Don't Let The Bed Bugs Bite

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The traffic in Istanbul first thing in the morning is atrocious and yet all the coaches arrive then. We were an hour and a half late because of the rush hour traffic. We got on the metro around nine but it wasn't that bad, neither was the tram. We found our hostel "Cordial House" very easily however we were told check in wasn't until twelve thirty. We dumped our bags in their luggage room and asked about tickets to football games. The guy there was utterly useless but we waited a while until the information office opened upstairs. After pestering them for a while we got some better information, and when we had finished our room was ready. The room was very draughty and we had to trap a blanket over the window to ease the coldness somewhat. There is a distinct difference in temperature here than in Pamukkale, it is cold.

We walked over the bridge to Taksim where we puffed our way to the top of a very steep road to get to the main modern centre of Istanbul. The street was bustling and packed full of shops which we looked at whilst looking for a biletix. We went into a book shop in the hope of finding English books but there weren't any. A lot further down the street we decided it would be best to ask someone where the biletix was. A guy pointed us in the direction of Ada the very same bookshop we had been in earlier. Slightly perturbed we walked rather briskly back to the bookshop and queued up. The girl serving couldn't speak English but portrayed that the biletix was no longer there but it was one kilometer back the way we had just come from. Well our feet were beginning to hurt and we were running out of time, so we went all the way to the top of the road again. The bookshop the biletix was in had signs up saying the Fenerbahce vs PSV game was sold out which is what we expected. We asked about the Galatasaray game and he said there were tickets but we would have to go to the biletix in the metro station to buy them because his computer was down. So we marched down to the metro and asked a very kind police man to point us in the right direction but he took us there himself. We struggled to tell the guy in the ticket office where we wanted to sit, but I think we got the right ones.

We dragged ourselves all the way back to the hostel and collapsed in one exhausted heap on the bed. The plan was to go and watch the Liverpool vs. Besiktas game somewhere and then get food afterwards. I had a shower out of necessity but struggled to stay awake during it, Rob shaved his head. In the room we made cheesy wraps with food leftover from the journey and then the warm softness of the bed was too much to ignore. We set an alarm for two hours sleep to get up at nine and then both of us fell into a very heavy sleep. Around eleven, Rob woke me to say that we had slept through the alarm. We both kind of shrugged and rolled over to go back to sleep.

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Photos

Here Kitty Kitty
Its only a few meters you can jump it

Comments

[Brian]

Football madness
Hi What a match you missed 8-0 to Liverpool that would have gone down well in Turkey, dont forget Galatasarays ground is not nicknamed Hell fof nothing ,keep your heads down if you do get there. Brian