Between the mosque and the palace

The Blue mosque

The first night was short. Hard to sleep with the heath (found the clim only when I woke up in the morning) and the prayer call at 4 AM, but I managed to get a little bit of sleep.

When you visit Paris, you should see the Eiffel Tower first, right? In Istanbul, the Blue mosque is THE place to go.

In front, street vendors are waiting for tourists to sell them useless stuff or to try to get them to buy a cruise on the Bosphorus. Can't avoid it.

Inside the inner courtyard is the muslims entrance. Behind is the one for tourists. To visit, women must cover their head, shoulders, arms and legs. Men should at least cover their knees. A woman stands at the entrance to give away clothes to those who need to cover up. So there is no need to wear warm pants all day long in fear of missing out on the mosque.

From there, we went to the Cistern. Very cool (temperature wise) place under the city. Ideal for warm days.

But because the sun was still shining really hard, we went for a turkish ice cream. The real one, sour and kind of elastic. The one for which you have to go through a real show to be able to eat it. The ice cream man just tosses everything around for a while before giving the cone away.

We kept on moving to visit Topkapi palace. The harem is interesting there. Because it had many functions. And even if the view on the city is nice inside, it didn't look fun to be kept inside. At the entrance, our new travel partner found out her camera's battery was dying. But she forgot her charger at home. One less amateur photographer.

The death of cameras wouldn't stop there. Less than one hour later, while I was trying to hurry so a tourist wouldn't get in my picture, I fell and dropped my brand new camera on hard stones. Less than 24 hours after starting to use it, it was already dead. You know, when you stop smiling...

In the end, we went back to the hostel to get our luggage and got into a shuttle, which would take one hour, getting lost in the city, to reach the bus station. That place is pure chaos, with more buses than gates. People are pushing to get their tickets, they won't move to let you walk by them... Tastes like Asia.

We had just enough time to eat at the cafeteria, where the waiter might have never been tipped before... and we left for 12 hours on the bus to Göreme. That's exactly when I started feeling I might have a cold. Like everytime I travel.

In the bus, which would stop every three hours, service was included. But the smile was extra. And it seems like we didn't pay for it. One hour or two after we left, sitting at the back of the bus, we were getting to know the people behind us when we were told to keep quiet. We were disturbing apparently. Probably not as much as the baby who cried half of the night, though. There was an entertainment system too, like in planes. But with turkish movies only. Long road ahead.