Day 14 - Istanbul - The Blue Mosque to the Grand Bazaar

A view from the bus as we are touring around Istanbul the Blue Mosque dominates the skyline

We LOVED istanbul! This is a city I think I would come back to and spend more time in. The people we SO friendly and all the men fell in love with Nicholas. You can see that this culture adore boys! Everywhere we went, so many people wanted to touch his face, ruffle his hair, kiss him on the cheek, even share their food with him! It was freaking Olivia out a bit, she didn't like everyone ogling Nic. He loved all the attention, got us a bargain or two and got to taste a bit of turkish food along the way!

These men offered  Nic and Liv to sit down and share their lunch .

We thought we were going on a tour which would include the underground cisterns to see Medusa's Head along with shopping at the Grand bazaar. As it turned out, we got ourselves onto the 'Deluxe tour' which meant we paid more money to see palace after mosque after palace with a TINY bit of time at the grand bazaar.....:(

The Blue Mosque is called that because of all the beautifully decorated tiles and mosaics (mostly in blue)

We saw the Blue Mosque, learnt quite a bit about the Muslim religion (which was actually very interesting) and then we went to the Grand Bazaar BUT along the way, we had to stop and have morning tea at this Carpet place. Ben and I actually told the tour guide we were going to skip the Fakari Rug sales pitch and go straight to the Bazaar, but she wouldn't let us, she said "You MUST come and see, it is very interesting, for the children especially and an important part of our culture, you will be sorry to miss it; it will only take 10 minutes" So we went. SPEWING. It went for 40 minutes and the Danoz Direct sales guy wasn't as funny as he thought he was. We got to have an apple tea though and that was nice. So at the very first opportunity we escaped and bolted to the bazaar to spend the fastest hour of the day seeing quite possibly only 1% of it. It was great! They have LOADS of knock offs (I bought a Gucci belt for $20) and missed out on the most beautiful Gucci Bag I've ever seen reproduced. He started out asking $600 Turkish Lira ($400 AUD) and ended up coming down as far as $120 TL as "the first sale of the day" special - but because we'd only been there for 5 minutes, I didn't know what else was available (remember that email about the lady buying the husband in the department store and went all the way to the top floor and lost it all? That was me. I should have been the man that was happy to take the first good offer he came across). After half an hour quickly looking at everyone else's wares, I soon realised that that offer was amazing for the quality of that bag, so we went back and do you know what the proprietor said? He said "Now, I sell to you for $200 TL because I've made 2 other sales", we were so offended we told him "your loss", but in fact, it was mine. Even at $150 AUD that was a good buy.  Oh well, you win some and you loose some (There's always KL girls...;) So we bought a few other cacarezzi under pressure to get back to our meeting point at 11am to continue our excursion and left the bazaar with a feeling of unfinished business.

The Grand Bazaar  that stretches on for miles (if you look closely behind Lee Lee i think you can see the Gucci bag)

We then walked for 10 minutes to practically the same spot we started at the Blue Mosque and saw the Saint Sophia Museum, which was a multi purpose building used as both a Catholic Church and a Mosque when it was being used. It no longer gets used for either but has been turned into a museum instead. It was quite elaborate and very lovely.

The Tulip festival is on and they are every where 

The beautiful Sultans Palace (that serves pasta)

We then went to the whole other side of the city to a magnificent palace that used to belong to a Sultan to have lunch. We were a bit excited about the possible magnificent Turkish spread we were about to experience and were devastated when we lifted the first galosh and found pasta!  Because we are on an MSC cruise excursion, they catered for the Italians and served a very Italian banquet with one or two Turkish dishes :( I can't like this cruising business :) We then got on a ferry which took us back to once again the Blue Mosque and we were being taken to another palace for the next 2 hours. At this point, we made an executive decision to ditch the tour (much to our guide's disgust) and go and see Medusa's head on our own and then spend more time at the Grand bazaar!

The Spice section of the bazaar the colours are amazing 

It was the BEST part of the day and confirmed for us we are definite solo travellers and don't like to be confined to itineraries. The underground cistern was AMAZING it was like a whole other world down there. Medusa's head wasn't that exciting, but at least we got to see it. I think we would have been devastated to have left Istanbul and not done it.

This is the Cisterns that run under the city amazing 

Yes Medusa is upside down and not that exciting ,she lives under a large Roman Column 

Our second time in the Bazaar was much more fun, we picked up quite a few more bargains, Nic got a bit more attention and we just generally had a ball. We left ourselves 45 minutes to get back to the ship (The guide told us to allow half an hour). One of the stall holders that fell in love with Nic told us an 'easy way' to get to the port and we ended up winding our way through kilometres of bazaar that we didn't even realise existed. It was truly amazing but very nerve wracking because we started panicking that we weren't going to make it back to the ship in time! We finally managed to get into a taxi with a man who didn't speak a word of english but was very welcoming anyway. He belched a couple of times which set the kids off on a giggling fest. He then dropped us off and indicated that we only had to go around the corner. We could see the ship, so thought ok, paid him and out we got. OMG. We were still at least 2 kms away from the entry gate and it was so stressful because we could see the ship the whole time but could work out how to get in!

Any one for a Turkish Rug 

In the end, we boarded the ship at 4:15pm and we were scheduled to leave at 4:30 but the ship didn't actually leave port until 5:15 because 2 of our passengers got arrested at the entry. Apparently there were police there waiting for them! We don't know what for though... (we found out the following day at lunch)

We decided that we weren't going to go to our dinner sitting and instead we went to the Royal Theatre to watch the live show (which was GREAT) and then we went to the Oriental Restaurant for dinner and had the best food we've had since leaving Venice. In fact, I think we'll probably do that again tomorrow night!

We have to put our clocks forward again as we're crossing over the international time line in the other direction tonight, so hopefully we'll catch up on some much needed sleep!