Istanbul - Day Three.

As we missed out on entering the Blue Mosque yesterday, we headed there first today. Not early, and certainly not early enough to avoid the line, which we join - Willy looks at me and asks if I really want to do this... The line moves quickly though, as I had sort of expected it would. I pass the clothing inspection, which sounds ridiculous but makes me happy, I don't want to wear one of the communal burqas - there are plenty of them being worn, maybe one in four or five female tourists are given one. Men aren't excluded from the clothing checks either and there are many men wearing fabric wrapped around theirs waists to cover their bare legs (shorts, not just naked from the waist down).

We enter the Blue Mosque. Having now been inside three mosques as well as a bunch of churches it's really interesting to see the similarities and differences. One of the main ones for me is that when I enter these wonderful old churches it can be quite moving - probably due to some form of cultural history, whereas the mosques while being beautiful really are just another building to me. The artwork is another major difference - the artwork is very, very different. The churches can seem lavishly decorated, with frescoes, statues, and other huge works of art. The mosques on the other hand have intricate designs which certainly have great significance, but I don't know how to process or understand what I am seeing so they can seem quite basic by comparison. The huge lights are fantastic though. Inside the Blue Mosque tourists are crammed into about a third of the main room. It's like being a sardine and after taking a couple of photo's we leave.

Taking our time we follow the tramlines down to the waterfront. We hop on a two hour Bosphorus tour - 12 Lira each (approx $6-7 NZD) and we travel up the European side and down the Asian, one city, two continents it's pretty rad but about half an hour too long. Very nice to be back on the water, hopefully only a couple of days until we get our next long awaited swim. We did spot three young guys swimming in the Bosphorus next to a bunch of fishermen but I don't think that we are quite that keen.

We end up walking up one of the narrow streets filled with people and shops and end up having lunch at a kebab place, though neither of us has a kebab. The food here seems universally good. I have now had meals that have cost almost nothing, and meals that have cost a lot more, all of them have been wonderful, the vegetable content has been so much higher than anywhere else we have been and all of the staff have been very, very hospitable. In Italy I found myself apologising constantly for not speaking the language and staff seemed split 50/50 between being super helpful and rude. Here everyone is helpful, most people speak English fluently (it seems like a much higher proportion than in Italy), and no one seems to mind that you don't speak anything else - in fact, on the rare occasion someone doesn't speak English fluently they are often apologising to us. It's very strange. I really do like Istanbul a lot.

We do some shopping and buy a suitcase to transport our treasures, this takes a long time and we get tired and hot so we retreat to the hotel again. We eat dinner across the road from our hotel, where we order our dinners blindly (the menu is not in English, and despite our waiters best attempt we still have no idea what most of it is) sitting at a low table on the sidewalk where I had a staring competition with a cat who was eyeing up my dinner. Willy wouldn't let me feed it. It was pissed off that I wouldn't. Our dinner was another in an increasingly long list of good meals and for 25 Lira (approx $12.50 NZD) including a decent tip you couldn't complain that it wasn't brilliant value. We leave for Cappadocia tomorrow!