happenings in istanbul

hey,

So the day after I arrived in Istanbul I walked through the Topkapi palace. It was pretty amazing. Very, very beautiful. And the Treasury was incredible! there were sooo many pieces of intricate and elaborate Jewelery and thrones and stuff. Oh and swords and guns! I wish I could have taken photos, but of course I wasn't able to, but I got some postcards which show some of the pretty cool stuff.

That day I also met up with Molly, Chris and Bahaa. It was great to see some friends again, because being alone I was starting to get a little bit bored. They were leaving the next day for London.

The next day I caught a ferry for 17.5 lira up the Bosphorous. The weather had cleared up by this stage, so it was a great day to do the cruise. When I got on, some young Turkish man realized pretty quickly that I was alone, and so he sat next to me and asked all the usual questions. 'Where are you from?' etc. When he started taking photos of me, i started getting a little creeped out. So I was a bit rude and just got up and walked away from him and found two english speaking ladies and asked them if I could stand with them because I had a unwanted suitor who wouldn't leave me alone. They were great and let me hang around them. We ended up spending the whole day together and had lunch. The cruise was great. Got to see lots of beautiful palaces and houses and eventually we got up to where the bosphorous meets the Black sea.

On wednesday I went to the Archeological museum, which was a little bit boring. I thought the Museum in Syria was much more interesting. Then I ended up in Taksim.

The next day I went for a walk to the Dolmache palace (ok the spelling is way off, but it's something like that). And i walked for a long time! and when I got there, it was closed. So that sucked. Then I tried to find some iron church place, but I couldn't find that and ended up in some suburb called Ortokoy, and that was lovely. Found a nice little cafe for lunch and found a super cheap designer store warehouse, so bought some more pressies for ppl.

The next day was Friday and that was the day I had to catch a flight to Beirut. I went to get money out, and all of a sudden realise my debit card is not in my pouch. So I raced back to my hostel to search my bags, and still no sign of my debit card. So that caused me a lot of stress. But i still have a credit card, so now i'm living off of cash advances, which isn't what i want to be doing, but I don't really have a choice.

That night I caught a flight from istanbul to Beirut. It was painful! To start off with, my flight was delayed by 2 hours. then the kid in front of me was terrified of flying and screamed the WHOLE way!!!!! So once I got through customs, and passport and visa stuff, i met my taxi driver at like 3am! Luckily he was still there waiting for me! even though I had booked him, I didn't think he would still be there.

So I arrived at 3:30am to my hostel, and woke the poor girl up sleeping in the dorm room with me, and then I finally got to bed and crashed.