The otobus from Izmir ended up taking a car ferry part of the way up to Istanbul, so even though we didn’t get a ferry ride all the way, we did get a boat ride!
Tag Archives: dance
Istanbul Day 3
We did sightseeing today – Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, the the Hippodrome. Gorgeous, but it was raining pretty hard at times and we all got saturated.
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Istanbul Day 2

What a busy day today! We started out by heading to Topkapi Palace first thing, missing a lot of the crowds. The palace is gorgeous – lots of fabulous mosaics and tiling, inlaid wood/mother of pearl panels and carved wood and marble. We visited the harem which was an eye opener – the Queen Mother had some great rooms, but everyone else was pretty much lumped in together. What a life! No privacy, locked in, the only recreation was gossip… painful!
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Back to Cairo
We caught the train back up to Cairo – on my birthday!We celebrated by going to lunch at the Columbo Cafe and having fruit juice mocktails (this one is a mint and lemon juice – so refreshing!)
The Egyptian Museum was our next stop for the day. There was just so much stuff here, it got really overwhelming. We look at the Tut Ankh Amon exhibit, the Jewellery Room, the Tombs of Tanis and Ankhenaten. Most of us didn’t bother going to the Mummy Room – there are lots of mummies throughout the rest of the museum, so we didn’t think it was worth paying extra to see more! We stocked up on tacky souvenirs in the gift shop (not the cheapest, but they had some good stuff).
Dinner was a “5-Star Extravaganza”! We had dinner on another cruise boat on the Nile: one that just does a loop for a couple of hours from the Cairo docks for lunch/dinner cruises. The buffet wasn’t anything special compared to the other meals we had, but the desserts were much more expansive! The entertainment was great though – the usual show of a Sufi dancer, solo bellydancer, a small group of male dancers, and the bellydancer joined them before inviting the audience to come up and dance. Because it was my b’day, I was invited up to have a shimmy or two, which was fun.
On our way back to the hotel we saw some of the contrasts of Cairo: on one side there was a wedding party, and on the other a cow was being strapped to the back of a car!
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