istanbul, turkey

hello blog friends!
thank you all for your kindness in reading my mundane updates! well, since last we spoke i have put up some photos on bugbitten (yay! hooray! they shout) and been to many places (which is what the photos are of!).
i don't have much time so my updates will be brief.

pisa: all we saw of pisa was the tower, a market place of cheap souvenirs and hundreds of people taking on the 'prop up the tower' pose...haha...we felt very unoriginal, which is why I adopted the 'push the tower over' pose

rome: rome was...well, old! everywhere you turn is a monument...Anisia and I were constantly asking 'why is this famous?' and 'what's that big marble thing?'...despite this, my favourite things were the 'cat area' where HEAPS of cats just chill out in the middle of the city! and meeting some fun English guys, Mark and Dave. it was so nice to have some friends to hang out with :)

istanbul: okay, so I didn't realise we'd only been to 3 destinations since last I blogged...it seems like so long ago! I guess we spent a while in rome and now a week in istanbul. well, istanbul has been quite the ordeal. anisia fell horribly sick when we first got here and had to go to the emergency room at the Amerikan Hastenesi (American Hospital) and get drugged up with all sorts of things to stop her from coughing, make walking less painful and clear her throat so she could breathe. poor thing. that was all very scary and i think it's only by prayer that i am not sick...the doctor said what she had was very contagious. she's still not 100% better, but is up and about and i think the nice weather outside is lifting our spirits. it's about 12 degrees outside, which we're very excited about!
istanbul has been very interesting. as is to be expected, turkey is least like Australia than any country we've been to. Turkey is 99% Muslim and so prayer time echoes over obnoxious megaphones every few hours, women wear hajibs and the taxi drivers have a prayer to allah hanging from their mirrors.
we haven't been outside much, but often hear prayer time from our room (at horrible hours of the morning) and people yelling out in some strange language selling something or another...
we ventured out to the Grand Bizarre (10,000 stalls!) two days ago and were greeted with a slur of 'Lady, lady! You wanna buy rug? I have what you looking for? You wanna dance with me? I have what you looking for? Yes please! I have perfect thing to match your eyes!' Anisia, being sick and irritable found them intolerable and we learnt to ignore them, to speak a foreign made up language and to only buy from those shop owners who did not hassle us. we haven't been to the bizarre since, for fear of an equally stressful experience, fending off disrespectful men. we told a man we found this behaviour rude and he held up his hand and said something in broken english about five fingers and many different people...but i struggle to imagine how anyone would be encouraged to buy by this abusive yelling.
tomorrow is our last day in istanbul. i hope we get to see more, but still feel like our time inside was probably best for us as we've been getting calls and smses from mum and dad (in Thailand) about how full on the final leg of our journey will be...

BRING ON THE WARM WEATHER!

love you all
ellie