Welcome Orsep Royal Hotel Istanbul

... 345;emístili přes potoky uprostřed silnice ke vstupní kontrole, kde jsme schytali slušný šok, kdy nám jeden z pořadatelů i policistů prostě suše sdělili, že musíme u vstupu odvezdat všechny mince. Po otázce, zda se nedají schovat do nějakého trezoru, jsme byli odvedeni ke kasičce ležící na zemi. Říkali, že je jinak fanoušci házejí při fotbale po ostatních ...

... rather than the bargaining or Maze of shops, the crazy part about the Bazaar is how many languages the merchants speak! Most of them shouted to us Te gusta? Que buscando?! They thought we were spanish! Kind of flattering, actually. But they were doing business in Turkish, English, Spanish, Italian, French and German, and that´s just what we caught. Very impressive buisnessmen.
That night we had our first taste of Raki, the Turkish Drink. İ ...

Sunday 17th May. Up at 7am we had a servo coffee and used their loo and set off again. Still on dreadful roads often single lane local traffic with trucks and buses and us. From the van it seemed a very labour intensive rural area as many many people were out in the fields tending plots and the towns seemed also less modern and more village rural than we had seen so far. It gave the impression Bulgaria is not affluent. By 1pm we were at the Turkish border where again we had hassles ...

... some chance, I thought arriving in Istanbul would be like arriving in Geneva for the first time: no orientaion and no communication. How wrong I was! I forgot about the culture shock one faces when they first arrive. So, I figured Il go outside and have a smoke before heading back into the airport to try find a way to Sultanahmet. Needless to say, after I had finished I realised I couldnt get back without having a my luggage checked. So, that was not an option. Then I saw a bunch of ...

the title of this here entry implies that i have run in to a few members of the wolverine nation since i have been here in what was formerly called Constantinople. today i was at the blue mosque with my friends (finally!! i wore the proper attire this time - jeans and my michigan t-shirt) and i heard someone call out "Go Blue!" to me. i started talking to the people who turn out to be parents of a fellow wolverine who is also going in to his junior year in ann ...

... and after that my socıal standıng ıncreased enough to be ınvıted to spend the evenıng watchıng the Chelsea ManU football match ın the local barbers shop! It was a great evenıng where no one spoke any Englısh but we stıll managed to tell a few jokes and drınk huge amounts of sweet Turkısh tea. About a dozen people wondered ın and out of the shop durıng the evenıng ...

... in each others presence drink a lot of tea and smoke a lot of sheesha (flavored tobacco) our of a water pipe in a circle. Sheesha is a great way to kill time and relax for very cheap, it was about $8 for 2 hours of sheesha smoking, and $1 tea's. That night we all packed our houses in our backpacks and headed for the train station. The only serviceable train to Bulgaria was mandatory we have sleepers, so all the guys split up to our rooms, three beds to one room the size of ...

... Since we'd done the climb with our new NZ friends, when we arrived back at the village, we decided to have a beer. We went to a restaurant with seating on a pontoon sloping right down to the edge of the water, and when we saw that the edge of the pontoon was a bit wet, we decided to sit at a table just back from the water front. We were very glad we had, because a few minutes later the next ferry arrived and several waves started washing over the pontoon edge, getting bigger and ...