Day 10 - Istanbul

You would think because we had the party the night before and stayed out late that we would just kick back in the morning and sleep in a little... well that's not the case, we had a tour at 8am! In fact we signed up for the longest tour possible for this day, which lasts 7 hours. The alarm went off at 6:30, so we got ready, grabbed some breakfast and headed into the theatre where we meet for tours. After sitting for a few they called our tour, so us along with several hundred others made our way out to the buses waiting for us outside. What we've realized so far this trip is depending on the tour guide you get paired with, it could either be a really good tour or the opposite. Luckily for us we got a great tour guide which lead to a great tour!

Our first stop on the tour was at the Blue Mosque, just a short drive from the boat. The Mosque was built in the early 1600's and is the national Mosque in Turkey. For those that don't know a Mosque is a place of worship for those that follow Islam. After touring this building which is still used as a place of worship we made our way across the street to Hagia Sophia which was originally built as a church then later converted to a Mosque. Pretty interesting to hear and compare the differences.

After these two visits we were able to go back to my favorite place in the world, the Grand Bizarre... which was included on our tour! Actually it wasn't too bad except that Jennifer wanted a wallet that she saw the day before... so with 4400 stores and thousands of people it was almost impossible! You might say why don't you just check the directory for the name of the shop, not possible... no names and absolutely no directory. To my surprise we found the store, and the wallet was purchased. After that we had some time to kill so we went outside to the more "normal" world and relaxed outside at Starbucks to watch people until our meeting time.

At about 1:00 we all met up and bused it over to our final place for the day, the Topkapi Palace Museum. This Palace was constructed starting in 1459 and transformed into a museum in 1924. Our first stop at the palace was the provided lunch. We made our way to the palace restaurant which sat right on the water. We were served a salad, lamb, chicken, rice, fries and dessert. Again to my surprise and probably to everyone else too the food was actually pretty good! After lunch we made our way through the museum portion of the palace where we saw things such as the staff of Moses, Davids sword and an 86 carat diamond! It was pretty amazing to see these pieces in person, it gave us chills! After about an hour in the museum we boarded the buses and headed back to the ship for our 4:30 curfew.

Once back on the ship we headed back to the room took a little nap, ordered a little room service, relaxed and then headed out for the night. We took advantage of the ships steak house again then headed into one of the ships bar/lounges to play the game Liar's Club. The game lasted close to an hour then they started doing karaoke... which we watched for the remainder of the night.

A very busy, but very enjoyable day! Next stop is Santorini, Greece!