Anyway, the bus picked us up and we got to the airport. One thing we noticed about Greek airports, is that the Greeks are not one for lines. If they are Greek and speak Greek, then they just go to the front....those lines are really just suggestions for them and not requirements.
We got to Istanbul, and it was way more modern than I had originally thought it would be. The airport was super nice, but as usual our Gate 1 person (Gate 1 is the tour co btw, which i would NEVER recommend even to my worst enemy--they were super lame) was dumb and didnt bother to check off people as they checked in with him so we ended up waiting at the airport about half an hour longer than necessary. Also when we loaded the bus up, we told him our hotel, but they didnt put my luggage in until the end, and how come at the first hotel stop (which was not ours) I saw them hauling away Big Red! So I fly out of the bus into the streets to pry it away from the bellman and place it back on the bus. can you people get a system in place for my trip? hellooooo. So we finally get to our hotel and as per usual it is was in a sort of sketchy location. The hotel and staff were super nice, but the hotel was in this weird part of town that was mainly textile stores, so there were all these people pulling hand trucks with these enormous bundles through the streets. They were all about manual labor in Turkey. It was pretty loco.
We checked in and figured that since we were only there for a couple of days we should book up some tours. People had been telling us that Istanbul was not safe for women to be traveling alone at night so at that point we knew we were not going to be roaming the streets.
We booked our tours, including a Whirling Dirvish show which I will write about later, and then figured we should go get our bearings and take the tram so we knew where things were.
Walking out of the hotel was a very surreal experience. I was totally scared because there are mainly men on the streets, and they were all leering at us. It didn't help that there was pure chaos with traffic so with every horn honking i was completely on edge. I was just clutching my purse like a freak and walking at a clip pace. Of course we took a wrong turn on our first foray out, but we didnt stray far, we found the metro pretty quickly, figured out how to get some tokens and then got on the tram.
The Turkish language pretty much looks like ours (for some reason, i thought it would look more arabic) but the sounds are totally different. They have silent g's and those two dots over some of the vowels, and the language when being spoken can sound really aggressive. So of course i didnt know what the hell was going on--are you fighting? are you talking to me? what is happening.
We got onto the tram after we let one pass because it was ass to elbow crowded and then took the train to the stop that the hotel guy told us the whirling dervish show was at--the show wasnt until the evening, but we wanted to make sure we knew where it was. Of course the guy told us the stop AFTER the w.d. stop and blasted all, it was a super crowded sketchy stop. I think the thing that made me the most uneasy was that there was no personal space and that you always had to know where you were at all times other wise you could get run down.
We found the dirvish spot which incidentally is held at the old train station for the Orient Express and talked to someone from the turkish tourism group, who told us he'd been waiting for us all day long. That seemed to be a theme. everyone we met there had been waiting to meet us for the day, their life, etc. Random. After we cased out the joint we got back on the tram and headed to the Blue Mosque.
We got to the mosque and you had to take off your shoes--they provide you with plastic bags as well as a scarf if your shoulders/legs are bare. That includes guys, so of course i took pics of guys that looked like they were wearing skirts. Those were all tourists of course because the actual worshippers in the mosque would know the dress code before they rolled in to the mosque.
the mosque was incredible. It was ginormous and the decor inside was super intricate. The main worship area was just for men, but in the back and upstairs in the balcony women could worship. Ugh. So sexist. Back of the bus women. Make sure you have my dinner cooked and my babies fed. Sigh.
After we went to the mosque, we paid tribute to the Istanbul Starbucks and had a cold bev and then headed back to the hotel to rest before the dirvish show.
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