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Jono's Travels
This morning will be a guided walking tour of some of the local sites in Istanbul, I got downstairs after waking, showering and skipping breakfast as I'm still trying to get over this flu and needed the extra sleep, can't really speak much today as my throat is really sore when I talk. Upon arriving downstairs I found that Te tour was going to be a few hours and we weren't likely to stop for a break at all, it's coincidently the first day of Ramadan which means the practicing religious people can't eat or drink from sunup to sundown, we were originally a little worried that it would mean there wouldn't be many places selling food. But we soon found this was not the case at all, plenty of places to get food and water throughout the day. We walked up to the Sultan Ahmed Mosque also known as the Blue Mosque, built 1609 to 1616, and named after the Saltan at the time who had decided to have it built. It was worth the visit, but not as blue inside as I thought it would be. It's still used as a mosque today so we had to take our shoes off and the girls had to cover up their hair, legs and chest area, even some of the guys needed to wear skirts to cover their legs due to the shorts being too short. After leaving there we headed just a few hundred meters down the road to the Hagia Sophia, which is another mosque, no longer used these days as a mosque, but used more as a museum. This building has a huge some on top which has had to be rebuilt three times over the years due to earthquakes causing the dome to collapse under its own weight, looking around the mosque you can still see some clear earthquake damage to the floor at points. Walking inside we also noticed a huge amount of scaffolding in there, according to our guide it's been in there for years and he has not idea what they are doing as he has never seen anyone working on it. We were left to walking around and get pictures for about 45 minutes before we headed outside to meet our guide again before heading to our next stop. The next stop was the Topkapi Palace, the Topkapi Palace was the main residence of the Ottoman Sultans for about 400 years. The place is still in amazing condition and even contains an 84 carrot diamond which we were able to see... The walls of the palace were also part of the walls of the park I visited the previous day, so that clears up that part of my question from the previous night. This is also where our guide left us for the day, we checked around the palace, looked at the things in there including things like the clocks and watches that they had, along with ceremonial armour and swords, all very impressive. We left the palace and began making our way to the Basilica Cistern, an underground water storage. It looks really cool all lit up with lights, it's about 150 meters long and 75 meters wide as it was built to store thousands of litres of fresh water, I'm not sure however if it is still used today. After we had finished walking around we headed back to the hotel so those of us going to the Turkish dinner could freshen up. Fabian and I quickly took off down the road to get a haircut and a Turkish shave which we had heard good things about... For about NZ$30, they cut our hair, gave us a shave, cleaned up the eyebrows, and did a think with a flame which I can't really explain, but essentially clearing up any other excess hair. Not a bad job if so say so myself. Dinner was a get your own dinner tonight, although we had the opportunity to pay to go on a cruise, have dinner, all you can drink alcohol, watch some dancing and even get up and dance afterwards. I chose to do this option along with some of the other guys. It was a fantastic evening, made even more enjoyable by the beautiful Iranian belly dancer. She gave a wonderful performance, getting Ronnie out to dance and also Fabian, but Fabian had decided to break out his dance moves, she didn't really know what to do. We finished dinner and watching the entertainment and then all the dancers got changed into everyday clothes and came out to dance with the rest of us. We danced the rest of the night on the dance floor and I even asked the Belly dancer girl to have a dance with me. That was followed up by Sabrina giving her one of my paper roses on my behalf, which I would like to point out she totally loved, she showed it off to all her workmates and came up and gave me a big hug and kept blowing me kisses the rest of the night. We all headed back to the hotel and then headed off to a bar just down the street, had a few drinks bad had some Shisha. Then I decided at about 1am that it was time for me to head to bed.
- comments
Dawn Scott You really are seeing it all! Hope the throat clears up soon. We're in our last cool place for weeks!
Margaret Smith Did you mean Tulips Jono?????Nora and I were just wondering!!!Is that who you danced with and gave the flower to???
Boaty McBoatface haha nice try Jono, M and I will leave you this riddle to unravel " I'm the spouting lie?"