The Blue Mosque & Belly Dancing

Last Updated: September 25, 2020

So I conveniently forgot to mention that I went to Starbucks yesterday. Yes m’am, I was needing a Chai Tea Latte after my hamam. It was kind of Western night all around. I spotted a Mexican restaurant yesterday (I should have a blog devoted solely to all the horrible Mexican restaurants I’ve been to around the world). Anyway, after meeting our new roomies and some randoms at the hostel we all went there for dinner and it was delicious. And oddly lots of [flirty] Spanish waiters (who am I kidding, I haven’t met a non-flirty male in Istanbul yet!) worked there.

C & M are staying at a hostel a street behind mine, so we met at Starbucks (ah, you caught me again!) around noon and went to the Cistern. Amazing! There were huge columns and water and even fish. The medusa heads at the corner were crazy! After taking millions of pictures we walked over to the Blue Mosque and waited until after 2pm so we could go in. It’s so massive and gorgeous. Turkey is such an interesting place. I’m so glad that they actually let you in the mosques (many Muslim countries don’t allow non-Muslims to enter mosques). Such amazing craftsmanship — it’s true art.

After leaving the mosque we had mezze platters at a cafe nearby. I went back to my hostel and checked email and read for a few hours, before meeting up for dinner down the street from my hostel. I had lentil soup and bread (cheap and good!) We headed over to C & M’s hostel to watch belly dancing (which was really lame) and ended up getting trapped into talking to two annoying American guys (they thought we were all Aussies, so we had some fun with them and tried to get them to guess where I was from… not the brightest boys, I’ll tell you that much).  So we ditched and went back to my hostel for beers on the roof.