Oh trouble... I'm in trouble... yeah trouble...

I guess it's all Abdul's fault. Trouble follows him. Wherever he goes. But he also gets us out of trouble. Or maybe it's my blond, lesbian-short hair, or my lack of mustache. Who knows. But anyways, it's over and we're better for it. The deal is we had an attempted robbery last night. Somebody tried to go into our backpack while we were walking down the high-street after dinner, going to the hostel. Abdul's lightning-fast reactions scared the bastard away but then another one came over with an eerie confidence about him. It was a pretty nasty experience and I was rather shaken by it all (of course I would never admit it!) but we now know that the Istanbul police speaks very little english but is all willing to do as much for us as they can. They were all pretty nice about it, their reactions were a far cry from the Romanian train operators and workers'. After going to the police station we headed back to the hostel and on our way there we saw the bastard again! We ran and got the police (they were about a 100 meters away) but because of their lack of english, german, spanish, icelandic, farsi, swedish, french and our complete and utter lack of turkish they didn't know at which guy we were pointing. So the bastard got away twice that evening. We left the shitty hostel with the hole-in-the-ground-toilet with broken doorknobs, dead lightbulbs, dirty shower etc. and went to Sultanahmed, the old part of Istanbul. Very touristy but because the tourists are all in Athens, it's VERY pleasant. We are staying in a lovely room with A/C, en-suite with a NORMAL TOILET!! Woohoo!! Me very happy! It's right next to the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazar and every cool museum, palace and historic monument you can imagine. Yes, prices are higher, but it's just so beautiful!

Today we went to the Blue Mosque (see link above)and saw a lightshow at the mosque in the evening with turkish narration about the beginning of Istanbul (we think), the The Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (we were looking at over 600 year old prayer carpets!!!) and then we just strolled around, had lots of street-venders ask if they could help us spend our money (as if we need help!!!) and reply in a cheeky manner that it's free to look, when we've said that we're not buying anything.

Again, gorgeous food and too much of it! I've given up trying to be Abdul's good inner voice and point out to him that maybe 4 main courses are too much for just him.

Oh, a very funny thing: whenever we are stopped by a Turk and they ask where we are from they usually ignore me (i am but a mere woman) and just listen to Abdul. When he says he's English (technically he is, born in Wales) they are never satisfied with that and always ask what his origin is. They can clearly see this Asian dude trying to pull off being an Englishman and they're not buying it!! :) You can take the boy out of Asia but you can't take the Asia out of the boy!!

G'nite, it's late. We have an early start, going off to the Topkapi Palace.