Turkey!

After a marathon 31 hours we finally arrived in Turkey. We had woken at 3-30am on Sunday 16th in Taiwan to catch our early flight to Hong Kong (Judy arranged to fly to Japan the same day so it worked in well). I had booked the Dragonair flights to/from Hong Kong separately to the main europe ticket. When we checked in to leave Taiwan the lady helpfully mentioned we could check our baggage all the way to Turkey - if we knew the flight numbers of the connecting flights. For some unknown reason I had only written down the flight number for the flight leaving Hong Kong, and not the second connecting flight from Frankfurt-Istanbul. We ended up having to check our baggage through just to Frankfurt, and hope we could sort the rest out in Hong Kong. When we got to Hong Kong we went to the transfer desk to get our boarding passes for the remaining flights. When the guy found we had 6 pieces of baggage checked through to Frankfurt, not Istanbul, he sighed but said fairly nicely "I´ll print new baggage labels for you and the baggage attendants can find your baggage and re-label them". I said "If it helps, 2 of the luggage pieces are bicycles" "I didn´t hear that!" was his immediate response - he explained Lufthansa usually charges to take bicycles, but if they are already checked through then the airline can´t do anything about it. I was naturally a bit paranoid that our luggage wouldn´t get found and would end up sitting lonely on a baggage caroselle in Frankfurt while we jetted off to Istanbul without it.
We got on the Lufthansa plane heading from Hong Kong to Frankfurt, wondering what good german food they would feed us. We´d just sat down and Joy gasped "Oh no!". I wondered what on earth she´d forgotten. She pointed to the seat back in front of us - NO PERSONAL TV SCREEN! We must have looked funny in our frenzied search for the screens - maybe they were under the tray table? Pull-out from somewhere? I was looking forward to catching up on all the movies I hadn´t gotten around to seeing. Joy watched the movie that was showing but I didn´t like it so I listened to the music channel - with a bit more than half an eye on the screen, driving Joy crazing by asking her every 5 mins why so-and-so did that and "who is she?". Afterwards she told me I was not allowed to try to analyse a movie that I didn´t really see! It WAS a dumb american movie, but a bit rivetting at the same time. (It was something about a secret treasure)
We arrived in Frankfurt, had a 2 hour stopover where we tried to sleep, then had another 2 hour flight to Istanbul. It was thrilling to see our precious luggage arrive one at a time on the carosel. And the bikes arrived too, yay. They seem to have survived their 5 flights - we still haven´t actually ridden them, but no major problems evident yet.
Strangely enough; after only 3 hours sleep I woke at 6-30am ready to go again. We spent the day wandering around the streets near our hostel. As we were leaving Joy said we should look out for a landmark so we could find our street again - how about the street with a mosque on the corner? Unfortunately there are mosques every few hundred metres... We went to the famous Blue Mosque, and the Grand Bazaar, a huge covered market. Managed to buy some rip-off sunglasses and cinnamon tea and turkish delight. Turkish Delight!! My goodness, I´ve never liked it in NZ but the real thing is so nice. Not too sweet. Great texture. And usually has nuts like pistachio in it. Managed to overdo it though in the first day....
An overwhelming first impression of Istanbul is "where are all the women?". There are men everywhere - standing outside their shops flirting with the tourists to get them to buy their wares, sitting down drinking turkish tea in the glass cups, crowding in to the trams, shouting about the food their restaurant is selling...
OK enough, I´m tired. More later