Istanbul stories

We’ve been here two months and continue our discovery of all the milongas in the city while exploring the food and nightlife that exist here.

We love Tango. We live Tango. We love Tango. We live Tango.

But sometimes a change is really good for the hips and heart. [Think tango and then blues fusion]

On Saturday night in the heart of Taskim, we found a blues club Kumsaati Blues Club. The club holds about 50 people and to gain entrance requires walking down the stairs to the cellar from the street. Think Greenwich Village vibe in the 1970s. The beer is on tap, the music is loud and good and smoking is only permitted outside. Was a fun experience sitting in club in Istanbul listening to 3 guys wail out blues riffs on their guitars.

Later that night we walked to the main street at 1.30 in the morning, but we were not tired. So we went in search of more music.

We found a great club for nightime Jazz. Coq Coq Pera is a Thai restaurant down the street from the Pera Palace that serves traditional thai food in a beautiful environment
complete with an outdoor
garden deck.

On the night we visited, there was a jazz trio, stand up bass, saxophone and guitar with a soulful singer. The space is a mixture of intimate bar space with a few couches and chairs. We tried to dance tango on the floor but we needed different shoes or powder, but still had a blast playing around with the jazz and 60’s sounds

The following day, after celebrating two Cancer friend’s birthdays we decided on Sunday night to go dancing again, we looked for a place to do some more salsa dancing…in a turkish city to find Latin dancing was not that difficult.

We found it at the Grand Pera AVM, a mall with a large open space on the top floor that offered Salsa lessons in one area and Batcha classes in the other room with Latin rhythms playing continually.

We found it at the Grand Pera AVM, a mall with a large open space on the top floor that offered Salsa lessons in one area and Batcha classes in the other room with Latin rhythms playing continually.

We danced a mixture of tango, batchata, cha-cha, rumba, salsa for what seemed like hours. We left exhausted but happy at 2.15 am, they go until 3 am.

On weekends the trains and some buses run 24 hours a day making it an easier and less expensive process to discover other music in the city.

Abrazo y Besos, Ruth