Let the fun and gmes begin!

Day 1: Yay! I am finally in Istanbul! after 6 months of talk, I finally made it! Moishii met me at the airport and we made our way to the hotel to drop my stuff off. We decided to cab it to the hotel. This was my first experience in an istanbul taxi. Now i know where Moishii gets his driving skills from! Lights mean nothing. Indicators mean nothing. Speed limits mean nothing. Pedestrian crossings mean nothing. Lane markings mean nothing. You will be going at 60km/hr when the driver will slam on the brakes because someone decides to cross the road. The best bit is, you don't need to wear seat belts in Turkey. They have seat belts in the car, and because i was fearing for my life, I thought I'd better put it on just in case, only to find out they have removed the buckles.....YAY!

Anyway, we got to the hotel in one piece. Because we were early, we coldn't check in so we left my lugagge there and headed straight for the Grand Bazaar! We had a quick stop for me to load up on turkish coffee and a few yummy turkish snacks. I have no idea what they are....but tasted dammn good! (I think I found a pea in my chocolate)

Finally made it to the much talked about Grand Bazaar only to find myself totally overwhelmed by the amount of shops, people and shiny shiny things! I'm like a moth! I'm automatically drawn to lights! We spent about 3 hours in the Grand Bazaar only to go around in circles because we got totally lost! All the shops look the same and most of them sell similar things! It took u 3 hours to find our way out of there and we've only been to a tiny portion of the place! LIKE OMG!

And btw, I exercised great self control! I only bought shawl and a ring! That might have to do with the whole bargaining thing. I've been told not to offer more than 25% of their asking price, but I feel really bad about it and tend to offer 30-50% of the asking price. Maybe thats why they don't want to sell to me...oh wells. I still have a few days.

We decided to head towards Taksim Square which is like the Pitt St mall of Istanbul. When we got there, we noticed that there was riot/bomb squads EVERYWHERE! Like every intersection! Just swarms of them standing on the street ready to charge!! LIKE OMG!! Cherry is stalking us! So we did the most logical thing. We ran to the nearest phone booth and called cherry. Unfortunetly, she wasn't answering her phone so we just left a message. MAUahaUaha *Evil Laugh*

Running away from the bomb squad, we headed back to our hotel to check in so we can shower before we go out again. We get to the hotel only to find out that their Internet booking has been stuffed (Despite the fact that I didn't book via the net) and that we have no room! @%#$^#@^@$^ BUT, this is the best bit, they went and upgraded us to another hotel down the road which is "poshier" than the one we were going to stay in! So we trudged on over to the hotel and checked into our room. Yay you say? Ahhhh....life is never that simple for Oishii and Moishii. Our air conditioning was broken. The porter was tring to demo to us how simple it was to turn the aircon on. After banging on random buttons for awhile, he realised that it was screwed. So he goes and calls some other guy to come in and try and fix the damn thing. Moishii was asleep so I had to deal with the guy who said "No problem. Technical service" and then walks out. Aircon remains broken until an hour later when another guy rocks up to "fix" the aircon only to find that some asshole had manually turned the aircon off! ARGH@#% The life of Oishii and Moishii...this all happened in the space of 6 hours. Lets see what happens after dinner tonight! AehaHahe