Sirkeci

Today was the only full day i had in Istanbul as my tour started tomorrow and would take us straight out of the city. I may have time after my tour to explore the city, but for now, this was all my time available. But after a decent sleep in, plus breakfast, I had to do some organisational things before my tour started. As such, I spent a lot of the morning replying to emails, booking my Africa tour, and checking the details of my Turkish tour. After this, it was about midday, and I started to head toward my new accommodation. Despite being only about a 30-minute walk, after I checked in, I spent a decent bit of time recovering in the aircon. Although Portugal began to get quite cool in the evenings and nights, with nice temperatures during the days, Istanbul is still brutally hot. It gave me a good excuse to watch the NRL semi-finals either way. Unfortunately, I missed the AFL semi-finals in which the Brisbane team was also playing, but they ended up playing to a win over Carlton. It would have been great to see this, but unfortunately, travel preparation and checking into accommodations take priority. Had I known that the tour had actually booked me an apartment for the night, I could have watched both games from the comfort of a bed rather than having to drag my bag between accommodations. It is quite silly, Intrepid never told me about the additional nights' accommodation, but I did remember the travel agent mentioning it to me after the fact. I paid quite a bit of money to stay in a hotel near to the meeting point, too, that ended up being a pointless expense. But i digress. I spent a good couple hours watching the Broncos vs. The warriors in a great great. The Broncos played very well and ended up securing a comfortable win. By this time, it was afternoon, and I figured it was time for a walk around town.

I started by going to the Blue Mosque, the biggest and best mosque in the city, with amazing views. It is a spectacular monument that you can see from across the city, especially at night when it is lit up. Unfortunately, when I arrived, the queue was enourmas, and the heat made this a difficult thing to persist through. Therefore, I moved on to the next mosque. This was less spectacular, but the newer mosque had its own character about it. Unfortunately, I would not find out for myself as there were signs saying that you needed pants to enter. Although I was quite sure I could probably get through in shorts, I was not willing to wait in a line, just to get to the front and be told I couldn't enter. As such, I once again moved on. I was feeling quite lazy today, and the idea of waiting in lines didn't appeal to me. I made my way to the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and this was really cool. They sold some incredibly extravagant things (though surely fake), such as flashy jewellery, designer brands, and all the rest. Though this isn't really my style and everything looked kind of cheap so I just wandered around soaking up the culture and experience of Turkey. It was a much cleaner place than expected. The grand Bazaar and Istanbul in general. They are cramped and crowded places, and you would expect there to be little time for cleaning rubbish, but in actuality, people take pride in the city and always appear to keep things relatively clean. This doesn't necessarily hide the fact that it is quite a poor country. There are ruined buildings and dodgy infrastructure everywhere, but the cleanliness was a bit of a surprise to me.

I got back to the hotel and had a shower and relaxed before the meeting. I am sharing a room with another guy, an Englishmen, who seems really nice. I met him during our induction meeting to prepare us for the trip. The information wasn't particularly useful, mostly things we already knew, but he just basically went through the itinerary in more detail. There weren't any icebreakers, which I normally hate, but think it would have helped in this instance to know everyone's names and try know a bit about them to ensure I can remember them a bit more. Either way, we had our induction and were taken to a restaurant for dinner. We had to pay but it was a really nice place with plenty of good food. So nice complaints.Read more