Turkey

The Moscow crowd - the six of us who travelled together for the entire 8 weeks, 

with Tony the Tour Leader.

From left:  Peter and Janette; Jane and Colin; Tony leaning forwards; Denyse and Jason; and me. I'd just like to draw attention to my bright orange watch and bright pink socks.

The overnight train to Istanbul was way hard core.  We were on it for almost 24hrs.  We got on at midday in Bucharest and got off at 1115am in Istanbul - we were early!!  AND Kim got off the tour in Bucharest so I had a cabin all to myself!  It was amazing.  I basically went in there and shut the door and didn't come out for six hours.

It ended up being quite good fun.  We were the only people in our carriage, aside from one other random person.  And he was weird.  He was travelling alone, and he told us all that he ran sold-out seminars for men on how to pick up women, all over Europe.  There was no way any of us believed him.  He was Canadian but he reckoned he'd been living in Bucharest for years.  He obviously thought he was the man.  None of the girls on the tour would've touched him with a ten-foot pole, and I didn't actually believe he'd been to half the places he said he had.  For instance, he was talking about how he'd spent heaps of time in Sofia, and it was just like Bucharest.

Not.  Even.  Close.

You may remember one of the stops on our tour was Sofia.  Sofia has wide cobblestoned streets and is beautiful and extremely well kept, there's no graffiti anywhere, there's no dirt anywhere, there are no buildings in any kind of disrepair.  And we've just discussed Bucharest.  Noisy.  Dirty.  I forgot to mention it, but they leave the ends of electrical wires dragging on the ground.  The buildings are half torn down and then abandoned.

Interesting.

Anyway, aside from that guy, everyone basically ended up standing in the corridor drinking together.  A lot of people had brought their own booze onto the train, and the conductor had something like four bottles of wine and six beers, and we ended up clearing him out as well.  Scandalous.

So we all eventually went to bed around 10pm (all the booze was long gone by 930pm).  We got woken up  crossing from Romania into Bulgaria, then again going out of Bulgaria, and then again going into Turkey.  A good time was had by all.  When we were going into Turkey, they made us all get off the train to get our passports stamped.  Everybody else on the tour had to buy their Turkish visas, which, depending which country they were from, cost from 15 euro up to 45 euro.  I didn't have to pay because I'm a New Zealander.  LOVE IT.  Some of the others were quite personally insulted that they had to pay and I didn't!  It was funny.  It was four o'clock in the morning and freezing cold, and they all had to go and line up (outside) to get their visa and then line up somewhere else to get stamped through.

We were staying right in the old part of Istanbul, close to the Grand Bazaar and the mosques.  We had a city walk that afternoon, then we really all just wanted to relax I think.  We had our final night dinner, but by then we'd already lost Peter and Janette, who were staying at a different hotel and joining a new tour (that's game).

On our city walk, we went to the spice markets and Grand Bazaar, which were awesome to take photos of.  The colours were amazing!  And so were the crowds!

The next day was my birthday!!  For my birthday, I'd decided that I should fly from one country to another, so I didn't have a lot of time.  But I spent the morning at Ayasofya, which is an old mosque that doesn't operate anymore and is preserved as a museum.  It was so busy.  I'm sure last time I was there (when I went to the Middle East with Tucan Travel two years ago) I had the place almost to myself.  However, I'm hoping I still got some good photos...

I was panicking about how I was so sure something was going to go wrong and I wasn't going to get to Athens, so I basically ran from Ayasofya back to the hotel, even though I was well early, to catch my transfer...  Which didn't show up!  More next time.....