Turkey! Istanbul! The journey and destination

I drew a line
so you could see
That our destination
was near the sea (Black Sea)

Here is our troupe. Nils, Peter, Emily and Myself.
Nils and Emily are my closest friends in PC and they also live really close to me (2 hours travel 1 way). Peter is studying in Germany and he's there to visit his brother Nils.

So of the 7 nights of traveling: 4 nights sleeper trains, 2 nights same hostel, 1 night hotel.
Pros of sleeper trains: cheap to travel and sleep at the same time and saves time.
Pros of hostels and hotels: showers.

The first room we got had 6 beds: 3 per wall. But others we stayed in had 3 beds on the one wall and a sink and a ladder on the other wall.

Getting up on the bunk beds (the topmost level) was a bit of work...specially when people like Nils is trying to pull you down.

Here we are suffocating, until we combined the power of 4: Pete's (short for Peter) foot, Emily and Nils' combined body weight, and my right bicep and my leatherman ; to open the window.
Nils then went around rescuing other suffering passengers after we won.
He abolished 4 close windows that trip.

We left at 12 noon. We arrived to the boarder of Bulgaria and Turkey at 1am? (at some point there was a Bulgaria and Romania boarder, but that's a boring story).
---We got a knock on the door. --We handed over all our passports. --Went back to bed. --Got a knock later and our passports handed back to us. --Went back to bed. --Arrived at the other border. --Got a knock on the door. --Was told to go outside and buy a visa and have passport stamped. --Walked outside in PJs in search of visa buying window. --Paid 15 Euro. --Got stamped. --Went back into train. --Put passport in my marsupial pouch (my security pouch I wore the whole trip), and passed out til our 10am landing.
Oh, and they give us clean bedding; we got them every train ride.

I saw Turkish flag in the morning.

Here is the local currency: LIRA. Which is about 2 LIRA = 1 Euro.
So like 1.5 LIRA = $1.

Look at this happy couple. Anyway, they have all their luggage in those two backpacks. His backpack was the "backpacking" "travel" backpack other tourists were using too.

I had my stuff in this backpack =)
But I had a warm jacket in a plastic bag too, which I never used on this trip.
Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria are warm now, but not Romania yet (burrrr)
Guess what I saw...

Exciting things were happening while we where there, AND WE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW!
Tour of Turkey!

and Festival of Lilies!
Here's a map of Istanbul which I thought was pretty. We were on the European side (the most tourist side) and we went on the Asian side too (more on this later).

SO, sights to see in Istanbul!

We did see lots of old things, look at this wall of dirt for example: OLD. And actually the smaller streets were cool too. They were very clean cause tourists basically crawl through everything around here, but still holds a certain charm.

Here is an experience of Prayer. The Muslims living here pray 5 times a day, but I only managed to hear 4 prayers a day. I am probably unconscious for the 5th, so I can't tell you if it goes on mornings or nights. This is the after 4pm one.

I'm not sure what's in the left picture, something about...yeah, it's in the Lonely Planet: Turkey guidebook, and the right picture is an old public fountain I believe.
It was funny to see how many Lonely Planet guidebooks were being used, and in ALL sorts of languages!! Japanese, German, Italian, French. There were all sorts of tourists there!
AND after having the book for Turkey, and not for Greece and Bulgaria, I'm not a 100% devotee, but I am a believe.

Flag picture, with cute puppy who wants to play outside.

Okay, more to come!!