Day 31 - Istanbul

Today we had the luxury of sleeping in until 8.30 even though we got woken up by call to pray around 5.00am. Mark isn't feeling well today so after breakfast Donna and I headed off on an adventure on the metro to find a pharmacy. As it is a holiday today there is only about 4 open and there wont be more than that for 4 days.

We managed to catch the metro really easily once we worked out which ticket machine to use however finding pharmacy was the hard bit. After about 30 minutes of walking around asking several people who didn't speak any English even though we had the name of the pharmacy the hotel had given us we finally found it.  It was closed. It is supposed to be open and lucky an English speaking young man help us understand the signs on the door and from this we decided to give up. We got the metro back easy enough but took the wrong exit out and had to get directions from another hotel back to ours. We did find another closed pharmacy near our hotel on our walk back so I took a photo of the names of the pharmacy's that indicate the ones that are open so if Mark gets worse we can find them.

After a bit of a rest from our adventure Donna, Noel and I headed to the waterfront on the Bosphorous to have one of the amazing hot potatoes we had seen the day before for lunch. The traffic was still fairly quite at this stage so our taxi got us there quickly. We ordered them from a vendor that spoke English, made our choices of toppings that are nothing like we get at home then ate our potatoes in the sunshine before we headed to our next destination the Rumeli Fortress.

The Rumeli Fortress or as we like to call it Castle of Dead Ends was built by Sultan Mehmed ll and it overlooks the narrowest point of the Bosphorous. The fortress was built in 1452 and it has 15 towers in big, medium and small sizes. We climbed up to a number of them but there is no hand railing and some of the steps a quite narrow in places. The only problem was between each tower you had to go back down as the wall did not continue between or when they did you couldn't get into the tower to pass through which was a real shame. The views from the walls however were amazing and we helped burn of lunch will all those stairs.

 

After our taxi ride home which this time encountered more traffic as the locals are coming out now after their lunch we spent the rest of the afternoon just being lazy and recharging the batteries after 2 weeks on the road.

One more day in Istanbul then off to Dubai tomorrow night. J&N

BTW: I have never had this set of instructions in one of my hotel rooms before.