Istanbul, Turkey

John has asked me for a couple of days if I wanted to work on the

blog, but I haven’t wanted to.  We had a boring day waiting for our plane in the Athens airport.  The exciting parts were trying to fit all of our things in our luggage again, making sure we didn’t leave anything in a place we’ve stayed for 12 days and checking bags at the 

airport.  We then had a miserable weather first day in Istanbul and I just didn’t feel like talking about it, but today has been different, so let me catch you up.  Turkey airport when we were waiting in line for passport control.  You could hear people saying, “Chine, Chinois, Chinese…” in all their different languages and moving away from any Asian person they saw.  It was like they thought that a plane had just  

disembarked from Hubei province in Ataturk Airport or something.  We see people being sent away from the passport line and are confused that we might be in the wrong line, but no, these are people who didn’t realize that they had to get their Turkey Visa online.  We have that and are through in no time to the most hair raising taxi ride of my life.  They call a bigger taxi to the front to take our little family and the driver puts

in the address of our hotel and when google told him it would take 40 minutes, John said the driver said “challenge accepted”.  We were going 170 km an hour in places on the highway and it was raining, he was watching the news coverage of the plane that had crashed at the other Istanbul

  airport while driving and honking people out of the way all the time.  I kept telling myself that this is a professional driver in his home city and just calm down, but it was actually scary.  I was just trying not to let my fear show to Oscar in the back seat.  We made it to the hotel in less than 40 minutes though, so he wins I guess.  We are safely in the hotel

 and attached to wifi to find out that some of our friends and family back home had already heard about the flight that crashed and were worried, but I called my mother first and she hadn’t heard anything.  So, worry crisis averted.  We are exhausted and it’s late, head to bed in our new hotel.  We awake to hit the breakfast place and I find that I can see Hagia Sophia out the window of our breakfast room.  I can see the Blue Mosque out another window and a the Sea of Marmara out the back.  It’s 

amazing and we are in the heart of it here.  We head to the Blue Mosque first because we want to go when it’s not closed for prayer.  We walk for 10 minutes tops and are there in the Hippodrome.  We can’t even read the notices next to the Egyptian Obelisk, the Serpent Column that we saw in Delphi, because of salesman talking to us and trying to get us to come by stuff in their places.  It’s annoying, but we just keep walking.  I grab a head scarf at a store right by the Blue Mosque and Oscar gets some new gloves because it’s seriously cold today after the storm that came through.