We had a wonderful second day in Istanbul, and I must say I was not at all ready to leave. I would love to go back and spend a couple of weeks exploring the city.
I started off the day sick (I threw up after breakfast), I think from the Doxycycline (malaria medicine) that I took on an empty stomach. After sleeping it off a bit, we checked out of our hotel and hit the streets around 10:30. We got to spend a lot more time exploring on foot, which was a lot of fun. We went first to the Grand Bazaar, where Jenny bought some beautiful, Turkish-made "genie" shoes, a bronze lamp, and we both got some jewelry and gorgeous scarves.
The Grand Bazaar wasn't quite as crazy as we were expecting, but we did get the funny comments from shop keepers that we had anticipated from our travels before. We heard things like, "You are an angel." "You are Jennifer Lopez." "Hello. He wants to be your boyfriend." and the like. It's all pretty amusing.
We had some great finds, and met some fun people. One shopkeeper in particular won us over by saying, "Hello! Come to my shop, we are cheaper than WalMart! It's true. It is my way or the highway!" Considering everyone else's English, we stopped dead in our tracks when we heard this and just started laughing with the shopkeeper. He ended up being a really cool guy, and actually had pictures of people like Liam Neeson, Laura Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Danny Glover in his shop.
We went to the Blue Mosque, which was absolutely breathtaking. We really enjoyed being there, and seeing people worship. We also met some really friendly American brothers, one of which was from Little Rock, AK (shout out to Matthew). And--his wife is from Jonesboro!!
Our favorite quote from the Blue Mosque was me saying, "Dangit, I forgot my passalong cards!" We had a laugh about that, considering the circumstances.
We were terribly sad to leave Turkey--especially considering that yesterday was sunny and warm--but we are very excited for our new adventure to begin in UGANDA!!
For some reason, it's not letting me upload pictures this time. So you'll have to check out my Facebook page (sorry).
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