Hello from Istanbul

Hi there

Where to start??? First of all, I made safe and sound to Istanbul on Saturday evening.  Flight was great until the very end, we were about 20 seconds from landing when all of a sudden the plane shot back up in the air again.  There was a scary few seconds where everyone looked at each other with very confused faces before the pilot came on and gave an explanation in Turkish of what had happened - the translation in English was an 'incident'!  Anyway, we circled for about 20 minutes then landed perfectly :-)

I cheated slightly and got the hotel to pick me up so there was no stress there.  Got checked in, got myself a chicken kebab and orange juice from the street vendor near the hotel, which was lovely.  All for a princely 5 lire (about £2)!  There was a message on our facebook page from some of the guys in the group saying where they were going so I headed out to meet them - it was great to finally meet them in person after all this time.  We headed up to see the Blue Mosque all lit up at night.......

 

Sunday was great, weather not so great.  Rain was forecast but it did manage to stay away for most of the day.  I headed out to the Blue Mosque to see it in the daylight......

 

and the inside.....

(some info on this if you are interested - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_Ahmed_Mosque)

 

I managed to get in and round before midday prayers and then headed over to the Hagia Sogia which is straight across from it.....

 

Some info on the Hagia Sofia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia

 





After that I headed back to the hotel as we had a welcome meeting.  Firstly I got to mee my roommate Jo, who is the same age as me and really nice.  Then we headed down and met up with the whole Odyseey clan.  There are 22 of us in total, including Simon and Teresa our crew.  I'll talk more about everyone in coming posts.  We all went out for a lovely meal then a few beers to break the ice - I think we'll all get along nicely!

 

Today the weather was just like home - cold, wet and windy.  No chance for homesickness anyway!  Firstly though, I went to the spice market which was very colourful.....

 

 

From there to the Grand Bazaar........

 

 

And from there to the Basilica cisterns .........

 

 

 

That's all for now.  Tomorrow we meet our truck for the first time (many pictures to follow - I know you are all curious) and head off out of the city for our first camp for 2 nights.  Can't remember where it is but it's about a 6 hour drive.  From there we will be able to go to Gallipoli and Troy.  After that Kusadasi!  Until then xxx

 

PS - pictures aren't great as i've had problems with the camera.  We think it's a faulty memory card so i've bought another to try it out.