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Jono's Travels
Still in Istanbul today, although it's a free day so we get to do whatever we like today, I ran into Tall Ryan as I was heading off to breakfast and he said he and Meg were going to be heading to the Grand Bazaar which is basically a massive market containing about 4,000 individual shops. I joined up with them both and we made our way to the market. Arriving around 9:30am the markets looked rather empty, I put that down to the fact that it was Ramadan and they possibly open slightly later. We browsed the markets and all brought something, and I think I was the only one who actually started to haggle over the price for one thing as most people would tell you the real price, where this guy told me a price that was redo lupus, once I had him down to what I would pay in NZ I accepted, I could have gone lower, but honestly I don't have the patience to care. We spent about an hour or two there and then left to head to the spice market, but the time we left business had started to pick up and when we got to the spice market we could see there was plenty of business there. The guys brought some chocolate and spices and then we made our way off to Galata Tower which had a great view over the city. Meg and I left Tall Ryan down at some shops as he had gone there the previous day, and we tried to negotiate the streets to figure out the best way there, turns out we could have walked right under the busy intersection, however instead we walked up and around it adding a few hundred meters onto our trip, not huge difference but a waste of time. By this stage it had started to rain (to me it was welcomed as it kept me nice and cool) by the time we made it to the tower however we were both sweating due to the hill we had to climb to get there. We caught the elevator to the top and then walked another flight to stairs to the lookout. We stood there in the rain which was slowly turning to a drizzle and got some pictures overlooking all sides of the city. Then we decided to head back down and try and find Ryan. It didn't take us long as he was probably the tallest person on the street and stuck out like a sore thumb. We headed to a candy shop and then made our way to a local shop to have some lunch. Lunch was kind of lunch a crape with meat in it, I can't exactly explain it, I decided after the first one to have another as I was starving. From there we took a walk to a ferry terminal, we figured we would catch a Ferry to Asia, Yeap... Asia, Istanbul is actually on two continents, part on Europe, and another part on Asia. According to something online that Tall Ryan read however, it's technically classified as the Middle East, so he as an American went to the Middle East without a passport and roamed around. We made it to the terminal, where we decided to get a hop on hop off pass, it meant we could take a cruise to any of the sites, jump off at any time and then jump back on when it suited us. We ended up staying on board until we reached the last stop on the Asia side of Istanbul, this meant we spent about an hour and a bit on the ferry, upon arriving to the other side we got our bearings and made our way to another ferry terminal which would take us closer to our hotel than what this one would. It was about a 45 minute walk but it would have been at least that waiting for the current ferry and then another 45 minute walk to the hotel, so this made more sense. Upon arriving at the terminal, we didn't know which ferry to catch, so Meg asked a lady who suggested we catch the train... Train I questioned... Underwater? Yeap, we were told the train would go underwater across the ocean to the other side and would bring us out even closer to our hotel. For NZ$2 it made sense as it would be way quicker and a new experience (for me at least) catching a train under the ocean. 5 minutes later we were there, it wasn't really that much different as we didn't see anything apart from darkness as the train tunnel is under the ocean bed as well. We got back to the hotel and got told that Sabrina had been trying to get a hold of us all morning, turns out a bomb had gone off at the Grand Bazaar that morning within an hour of us being there and killed 11 people and injured dozens more, turns out this was about an hour before we got there, not an hour after which I had initially thought... But that would explain why it was so quiet when we were there. Talk about timing, Sabrina said to me "The one day I want you to be on wifi", well... we can't do nun if Te places we visit don't have wifi, this meant 6 or 7 hours of Sabrina not knowing if we were ok or not. We headed out for dinner, I was happy with my meal, but about 5 people got a Turkish Ravioli, all of which didn't like it at all. Even I who finished my meal tried a little bit of theirs and it tasted disgusting. I'm so glad I ordered the steak.
- comments
Dawn Scott You've been places we haven't, and we've been there 3 times. Lucky escape at the bazaar - too close for comfort!
Andre I see the bum fluffs gone :-) nice clean shave