October 2, 2013

Yesterday was a rain day so we used our time well by blogging on Ephesus and Samos.  We also did photos of both places.  That took us from 9 to 2:30.  Our eyes were blurry from starring at the screen all day. So, in the late afternoon we walked to the Grand Bazaar after the rain had stopped. The Grand Bazaar is like a large shopping center, but in this case it has a mosque, people who live there, a school,  and it is over 500 years old.  The Grand Bazaar does not have stores per se, but rather stalls where everything from spices, rugs, and jewelry is sold. It consists of 61 covered streets, and encloses an area of 3.3 million square feet, which exceeds every mall in the US.  Everyday 30,000 traders go to work in the Grand Bazaar, at 4,500 stalls and haggle over price with some 400,000 shoppers.  The Grand Bazaar is the world’s oldest covered market.  To Rita and me, it was just “bizarre”!  

Last night Rita picked the restaurant based on its menu which was created by Nobu, where we dined in London. We went to the restaurant, called the Sunset Grill, by taxi. It took 45 minutes in bumper to bumper traffic and $25 USD to get us there, but the time and money spent was well worth it. I had great sushi and duck. Rita had monkfish in a tomato cream sauce.  Yum!  

Tonight is our first overnight flight of the trip. We leave Istanbul and travel to Agra, India to see the Taj Mahal. We have started on 15 days of malaria pills just to be safe since they are required for some areas of India we will be visiting.  We thank everyone for your thoughts and prayers for our safety while in Turkey.  But, we can honestly say that we were never in harms way and the people could not have been any kinder or warmer to us two Americans.

Love you and miss you.

Can you believe we have less than 60 days left before we return home?  What will you have to read each day when we return?  Time has gone so quickly since we gave up “Betsy”. 

 

Norm and Rita