After a long, long day with loads of walking yesterday at the Topkapi Palace, I woke up with back pain from hell. Woke up at 3.30am that is and had a lot of difficulty getting back to sleep…. bad back bad. So some uncalculated number of pain killers and some breakfast later, we decided it might be a good idea to take it a bit easy today. Ventured out this morning to enjoy the thrills and spills of public transport Istanbul style and was pleasantly surprised to find it cheap, clean, air conditioned, quick and uber efficient! Wish we had a light rail like this back in BrisVegas…. YTL1.30 to get on and go as far as you want.
We took the train up to the Suleymaniye Mosque… and it was absolutely gorgeous. This mosque is more of a ‘working’ mosque for want of a better term. There were no gaggles of French tourists or gawking school children, and the place had a peaceful and serene atmosphere. It was wonderful to be able to wander around and have a good look without feeling like you were being rushed out for the next lot of tourists to pile in.
After wandering around the mosque for a while, we went to the Grand Bazaar again, this time with a view to doing some shopping and not just whipping through running and hiding from the awfully pushing vendors. So we meandered through the bazaar this time, I learnt to keep walking and not to repsond every time someone called ‘hey lady’ (hey… pretty lady… how you doing? 😉 and Dr Nick learnt how to carry something in his right hand so he didn’t have to shake hands as everyone tried to way lay him! 🙂
In all, a much more successful shopping trip, some lovely beads, pashminas (plural) for everyone back home and some Turkish bath cloths found their way into my possession!
Only down side…. no one takes Visa at the bazaar. How bizarre! So now I’m running short of currency already! Off to the banque tomorrow with you lassie to get some more yettels!
On a whim, we thought we go try and check out the sinema to see if they were showing the latest installment of the Pirates of the Carribean. Which they were… and the lady behind the ticket booth did assure us (in broken English) that it was indeed being showin IN ENGLISH. But I have a not so fond memory of being told a similar furfy from a ticket booth chickie in Munich many years ago when attempt to see Forrest Gump at the cinema… only to discover after a long and drawn out opening sequence (that damned feather – do you remember it?) that Forrest was fondling a box of pralines and we couldn’t understand a word of it as it was dubbed into German even though we had assurances that it wouldn’t be. Anyway, must have been in a devil may care mood this afternoon, as we braved the Pirates being in English. Had much better luck this time around, and it was indeed in English….. shame it wasn’t also in surround sound and minus filthy smokers :S
.