Istanbul Day 1

We caught the night luxury bus back to Istanbul, and arrived in Istanbul much earlier than we had been told. Once again, we were just dropped off on the side of the street.

One thing about the Turks, it seems, is that they aim to please. The problem is this doesn't always mean they actually do something to please or satisfy you, but rather, they will tell you anything that you want to hear, whether it's true or not, to give you the impression that you are being pleased. For example, the guy at the bus office in Selcuk originally told us that the bus was supposed to get to Istanbul at 7:30. He thought, mistakenly, that we wanted to get there early. But, since we wouldn't be able to check into our hotel that early, we told him that was too early for us. "Well, my friend, this bus arrives like 8:00, 8:30." Really. Interesting how it slowed down to buy us a full hour just because we wanted it to. We booked that bus anyway because it had a bathroom - which we didn't use. And sure as shootin' there we were standing alone in the middle of Istanbul at 7:00. Thanks, my friend.

But that didn't matter, we were excited to be in Istanbul. That is until we saw the hotel we had signed up for.

Our hotel ended up being scary and trashy with no AC and sort of like a big crowded frat house. We tried to not get to upset about it telling ourselves maybe the rooms wouldn't be so bad. So we dropped off our luggage, it was to early to check in, and headed out into the city. We got some bread from a street vendor and sat in Sultenahmet square to get our bearings.

Then we headed to the Grand Bazaar. Which was really cool. I was expecting it to be a tented area, but it was really in an old sprawling building that was awesome. They also had all sorts of things to buy. I love browsing through things to see what interesting and unique things you can find.

After wandering the city some more we made it back to our hotel (I use this term lightly, see previous description) to discover that things in fact were not any better upon seeing the rooms, but were much, much worse than expected. After a few stunned seconds we hightailed it to the nearest internet cafe (which was surprisingly hard to find) and found ourselves a new hotel. We went back got our luggage paid the cancellation fee and ran, and I am so happy we did.

We ran straight to our new hotel with beautiful rooms and air conditioning and had a little rest. It gets too hot here in the middle of the day to do anything but siesta.

Then, not wanting to waste our time in Istanbul, we headed back to the streets. Our new hotel is in a less touristy part of the city and while we were walking down one street there were a ton of stores selling shoes, but they also had huge boxes of shoes around and there were a lot of people hauling the boxes. We stopped to look at a pair of shoes that looked nice and we asked the store owner how much. He said 15 Lira, roughly 8 bucks, so we were about to buy them when he told us they only do bulk orders, everyone on the street is selling shoes wholesale, he told us he sold to people all over the world, but mostly Africa and Russia. It was kind of cool to get a behind the scenes look at "Made in Turkey."

Anyways, moving on we made it to the Blue Mosque. They let visitors in even though it is a working Mosque, built in the 1600s. It was so beautiful, I was amazed. When we went in there was the shouter singing the prayers which sounded so beautiful. I loved it. It is called the Blue Mosque because the inside walls are covered in these intricate blue painted tiles, so amazing.

We also had to make our first stop at a pharmacy, which renewed my dislike of American pharmacies. Here, I was able to walk, in tell the pharmacist the problem, he gave me what I had already self diagnosed as the thing we needed, paid 10 lira, and were in our way just like that. Let's just say when I was getting our malaria medicine for our trip I had to go to the pharmacy three times, plus a call to my insurance, plus a trip to the doctor. That was annoying. Yesterday was not.

We ended the night with a lovely Turkish dinner. I had Corba soup, when I asked our waiter what it was he just kept telling me it's Turkish name, which wasn't really helpful. I ate it anyways and it was delicious. When I looked it up I was happy to find it was just lentil and potato soup, not something scary and random.