We spend two more glorious days exploring 
and discovering Istanbul.
We walk through the Spice Bazaar and the Grand Bazaar, stopping to chat to the locals and sip tea with the carpet salesman.
Unlike the carpet salesman in the west, they are not aggressive or care that we have no interest in purchasing a carpet. We sip apple tea and get yet another lesson in carpet identification and Turkish hospitality!
I love the colour and smells of the Spice Bazaar, where spices sit alongside Turkish delight and the vendors are happy for us to try before we buy!
We walk through local neighbourhoods, stopping once more to chat. We’ve found the Turkish people to be extremely friendly, even when they have no understanding of English.
The Grand Bazaar is bigger and busier than the Spice Bazaar and here we see high fashion jostling for space with just about everything else! 
Once again we are invited for apple tea. When I tell our host I am writing a blog, he informs us he has been written up in the National Geographic traveller magazine! 
Once we’ve had our fill of the bazaars, we take a tram across town to cross the bridge and sample fresh fish at the fish market and watch the boats on the water. It is a beautiful day to relax and enjoy the best that Istanbul has to offer. 
There goes the call to prayer again..
You can’t escape the call to prayer in this city. Istanbul is dotted with mosques but people here seem to be a lot less conservative than their counterparts in Asia and Africa. While face coverings are still seen, they appear to be a lot rarer than in the rest of the Middle East. We pop into another mosque, and lie on the floor, enjoying its quietness and grandeur. 
We top off a brilliant evening by attending a Sufi Dance. The whirling dervishes make me dizzy and I wonder how they master this amazing art! The Sufi dancing is a physical active type of meditation. The dervishes aim to reach the source of perfection by abandoning their egos and personal desires & by listening to music and focussing on God. They spin their bodies in repetitive circles which is meant to imitate the planets of our solar system orbiting the sun!
We meet up with our fellow travellers after the concert for a last farewell. We say goodbye to Em who is headed home to OZ.
The next day, I am joined at breakfast by Tuncay, a young Turkish man, visiting friends at our hostel. We chat for awhile. He invites me and my friends to visit his..guess what…carpet shop!! More drinks of apple tea and chats to his family before we escape to spend our last day in Istanbul visiting the cistern. 
The Basilica cistern is an amazing historical feature of Istanbul. This cistern had the capacity to store 100,000 tonnes of water and is built on a square area of 9,800 sq.m. It is a beautiful place to visit and photograph but the silence is broken by a visiting group of school kids, whose voices echo in the dim silence and disturb the peace! 
I’ve got to ship a few things home and we spend a fair bit of time looking for the post office. Yvonne and Victor help me with my mail before we go in search of wontons. After weeks of being on the road and dining on humus, both Victor and Yvonne are ready for some Chinese. Despite having an address and a location on a map searching for wontons is almost as daunting as searching for the post office!
We stand on the street, map in hand, looking quite lost when a kind Turkish man stops to help. He calls his partner and spends a lot of time trying to make sure we find our wontons. As he leaves, he flicks us his card and says, ‘Google me, go find out who I am’. Intrigued, we look him up. Rossi Barbarossa, the kind stranger who helped us find wontons in Istanbul, is a famous fashion designer!
It is finally time to say goodbye, to Istanbul and my friends Yvonne and Victor. We have had an incredible time on our journey in the Middle East and we will definitely catch up in OZ. For now, Victor and Yvonne will head to Beirut while I go off to London.. 
"There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast." -
Paul Scott Mowrer
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