there. 

So I just left less tip, deducted the missing money from the tip and left. But if you go to this restaurant, just be aware of the change you get.

Below you can see the QR code for the restaurant, the receipt and our food.

The great search for atm's

Next was to find currency exchange places, we walked around for a long time but could not find any. We asked in a store and they said they had no currency exchange places but they did have atm's and told us they were at the next floor down.

So we thought, well we have given it our best, this is day 4 looking for a currency exchange place, we can't find any, we will have to go to an atm and just exchange the euros we have back to our currency when we get home.

So we went down one floor and looked everywhere and finally we saw an atm sign, but it was pointing to go down one floor. We went there, then the sign told us to go to the side, when we got there, the sign was telling us to go up one floor again. We walked more and there was an atm sign pointing downwards. 

I kid you not, the signs were contradicting each other and we just walked around for probably 2 hours trying to find the atm's! 

FINALLY in the end we found out they were at the bottom floor behind some escalators. 

Then there was the issue of which bank to use, there were MANY atm's and I remembered reading about some of them having insane withdrawal fees or currency convert fees. So I was going to use the wifi to google it....wifi didn't work.

Turns out the wifi we connected only connects in one part of the mall. I tried other wifi's that I could see but could not connect to any of them.

So we had to walk all the way back to that American restaurant and there we got connection and found this page where they had put up a table of banks and their atm fees. On their page they say this:

There's a lot of banks that accept international cards, but some of them will try to extract more money from you via service fee or dynamic currency conversion (DCC). 

So we made sure to use the ATM that didn't use DCC, or Istemiyorum in Turkish.

We ended up finding out that out of the atm's in the mall, ZiraatBanksi offered non DCC withdrawal. We tried to put the language to English before putting in our card, because we didn't want to be stuck with our card there and no way of knowing how to cancel. We clicked this and that and tried to use google translate to find out what everything meant to find how to change the language and just could not!

Then this lady in the queue behind us came up and offered help, she showed us that we had to put the card FIRST in and THEN you would get the option to change the language. 

But ok we withdrew 750 liras (41 euros / 40usd / 36gbp) and my god the stack of bills I got (all 10's and 5's) was SO BIG that I could hardly fit it in my wallet! But we FINALLY had some money!

Now it was 4 in the afternoon and we had spent majority of our time there trying to find an atm. But we tried to walk around as much as we could to find some good places to shop. All around the hotel were little stores that were pretty cheap and good for us who don't care about brand clothing. But most of the stores in the mall were much more expensive and much of it was brands. So for those who like to shop brands, the mall is a good place.

For us it was not good, we ended up only shopping at the food store there and nothing else.

The mall was also so big that we didn't even get to see all the shops there because we had been walking for hours and were so tired that we wanted to get home.

Later we found out that there were indeed currency exchange places in the square we originally went to and all around it. After my surgery we walked around there again and saw at least 5 or 6 places. They just all happened to be closed those days that we originally were looking which was around the weekend. 
Possibly it was open when the riot police was there but then we couldn't stay in the area to look. So people, if you go look, don't look on a weekend, even though google maps says the places are open then. Don't waste your time.

The small stores around the hotel

We had a lot of small stores around the hotel (Bricks hotel) and in one of them I was trying out some clothes. I had the cast on and was also swollen and bruised. The girl who was working there did not speak any English but she was trying to communicate with my mom asking what happened to my nose.

She was acting out the words and she pretended to punch someone to ask my mom if that is why I had to have a nose surgery and my mom said no to that, then she proceeded to change it to a punch straight forward in the face instead of to the side and my mom said no and tried to answer the same way, acting it out showing that someone had headbutted me xD The girl was satisfied with the answer.
I thought it was hilarious because if we could tell this girl who headbutted me she would have laughed....because it was a 1 year old child and a dog that ended up being the ones who broke my nose ahahaha xD