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About Selin

I'm Selin and have been living in Istanbul for 28 years. I am a travelling pilgrim like you that I started travelling in primary school with my family and then did my first trip alone to Finland when I was 16 years old. Since then I have been travelling around the world, so far 25 countries. I returned back to Turkey in 2018 after I had lived in Australia for 2 years. As an adventurer with a never-ending curiosity for everything, Istanbul is not only my abode but also a hidden treasure that I discover and I still want to discover by reading about it and following as my friends say all types of eccentric events. If you want to the story behind Istanbul, I've got it, as when you learn, your trip becomes meaningful. I am a true language enthusiast, so far studied English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish and Chinese but fluent in only 3; English, Italian and Spanish. Right now I'm teaching English, Italian and Turkish to foreigners and also doing a master's degree in Italian language and literature in Istanbul University. After solving the language puzzle, I can confidently but not presumptuously say that I have good social skills. After reading this by one of my favourite authors, Daniel J. Boorstin, from his book "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America" decide if you are a "traveller" or a "tourist"? "Formerly travel required long planning, large expense, and great investments of time. It involved risks to health or even to life. The traveler was active. Now he became passive. Instead of an athletic exercise, travel became a spectator sport. This change can be described in a word. It was the decline of the traveler and the rise of the tourist. There is a wonderful, but neglected, precision in these words. The old English noun “travel” (in the sense of a journey) was originally the same word as “travail” (meaning “trouble,” “work,” or “torment”). And the word “travail,” in turn, seems to have been derived, through the French, from a popular Latin or Common Romanic word trepalium, which meant a three-staked instrument of torture. To journey—to “travail,” or (later) to travel—then was to do something laborious or troublesome. The traveler was an active man at work. In the early nineteenth century a new word came into the English language which gave a clue to the changed character of world travel, especially from the American point of view. This was the word “tourist”—at first hyphenated as “tour-ist.” Our American dictionary now defines a tourist as “a person who makes a pleasure trip” or “a person who makes a tour, especially for pleasure.” Significantly, too, the word “tour” in “tourist” was derived by back-formation from the Latin tornus, which in turn came from the Greek word for a tool describing a circle. The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing” (a word, by the way, which came in about the same time, with its first use recorded in 1847). He expects everything to be done to him and for him."

Things to do in Istanbul with Selin

Would you like to render your visit meaningful by knowing the history of the places you are going to visit or even places that aren't in travel books but reflect the authentic Istanbul. Do you want to try not only the famous Turkish cuisine but also different and funny plates?