Another packed day started off with an early rising and a traditional Turkish breakfast to begin our journey. Again, we exchanged our USD for Turkish Lira and called for a cab to take us to the ferry docks. The same routine as yesterday, but today was slightly different - our cab trip. For starters, The six of us had to split up in different cabs, and our driver spoke no kind of English, but he was still a nice guy. He showed us some pictures of his vacation in Japan. Me, John, and Mr. Tolksdorf were the lucky ones who got to enjoy this cab trip. As I said before, our cab driver spoke no English, so Mr. Tolksdorf had to speak to the Taxi dispatcher on the phone so he could translate the cab driver's Turkish lingo. That was a hassle in itself, but it didn't end there.
The bridge leading to the docks was backed up, so the driver tried to ask us if we could travel on the second bridge. We shouldn't have agreed. Keep in mind, that during this whole trip, the other three were on there way to the docks via the regular route, so we were split up. Our cab driver ended up taking us all the way across to the European side of the country to Downtown Istanbul. Why is this bad? Because if we took the ferry, it would have taken us to the same place for much cheaper.
We ended up spending 70,00 Turkish Lira ($42.00 USD) on a cab trip. After Alex found us on the other side of the country, he took the ferry back to the Asian side to regroup with the other cab crew and tell them that we were safely dropped off to our "destination." That was also time-consuming in itself. By the time everyone was on the Asian side of Turkey, it was nearly noon... we left the hotel at 8:30am. It usually takes 1hr30mins to get to Downtown Istanbul from our hotel, but this time, an extra 2 hours were tacked on. Now that we're paranoid about taking separate transportation services, we decided to take the trolley to the museum so we could all stay together. We managed to do just that.
So now we're in the Museum, and the amount of artifacts here are amazing. You'd be amazed at the types of things that were excavated from around this area. We saw artifacts from the early Roman empire to the Byzantine Empire, all filled with extremely interesting artifacts and information. From the museum, we went to the Grand Bazaar. Imagine the Great Lakes Mall in Auburn Hills, MI underground, and bigger. This place was huge, and filled with all kinds of products. You could buy knock off cologne, real cologne, knock off jewelry, real jewelry, shirts, drums, guitars, Islamic prayer mats, clothes, etc. I probably won't see anything else like this in a while. So after shopping, we were pretty much done for the day. We headed back to the hotel at about 5:30pm, and we had a good dinner with the IDEA Youth Forum.
Until next time,
Yuri Ramocan
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