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Published: June 24th 2009
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Blue Mosque
The largest Mosque in Turkey. Beautiful from the outside. Day 14
After our arrival to Istanbul yesterday we took a walk around the area of our hotel. Taxim is in the main part of town right near tons of shops and restaurants. Istanbul is full of great areas all over the city and with 10 million residents every where is busy, but it is beautiful to walk around the shopping districts and restaurants and clubs. The hotel recommended a great restaurant where we ate traditional Turkish food. The hotel employee even walked us to the restaurant. What great service! And the food was yummy!
Today we did the traditional day tour of Istanbul. Istanbul is a very pretty town and much cleaner than we expected. After some bus shuffling we were off to see the sites. We visited some mosques, sultans' palaces and a bazaar. This bazaar was a lot better than the ones in Cairo, we didn't have anyone dragging us into the shops or chasing after us when we didn't buy anything.
Our guide was a bit entertaining in that he did not hesitate to insert his own political opinion in his dialogue. In discussions about Turkey entering the EU he advised us that everyone
in Europe is unhappy and the EU just takes over your financial system then steals all of the money and leaves your country broke. He also had quite a few opinions of non-Muslims (aka infidels, that would be us) that were holding them back. He was very hard to follow with his insight but we did pick up a few interesting facts. But unlike Egypt we think the book is much more accurate than the guide in this case.
We finished the tour with a visit to the Sultans' Palace. It was massive and beautiful. We saw tons of jewels including a diamond the size of a peach. We also walked through one of the buildings that holds the bones of John the Baptist, a super old, hand-written Koran and other religious relics belonging to Christianity, Judaism and Muslim. However, according to our guide, the late Pope JP II wanted everything back at the Vatican, and Israel gave the museum a blank check for their relics. That is if you believe in that stuff . . . according to our guide.
We returned to our hotel and of course, right next to it, was a small sandwich/ice cream
Kirsten in the Mosque
Always dressed for the mosque. shop. We stopped to enjoy a cone on a hot day. Little did we know, we each ordered what we thought was a waffle cone of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, not so much. Basically, we ordered a waffle, coated in melted milk chocolate and then had a couple of scoops of ice cream on it. It was folded like a sandwich. So we just ate over a whole day's worth of calories in roughly 14 minutes. What can we say, we are on vacation and had to indulge ourselves.
Turkey will definitely be a whirlwind tour. We are either at an airport, in a plane, or on a tour. Don't worry though, we do have a date at a Turkish Bath house later in the week, so you know that will be full of surprises. Maybe not as many surprises now that we had the "Cleopatra" in Egypt.
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Lynne
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Hotel
How about the name of your hotel??????