Istanbul. Day 3

 When last we left off, we were sitting in Changi Airport. Well, that went on for quite some time. By the time the flight boarded, some time after 1am, we were exhausted and overfed - as it's easy to eat when you're bored.

The upside of eating all evening was that once the flight took off we could go to sleep and not wait around to be fed. The downside was that it was a new seating arrangement. Technically a lie-flat bed, but you don't recline it until it's flat. No, you put it upright and then a flight attendant, who knows what they're doing, folds the seat back down - and there's a thin mattress on the back, and a separate seatbelt! All that was actually pretty good. The problem is captured in the photo below.

In this flat bed, the room for your legs is the small area below and to the left of the screen. Quite a narrow hole, and off-centre. So it doesn't really work, and every time I rolled over I'd wake up and fidget around trying to get into some comfortable position. 

But we made it work enough. By the time we were fully awake and I could make sense of the screens there was only four hours or so to go of our 11 hour flight. With the change in time zones we landed about 8am and were outside by 8.30 or so. Then a bit of hanging around trying to find our transfer to the hotel. We got there by late morning and miraculously, they let us check in early and got our rooms ready in record time. So we could change, shower and regain a measure of civility.

The hotel is unremarkable but in a good spot, within a biscuit-toss of the Topkapi Palace walls, Grand Bazaar and all the other things on this penninsula. So after freshening up we walked up to Sultanahmet Square between the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia. We didn't go to those things - we've been there before, so I'm not going to explain them and you'll need to use Wikipedia. Go and look them up now, they're amazing.

Blue (Sultan Ahmed) Mosque

I had bought another HOHO ticket - part of my campaign to hop on and off around the globe. But we had a bit of time, so we walked down the hill and found a nice cafe looked over the Bosphorus where we had a light lunch and watched the world go by. The back up the hill, onto a HOHO bus and this took us a short way down to the Eminonu Pier where the Golden Horn opens into the Bosphorus. It took a long time to work out what boat cruise was associated with our bus ticket, because all the cruises seem generic and indistinguishable. But eventually we got on a large boat, which seemed part cruise boat and part ferry (as it made multiple stops) and this took us on a pleasant and breezy cruise a couple of bridges to the east and back.

The Bosphorus, of course, is the waterway dividing Europe (north bank) from Asia (south bank). And essentially every ornate building along it is a palace, mosque or hotel. 

The Dolmabahçe Palace
When we got off the boat we got back on the HOHO bus and spent a while travelling up and down the Golden Horn and hearing far too much history with complicated Turkish names. By the time we got back to the start it was about 6.30 and we just had time to freshen up before dinner. We ate at the hotel as we were just too tired to go anywhere else, and it had a nice restaurant on the top floor (as all of the places here do).

I fell asleep still writing this blog at 9pm.


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