Istanbul

Our first day started way too early with a wake up call of 4.30am. We arrived at heathrow with plenty of time to spare. Dead set BA needs to get the stuff sorted. We sat on the Tarmac for an hour because of a broken landing light and it needed to be fixed!
We finally got to Istanbul an thought we were pretty lucky to have got to immigration quite quickly despite being one of the last off the plane. Turns out your meant to have a visa and we had to line up in the huge line to get that. After paying 15 euro for a sticker we finally got through immigration, got our bags and found our travel talk transfer. We waited and waited for the mysterious mike who was meant to be arriving with us and would be in our transfer. After waiting for half an hour we ended up leaving without him. Turns out he had a bender the night before, arrived at heathrow 5 minutes after check in closed. Good one mike!!
The journey fromthe airport to our hotel was... Interesting. Istanbul reminds me of KL, crazy traffic with constant beeping, streets littered with run down buildings, massive billboards advertising everything and anything. At one stage we almost got run over by a tram!

We walked around a little near our hotel which was great. Had a look in some souvenir shops that sell Turkish rugs, shishas, pottery and jewellery. I wentto buy a post card and the man gave it to me for free! The Turks are really nice.

After a welcome meeting for our tour to explain the trip, what we will need, what to expect etc etc, we headed off to dinner. The restaurant was underground in a converted old water resivior. Turkish gypsies (funnily enough dressed in suits and not at all what I expected of gypsies) played some tradition Turkish music. Our guide told us they were crap haha. All I could think of was borat "you do not fool me gypsie" hahahaha.

So my first impression of turkey is pretty good. Loving the different country and culture! So excited for the rest ofthe trip!!