Weather is poos and we are tired so I will catch up on blog instead!

Well the weather isn't really poos, but it is very overcast and humid, rain threatening. Between the weather being average and Greg and I spending way too long at the Topkapi Palace, we decided to flag doing a boat trip up the bosphorus. So then we were going to have lunch and go shopping. What we actually ended up doing was having lunch (which was super!), going into one shop, buying some lokum (turkish delight, my new obsession) and then coming back to the hotel. Where we have stayed, enjoying watching the madness ensue on the street below and talking a lot about doing some washing. We have a date on a rooftop restaurant for dinner tonight though, so we aren't squandering ALL of the time we have left in Istanbul hiding in the hotel room!

As I write the eery wailing of the 5pm call to prayer is drifting in through the window.

So anyway I thought I would get cracking catching up on the blog. In case you are wondering why I am subjecting you, the reader, to all the mindless details of the trip that could only possibly be interesting to the person that went on the trip (i.e. Greg and I), this is the only journal I am keeping, so I'm basically writing it for myself in the future as much as you. So apologies for that.

So I think I left off just after the Aya Sophya yesterday? Right, well we went directly from there to the Basilica Cistern, which is a massive underground cistern supported by columns. It was lost for a long time until a dude who happened to be a historian or archaeologist noticed that locals were able to drop buckets underneath their houses and draw up water and even fish successfully! The cistern is dark and eery (helped along by eery turkish music being constantly piped in). Most of the columns are haphazard in size and shape but unremarkable, except for three. One has engraved peacock tears -

Okay a thunderstorm is starting. How exciting! Glad we're not on a boat!

- possibly to honour the hundreds of slaves that died building the place - and two more have, somewhat randomly, engraved medusa head blocks as their base. One head is upside down and one is on it's side. The theory is that the medusa heads were plunder from somewhere else, and they were placed strangely to represent something (they don't know what) or purely because they fit better that way.

After the Basilica Cistern, we were ravenous. We settled on lunch at a restaurant near our hotel. It was clearly one used to catering to Aussies and NZers, as evidenced by the waiter's greeting of "Hi mate" and the english pub anthems being piped in the background. Greg was thoroughly entertained by a TV screen in the background of a reality TV show about people driving badly and crashing. Which was weird because bad driving and near misses is apparently just how you get around in Istanbul - if Greg had been sitting in the seat facing the street he would have been just as easily entertained!

The food (shish kebabs) and service were great. The tour bus load of men wearing identical polo shirts that pulled up right outside the restaurant, disembarked, and proceeded to stand all around where we were sitting in the restaurant and chain smoke was less great.

Oh yeah, but there was a cat who sat next to me the whole time I ate so it was okay :)

He knew the moment I finished my last bit of chicken - he meowed sadly and wandered off. It's testament to how hungry I was that I didn't give him anything!

After lunch we walked to Grand Bazaar. It is a truly remarkable place. It reminded me a little bit of the Victoria Markets in Melbourne, only a bazillion times more massive, more labyrinth like, obviously Turkish, and with way pushier shopkeepers.

I wanted to try and buy something, I truly did, but the bottom line is I chickened out. What follows is a rant in which I try to understand what happened.

For a start, I'm feeling pretty cheap at the moment. It's the start of the holiday and I have no concept of how long my money will last. When it comes to pushy salespeople I have a very real fear of being duped into spending too much money on something so as not to disappoint the shopkeeper and to be polite! 


Also, I just didn't really want anything that badly. It's my usual holiday dilemma of going to all the souvenir shops, looking at it all and thinking "yep, it was probably made in China for ten cents". The only thing I wanted was a scarf like the one I've borrowed from Bec because the colours are so lovely, but those colours don't seem to be common and as soon as I went to look through the piles and piles of scarfs at the stalls I would get jumped all over. 


I don't really like being jumped all over. 


There was one thing I liked the look of, I asked how much and the man beckoned me to enter the store. I knew that that meant bargaining, but all I really wanted was a ballpark starting figure (it was really nice scarf - what if the starting price was 1000 TL? I only wanted to spend about 5TL...). So because I didn't want to get into a committed bargaining situation, I basically ran away... 


I must confess I also found it really intimidating also that almost all of the shopkeepers are men. I guess that makes me sexist or something?


What about Greg? Well since Greg doesn't shop, the bazaar was an interesting experience for him, but purely as an observer rather than a participator. He laughed at me when I ran away from the scarf man!

Right, rant over, what did we do next? We really did do all the things yesterday!

That's right, then we walked for ages through Old Istanbul until we got to the Galata Bridge. Along the way we passed some kind of official building, complete with guards carrying machine guns. I don't like people carrying machine guns very much. Gives me the heebies. Oh yeah, and rush hour started. Gosh the Turkish can smoke! 90% of people on the street that weren't obviously tourists: smoking. Not a breath of air without some second hand tar and nicotine until we got to the waterfront. Needless to say the conversation turned to speculation on Turkish rates of heart disease, lung disease, and cancer. The traffic at rush hour is something to behold also. I suspect it's reasonably impossible to get anywhere in Istanbul by car in a timely manner without completely disregarding the road rules. Actually, I suspect it's reasonably impossible to get anywhere in Istanbul by car in a timely manner...

So we got to the bridge and went across. The first half you can go across underneath and it's full of fish restaurants, including one specialising in very cheap balik (fish) sandwiches. We made a mental note of the restaurant and then kept going. Some nice views from the bridge, and heaps of people actually fishing off of it too, as the traffic roars past directly behind them.

On the other side we entered the beyoglu district long enough to be further dazed by the traffic, see a bunch of guys outside a bar set off abut twenty flares all at once and then dance around for ages yelling, walk down what must be the world's longest street of solely hardware shops, and somehow ended up at the next bridge. Starting to get very footsore and Thangry, we decided to head back over to the other side and find those fish sandwiches!

This is Greg's "I'm very hungry and want to eat, why are you taking my photo" face. You'll be seeing a lot of that face.

After dinner we headed back for home, pretty done in from the full on day. However that didn't stop me popping into a Turkish sweet store and buying some freshly made turkish delight! Apparently the kind I bought has no calories! I wasn't too interested in that but I was interested in the Om Nom Nom. Also was fun chatting to man in the shop. Greg meanwhile stood outside and chatted to the other shopkeeper (the one standing there to drum up business), getting him to teach him how to say thank you in Turkish. Its a blimmin' hard one to say!

SO we finally made it back to the hotel. We'd though to head out in the evening to see the blue mosque at night (and maybe we should have, given that the weather tonight has turned into total pants), but guess what? I lay down on the bed and fell fast asleep! I woke closer to midnight, put up the blog post, then KO'ed again.

And at long last I have finished the blog post about yesterday. Will post about today... tomorrow probably!

Hope all is well with everyone

Jane