Wow, what a city! My MC duties are now over and I can relax. No more corporate speak.

This place is truly amazing. Why doesn’t it get mentioned in the same breath with ‘New York City’ or ‘Paris’?

Laneways everywhere oozing with style. Poverty brings desperation but it also brings clever street salesmen, stunning cheap crafts and crazy traffic where pedestrians jostle with taxis trucks and the ‘recycling guy’ dragging his vastly over-stacked trolley.

Extraordinary mosques on every hill, The Bospherous a magnificent waterway filled with everything from small tourist boats, regular commuter ferries, large car ferries through to huge tankers crossing the 3 seas to the Black Sea.

Being a drummer I was pretty distracted by the famous Turkish cymbal manufacturers. The cymbals looked and sounded amazing. I couldn’t believe how many music shops there were in the same street. I counted at least 10!