Best of Greece and 7 Day Aegean Cruise

Day Nine – 19 Sept 2009

Weather: Partly cloudy, 22 and late day rain (what’s an afternoon of shopping without rain???)

The first half of the day was relaxing. We could get up when we wanted and have breakfast. There was a choice of two rooms to have the buffet breakfast, but La Scala wasn’t open till 8:30, so we went up to the cafeteria style buffet on the ninth floor. It was the usual buffet assortment with a very good selection. Four types of eggs (omelet, boiled, fried or scrambled). Great croissants too.

After breakfast, I walked around a little and then returned to my room and slept for an hour.

At ten, I headed down to the next meeting with George and got my receipt for the optionals. He went over some points like sea sickness (which shouldn’t be a problem as the ship was as smooth as a baby’s butt) and smoking – which was permitted indoors in Greece, so there were indoor areas where the smoking was permitted. This included the pool deck where smoking was permitted on one side and not on the other, which according to George, was like having a urinating and non-urinating section in a pool.

He gave us a rundown on Istanbul. He said the captain had put the ship into overdrive and we expected to arrive on time or a little early (just after three). Since today was the last day of Ramadan, there were some changes to the itinerary and George wasn’t sure if we could cross the bridge to the Asian side of Turkey yet. Also, he wanted to do Saint Sophia today instead of tomorrow so that it freed up some time tomorrow. He also expected that we’d get to visit both the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Market. With eighty people cruising with Trafalgar, we’d be on three buses with our own guides and George jumping between the buses. He divided the groups so that those of us from the land portion of the tour all got on the same bus.

Or as he put it, anyone who knows Joanna was on bus five.

And you know what happened next, of course. Someone asked who Joanna was.

George looked at her and said “You’re on bus four.”

He was hilarious!!

After the meeting broke up, we wandered the boat for a bit and watched a cooking demonstration before going to La Scala for a sit down lunch.

I had the vegetable soup, a cheeseburger (with Swiss Cheese as it turned out) and a chocolate mousse cake. After lunch, I returned to my cabin to get ready for the afternoon and then proceeded up to the top deck to watch us enter Istanbul.

We could see the skyscrapers of the city for almost an hour before we entered the Bosporus Straits and docked. The view was spectacular and my new telephoto lens got a great workout.

With the announcement “Welcome to Intanbul,” we proceeded to the conference room to wait with George until we were given clearance to leave the ship. After about ten minutes, we walked down to the third deck and our boarding passes were scanned. It was a short walk along the shore to the bus. We left immediately and drove towards the old part of Istanbul across the bridge.

Our guide, Salem, wasn’t as talkative as some guides but he knew his way around. Some of the elderly members of the tour found that he walked much too fast.

The number of buses trying to get up to the Grand Bazaar was astonishing. Imagine a small, narrow European street about a kilometre long with white tour buses waiting bumper to bumper.

We got to the entrance ahead of them all and Salem gave us forty-five minutes to check out the Grand Bazaar. In reality, one would need a full day. It took us twenty minutes to get inside and we could only walked the centre aisle. There were side aisles extending as far as the eye could see, but if we had made a turn, we likely would not have found our way back. The prices were a little cheaper in the side aisles.

The centre aisle was primarily jewelry but we were waiting for the tour of the government facility tomorrow to get our jewelry (where we know it would be real). I checked out the Pashmina scarves, and found them a little expensive, so I decided to wait.

We met up with Salem just after five, and we learned that a bus had broken down on the street, trapping all those tourist buses, but that our bus had escaped and would met us at Hagia Sophia.

We walked about a kilometre and got there a half hour before it closed at six. The building, originally a church, was built more than fifteen hundred years ago and is one of the largest churches in the world. It was massive and magnificent – especially considering that it only took six years to build.

The church was converted to a mosque in the 1400s, but they did not destroy some of the paintings on the ceilings.

A hundred years ago, the mosque was then converted into a museum. We were given a few minutes to walk around and had a WC break in a 21^st century WC that didn’t cost us anything.

Our bus driver met us down the road from Hagia Sophia and drove us to the Egyptian market (or the Spice Market). It was smaller than the Grand Bazaar and was primarily spices and Turkish Delight with some tourist shops among them.

I bought a boxed selection of spices and others picked up some Turkish Delight. I was able to sample it. Delicious. I decided to pick some up in Kusadasi (pronounced Kusa-de-sir) the next day.

We boarded our bus at seven for the short drive back to the ship. A lot of us had considered going to Taksim Square but decided against it. We were tired and didn’t want to face the Turkish taxi drivers.

It was open sitting for dinner and I had salad, grilled turkey and creme brule for dinner.

The dining room was packed and it seemed a lot of people didn’t read their newsletter as they showed up late and were turned away (with the buffet upstairs open for business as usual).

I took a walk on deck to take some pictures of the bridge and the mosques and then discovered that the port has free wireless, although it dropped out about every forty seconds for ten seconds. Better than 10 Euro an hour and it gave me a chance to really catch up on a lot of stuff.