Hello Istanbul!

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So, the last few days we have been travelling from Edinburgh to London then to Istanbul. Had a few lil dramas like when we thought we had paid for 1 piece of checked in luggage but turned out once we got to the airport we hadn’t. Luckily easyjet doesn’t have a hand luggage weight limit so the only thing we had to forgo was the sunscreen! Noooo not the sunscreen! So we find our 3 lil containers of moisturiser and emptied them into the bin – it ended up smeared all over the rim of the bin – and filled them with some of the sunscreen so we didn’t have to sacrifice the whole thing! The womens all around was on that night so we had got to the airport to watch it and manage dto get the bar owner to change all 3 of the big screens to the gym! Haha so hopefully everyone in the airport wanted to watch it! So that was good times! We stayed the night at a airort hotel and were up early at 5.30am to get the flight to Istanbul. Crazy amount of ppl at Luton but luckily we got rushed through cos our flight was boarding! Flight to Istanbul was all good and we got on a bus from the airport to Taxim square but then were completely lost as to what to do so after getting drenched with the bucketing down of rain and then dried super fast from the sudden bout of intense ehat we finally found a cab to take us to hotel. traffic in Istanbul is a nightmare!! So took us forever but finally found our hotel and the whole things was so gold! Our room was insane! Huge and just got everywhere! Check out the pics! We were knackered and just wanted to watch the Olympics really so cos we couldn’t find the channel on our tv (out of 246 channels!) we went across the road and the guy put on eurosport for us and we settled i for the evening! 4.5 hours in this pub watching the Olympics. Good start! J

So, this morning we decided after our lazy day yesterday we’d better actually see a bit of Istanbul. The tour which starts tomo though is covering most of the main sights so we got up and had our complementary breakie which was on the roof terrace which had an amazing view of the city and hagia sofia and the blue mosque! Breakie was very average but i think my expectations are ridiculously high after Tenerife with mum and dad! So we had our muesli and packe du our stuff to go in ssearch of our new hotel where we were meeting the tour tonight. It wa sonly 1km away so cos of bens amazing directioning we got there relatively quickly but weren’t able to check in. So we just left our bags and decided to go in search of the grand bazaar. Which jen had recommended we do! J We found it and it was pretty cool! All inside thankfully cos it started bucketing down with rain again! Most shops all selling the same thing and all the guys trying to get us in their shops! 2 of the guys tried to get ben in by saying “come inside and buy something for your secretaries!” Which we thought was a bit odd but we went with it. We spent a few hours in the bazaar looking around. Kate bought a few scarves, I got an anklet which i had been looking for for a while and ben got a haircut! It was a bit of a scary experience at the ol Turkish barber but the guy was good and he didn’t take too much off so i was pleased. But still took alot of hair off enough for ben to be staked and even splashed him with a bit of seedy Turkish cologne to finish! After the bazaar we decided to go find lunch somewhere that had Olympics showing so on the way we got caught by this guy out the front of his restaurant pretty much pushing us inside. It looked like an ok place so i said only if you have a big scree with the Olympics showing. He said yes yes and shoved us inside! Haha when we got inside the men told us the TV was broken but then had a team of about 5 guys trying to fix it which they did, and then find the right channel, which they did! So we had aother great lil posie fr the Olympics! And it was the 100m heats which was good viewing! And the food was amazing!! We had chicken shish kebabs which were so so yummy! I think our consumption of meat this trip is going to be excessively high!

After lunch and tv watching for a few hours we headed back to the hotel to check in and have a lil break before meeting everyone and having our meeting. And at 7pm we went downstairs and met the group. Only 16 of us which is nice and not everyone is doing the same tour which is kind of confusing so only 8 ppl doing the whole tour with us. We then all went out to dinner to a really nice Turkish restaurant. It was really nice food and got to know some of the group which was cool. The tour sounds really good so we’re all excited. We were back at the hotel by 11 and got to bed, watched a bit more Olympics and got ready for our 9am start to explore Istanbul.

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Comments

[Steefen]

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