Day 33 - Istanbul, the ride, the smoke and the Turkish Night

We've been meaning to go to the Princess Island for the past few days. Every day we aim to get up at 9am to catch a ferry to the Princess Island and spend the day there. Every day, the alarm goes off, we open one eye and look at each other before going back to sleep. Today was no exception. It was way after 2pm by the time we got ready. As usual, no hotel breakfast for us. Only berocca and cough syrup. We did make it across the road to Maestro for breakfast/lunch again.

Stingey on the bread again

Morning tea to wake me up

Waiter guy on the streets

New potential for Christine

Guvec for my breakfast

Turkish rice

Breakfast plate for Moishii

After we paid for our meal, we struck up a conversation with waiter. He offered to show us the upstairs part of the restaurant, which we've never seen before. We walk upstairs when next thing you know, he practically shoves me onto a bench and told me to stay there. Then he grabs Moishii and drags him to the other side of the room. I knew something wasn't right, so I immediately took a photo.


My initial reaction was that he's trying to convince Moishii to go to a brothel or organise a hooker for him. Well was I wrong or what. Apparently, he's a complete religious nut, and started questioning Moishii's faith. Whether he goes to the mosque, whether he reads/memorized the Koran and.......whether....... *cough* he's had the snip. Who the hell asks such a question?

After his 15min of preaching, they both come back over, and suddenly he starts giving me a lecture about how I needed to learn how to speak Turkish, but it was important and essential that I spoke Turkish. WTF?

We quickly made a get away and headed towards the supermarket to grab more water, tissues and cough lollies. Of course, the perverted restaurant owner guy had another perve at me and practically pulled a muscle to check out my chest.


We went back to the hotel where we booked a Turkish night for tonight. Originally we had asked Bellboy to find out how much it was, and he quoted us 120euros for the 2 of us. I had a COMPLETE fit and refused to pay that much! The last time we did the Turkish night, it was 35euros! We asked the reception guy who quoted us 40euros each. Bellboy found out that we busted him trying to rip us off, which was why we got the room swap yesterday.

With that booked, we grabbed our DSLR and headed off towards the Blue Mosque. We wanted to do the horse drawn carriage ride around Sultanahmet. We had a bit of time before the ride to do a bit of sight seeing and photo taking.




Between the short tour and the deluxe tour, it was $5 difference. We figured we might as well go out all out and do the deluxe tour. When we told the tour operator, his jaw practically dropped to the ground. I don't think ANYONE has ever requested the delux tour.

We hop onto the carriage and off we went for a ride around town:

Horse fighting the traffic

I felt like a complete celebrity on the horse drawn carriage. Everyone started waving at us!



Well, almost everyone. A few people looked at us as if we had killed half of their family! I should've thrown this at them:

Look VERY closely...

After our ride ended, we headed back to Sude Konak where we were going to meet up with Vural. We even managed to stop to get our fortunes told by the bunnies:


I also decided to quickly jump on the net to do our online flight check in whilst we were waiting. And we decided to keep ourselves amused:


Vural finally showed up so we could grab a quick photo before we ducked across the road to Maestro to give the Turkish Bong a go.


Tea, coffee, Turkish bong, what else do you need? :P

The setup

*puff**puff*

After about 30mins, I started getting head spins. The funny thing was (Yeh it WAS FUNNY), it was making our throat better and helping my cough!

We finally decided to walk it off and also grab some tape for tonight's Turkish Night. The puffing has made us hungry and we knew dinner won't happen til about 9pm, so we decided to share a Kokorec. We never figured out what Kokorec is from our last 2 trips, so we just dived right on in:

Buns warming in the oven

Kokorec

Well.....2 bites into it and I figured out what Kokorec is. It is seasoned lamb intestines that have been skewered and BBQ'd. I actually really liked it and would order it again. The intestines were finely chopped up with some herbs and onions and shoved into a warmed roll. MmMMm

We went back to the hotel to rest up and got ready for our big night out. The bus came and picked us up and it took us an hour to get there because of the worst traffic jam ever. The guide ended up jumping off the bus to try and find the hotel to pick up other people and the bus continued to drive down the road. This meant the people who were already late, had to run the 500m to get back onto the bus.

We finally got to the restaurant "Sultana's" where we were escorted to our front row seats! This is NEVER a good sign. We never get good seats. If we get something good, it means something will go HORRIBLY bad pretty soon.......We decided to just enjoy ourselves for now.

Hot and cold Mezze

Side Salad

Grilled chicken with rice and chips

Fresh fruit

Fresh Helva and cakes

And the show begins!!

Bellydancer

Folk dancing

More belly dancing

The shoes they dance in

The face is the guy's belly!

Another belly dancer

Cheers!

So the night ended for us around 10:30pm. I think there might be more shows, but the bus was leaving and we were both exhausted. We walked outside to wait for the bus and spotted this next door to us:


I don't want to know what type of show it is........just as we were debating about the place, the started raining. Luckily the bus came and we hopped on. Then we started going around the block again and again, circling the prostitutes on the streets. After 20mins, we finally found the first hotel to drop people off at.

15mins later, we come to a grinding halt. Its bucketing down rain and we're not moving. 15mins later, we've moved about 500ms. Lightening. Another 10mins and we've gone another 200m. Its complete gridlock and utter chaos. It wasn't until about 1:30am that we FINALLY got dropped off at our hotel. And we were the last people to get dropped off. What are the chances of that? About the same chance as us getting a front row seat.

We got home so late, even Maestro had closed. We tried banging on the door to get some soup, but nope. We walk into the hotel and the reception guy is there. Seeing my DSLR, he told me to go to the terrace to get some night shots since the rain had stopped. However, he forgot one minor detail. The terrace was closed!! FFS!

I decided to jump on the net whilst I was still awake. Reception guy gave us a glass of wine each when we decided to act on a little plan we concocted whilst we were stuck on the bus. What the plan? Well, you'll find out soon. But it involved the internet, my USB key and wine.

We went back to our room to finally crash, when next door started going for it again. There was laughing and running around the room followed by some....errrrr.... peculiar "noises". What a great way to end the night.....