Istanbul in 24 hours

Last time I talked to Burak about coming to Istanbul for a day, was back in the beginning of December. I emailed him yesterday, and luckily he didn’t forget that I was coming :) It is snowing a lot here, it almost feels like Moldova or Denmark.

I spend the day together with him and Ertan, who is a promising upcoming MMA fighter. Basically, I joined in on a typical day of being a full time professional fighter. This included classics such as playstation, working out in luxury fitness gym, eating rice with chicken, drinking coffee and training Jiu Jitsu. They are going all in on MMA and it seems like they have a really professional approach to it.

Their gym (Corvos) is brand new and super nice, even though the mat area is a little small. It is one of the best looking (and smelling) gyms I have been to so far (my own is better looking, of course ;)). I taught a class on guard passing, but had to skip the sparring. My knee is still not ready for that, but it is getting better day by day I think. Good group there and nice facilities. A few really high level guys in between. Too bad I couldn’t join :-/

Istanbul visit was short, but nice. Tomorrow, I am leaving for India. It will be five hectic days in Mumbai and Nashik, but I am looking forward to it :)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2011 at 23:42 and is filed under Turkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

slideyfoot

Real shame if you didn’t get to check out any of the culture, as Istanbul is so incredibly full of history: hopefully you’ll manage to squeeze in a couple of things before you go. :)

How was the level of English at the gym, out of interest? I was planning to check it out next time I’m in the city, although my Turkish is still pretty crappy (which I really need to sort out, as I haven’t done national service yet: that won’t be fun if I can’t understand what anyone is saying…)

Mar 10, 2011 @ 23:55