Day 35 - Leaving Istanbul

Wow. We actually got up in time for the hotel breakfast!! Well, we kinda had to get up otherwise we'll miss our flight. Besides, we were so early that Maestro wasn't even open!


We went down to breakfast, and we bumped into the couple next door.....


We told Bellboy, and apparently they were Polish, and when they checked in, they asked him if he was interested in a threesome......

Anyway, breakfast. Hotel breakfast good. Kinky, spanky, 3some wanting couple bad.


We went down to reception and told Bellboy we wanted to go to Maestro for a coffee before leaving. He thought we were serious and chucked up a massive fuss, practically shoving me onto the couch before he ran off to make us a coffee instead.


So whilst we were sitting there having our instant coffees, Bellboy started teaching me Turkish, and insisted that I had to call him Askim.

Askimmmmmm!

Askimmmmmm (Honey!!)

We must've been pleased that I gave him a kiss, because next thing you know, he said he'll bring our luggage down. He runs off and comes back with some of our bags. The problem is, we haven't done our final check of making sure we had everything and he's just grabbed random stuff from the room. He also left my bag behind that had my camera and laptop in it!!

We jumped to our feet and raced off with Bellboy to get the rest of our stuff. Moishii had a broken bag he was going to leave behind as it doesn't have the long handle to carry over the shoulder. He decided to give it to Bellboy. This started off a massive raid. You see, we had stuff we didn't want to take back to Sydney, but it wasn't new enough to give to Seyda. So we were just going to chuck it. Next thing you know, Bellboy rips a plastic bag from us and starts loading it up with goodies. It looked a bit like that old tv show, supermarket spree? Where he ran around the room grabbing stuff we've left behind and shoved it into his bag. My shampoos, conditioners, facial scrub, all with just a few cm of stuff left. Moishii tried to throw his leftover cotton buds away and got screamed at by Bellboy. He even raided the mini bar and ran off with a bottle opener!!! Meanwhile, the two of us just stood there with our mouths hanging open.

We eventually finished packing our stuff, we had to protect some of it to make sure Bellboy didn't run off with it. We called a cab and off we went to the airport.

The rest of the flight was fairly event free. So here are some photos of airplane to fill the space

Really good grilled chicken

Day 34 - Last night in Istanbul with the taxi ride

We've given up trying to go to the Princess Island and making it to breakfast. Today was our last harrah in Istanbul. Of course, we start the day off at Maestro:

Strong morning tea to wake us up at 2pm

I went for a Kofte platter

Breakfast plater for Moishii

Cheapskates are skimping on the bread

Our bill comes in a little treasure chest

As we walked out, we took some last minute photos with the waiter/bible basher:


We also got a photo of the car parking guy. I don't know what exactly what he does. He stands in the middle of the road trying to help people park cars, but no one goes to Maestro except us??


We run back across the street to the hotel to grab our stuff when we noticed that the Lobby has turned into a store room. Looks like a Korean tour group has checked in, and they've bought a crate of instant noodles with them!!!


We had a little plan hatched, which involved us visiting a photo shop. More on this later.

Seeings it our last day, we decided that we need to hit the Grand Bazaar for any last minute shopping. We start making random purchases, before finding ourselves at the Greek Scarf guy's place where we played dress up again. This time round, he doesn't even hide the fact that he's looking down my top. He shakes my hand and doesn't let go so he could get a better look.


Out of nowhere, one of his friends popped up and took a photo with me as well. I finally had enough and Moishii had spent all his money on his Sultan's coat that we ran off to look for Jewelery guy. Apparently his wife is in labor and he'll need to run off any minute to go see his baby. In the meantime, we went nuts buying last minute gifts. I even scored myself a really nice amber pendant where again, he tries to rip me off. I'm not too sure what happened, but there was some negotiation, a free necklace thrown in and an popped button.

He sent his little monkey off to do work for him whilst we finalised our purchases. He comes running back all happy and smiling like Odie from Garfield. Apparently the first day at work, this guy smashed his glass counter top. Nice.


I also found a really nice hand beaded shawl with 2 peacocks on it that I wanted to buy my mum. Moishii reckons his mum would like it as well, so we both agreed that we didn't want to pay more than $30 each. We pick our scarfs and start the negotiation. The conversation went something like this:

Me: How much?
Him: $70 each. Very nice!
Me: $60 for 2
Him: No no!! Too cheap! Scarf expensive!!
Me: $60
Him: I do you special, $100!
Me: $60 *starts walking away*
Him: $90!! Come back! Come back!!
Me: $60
Him: I make no money! I do it for $80
Me: $60
Him: *Turns to Moishii* Say something to her!!!!!
Me: $60
Him: Ok ok. $70! *Starts to put the scarves in a bag*
Me: $60 *Takes $60 out and stands there*

He actually took the $60! LOL He even begged Moishii to stop me from being so ruthless. Like he would help. It was hard enough for him to stand there and no laugh!


We also went back to our Original Scarf Guy, who we found out was call Zulfu (This caused a 15 min laughing fit) because I wanted to pick up some hats as souvenirs for my workmates. After ripping us off yesterday, he went and just grabbed the hats I wanted and shoved it into my bag free of charge. They only cost him $2 each anyway....besides, we printed out a photo of us together and gave it to him.

On our way back to the hotel, I spotted this old lady selling hand knitted woollen socks. I thought it would be nice to buy them for my grandma. Even with the old and homeless I had to bargain. Moishii says shame on me. I say I know good value when I see it!

We get back to Maestro where it was time for lunch. I mean, its only been like 2 hours. Bellboy actually joined us this time round. Mind you, he rocked up, ordered a heap of food and drinks, ate and left.

Shepards salad

Guvec with rice and salad

To entertain us after lunch, we pulled out the lovely photos we got developed that morning, and decided to leave Maestro a good present:


We had a massive argument in the shop as to how many photos we needed to print out. I said 3, Moishii wanted to use up their paper supply!!

Left in the table tray

We went back to the hotel to do our packing before heading out to dinner in a few hours. Not before leaving our mark behind:

Moishii's hand luggage.......

My final packing

We realised we had a whole heap of stuff we didn't want to take back since they were heavy and easily replaced when back in Sydney. We threw everything into a big care package which we were going to regift to Moishii's friend. Oh, we also threw in a picture of Christine.

Once that we done, we grabbed our stuff and headed towards the ferry.

View of Istanbul from the ferry

Once we got off the ferry, we practically got ran over and beaten up before we managed to get a taxi who did an illegal U-turn across 4 lanes of traffic before getting completely lost. We eventually found the restaurant, which was past an army training base. There were warning signs all over the perimeter about us being shot if we trespassed. Lucky we made it in one piece, just in time to see Seyda making a grand entrance.


The restaurant we went to was really nice. It was a huge modern Turkish restaurant overlooking Istanbul and the sea. I didn't exactly know what was going on, so I just left the order up to the 2 of them.

Russian salad

Babaganoush

Strange, but very yummy puffy bread. Its all air inside

One half of the restaurant

Adana Kebab

Shish Kebab

Lamb Kebab cooked in yoghurt

View from the restaurant

Free snacks when waiting for a cab

So the 3 of us jump into a cab, where the plan is to drop Seyda off at her apartment, when we'll go catch the ferry. So Seyda sits at the front, and me and Moishii sits in the back. As the cab pulls up outside her apartment, Seyda half climbs to the back of the cab to give Moishii a hug goodbye. Because I'm sitting directly behind her, she gets out of the cab and walks to the back door of the cab. Just as she opens the door, the cab driver starts to drive off. So here I am in a moving taxi, with an open door that Seyda is just hanging on to the handle. We started screaming for him to stop the cab before she gets dragged under. We scream at the cab driver, say our goodbyes before she closes the door and we're ok to drive off again.

2mins later, Me and Moishii has absorbed the fact that Seyda almost got dragged under the cab, and it would've been partially my fault. Then we started arguing as to whether I should slam the door shut to save myself or would I be dragged under as well in my attempts to save her. This started a massive laughing fit where we were sitting at the back of the cab, snorting into our sleeves to stop ourselves from laughing out loud. I swear we can't go anywhere without causing an incident. I CAN'T SAY GOODBYE WITHOUT ALMOST KILLING SOMEONE! haha

We jump out of the cab to realise that the last ferry of the night is going to leave in 1min. We run to get our tickets where Moishii almost punches someone in the head for being too slow before we did the 200m dash and leaped onto the ferry.

Now that we were safe and sound and had a good 30mins to get back to the hotel, we decided to amuse ourselves. We started leaving photos of Christine on the boat.

We walked back to the hotel and decided to go to Maestro one last time.

Apple tea

And just to keep ourselves amused, I went into the toilet to leave another picture of Christine behind.


We went back to the hotel and saw reception guy there. We grabbed photos and Moishii started talking to him, actually, I think Moishii was trying to keep him distracted as I started planting photos of Christine in the postcard rack.

We ended the night with more packing before we crashed into bed. Not before the couple next door started going for it again.

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.....