"Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul not Constantinople..."

We arrived in Istanbul (not Constantinople) on Friday morning and spent the next two days being the ultimate tourists. Ultimate, as in we rushed from sight to sight trying to see everything in the time we had: Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Cistern and Tokapki Palace. Ok, so it's not everything in Istanbul, but it's alot. Initially, we had even intended to see the Archeological Museum but decided that would just be plain crazy (we'll do it when we come back on our cruise).

Istanbul is a really beautiful city, but is definitely packed with tourists in comparison to the other places we've been--it seemed to have more tourists than the other cities combined. It's a double edged sword for us: on one hand, it's easier to navigate the city (maps are readily available) and you can be almost guaranteed that every restaurant you go into will have an english menu, but on the other hand, the city looses some of its "real" feel, as if it were set up just for the tourism industry.

On an upnote, I did find a super cute and super affordable spring dress there. :)

Last night we boarded our overnight train for Athens and said goodbye to our Intrepid group. It was sad to part with them--we had some good times with them and had developed a sense of familiarity and security with the group--but both Michael and I were also excited to be on our own again. The night train proved to be...an experience. It left at 8:30pm and both of us were in bed by about 10pm. However, we had to cross the border into Greece and therefore were awoken at about 1am to hand over our passports for exiting Turkey and entering Greece. From everything we had read, this would be a quick painless process. Everything we read was wrong. The 2 minutes it was supposed to take turned into 4 hours sitting in the no man's land between Turkey and Greece for who knows what reason. What made it twenty times worse is that there were clouds of mosquitoes outside and in order to keep them out of our train compartment, we had to close the window, which resulted in our compartment getting up to about, I'm not exaggerating, at least 100 degrees. For four hours. At one point, we succumbed to the mosquitoes because, really, it was better than the god-awful heat. Needless to say, we didn't sleep much between 1 and 5am. Gotta love train travel. :)

So now we're in Athens, having just come from a great meal of stuffed red peppers and pork kebab. Tomorrow we'll do the tourist thing again by visiting the Acropolis, and then we board our cruise tomorrow evening. I most likely won't be updating the blog as regularly, as I'm not sure of our internet access for the next two weeks, In any event, I'll do my best and will for sure send updates as I'm able...