By the end of the trip we were sleeping right through them. Before our trip we had a general impression that Turkey was a poor country and maybe a little backward or Third Worldish. Turkey is thoroughly modern and Istanbul is much more European than Middle Eastern. This is not a backward country. Lots of people have cell phones.
Internet cafes are everywhere.
Most of them speak at least some English. The faux hospitality of the carpet dealers aside, the Turks are exceptionally friendly people. This morning we had to take care of some travel chores. We decided Cappadocia in central Turkey would be our next stop, so we needed to buy train tickets to the region. We could only get them at the train station on the Asian side of Istanbul, and that was a mini-journey itself.