n Istanbul at the moment, which is defiontiely one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been to ... when its not snowing and the wind is making the snow fall sideways! But when I did have the luck to have a fine day here, everywhere you look is a virtual photo oppurtunity.
My last day in Bulgaria proved to be quite an interesting one, I spent the morning doing an interview for a weekly mag in Sofia, A Week in Sofia. The journalist was a friend of one of the workers at the hostel, and as the only other option for the morning was sleeping in I obliged. The train to Sofia was predictably slow, at one point we stopped for about an hour, went forwards about 100 metres, then, almost as if the driver thought this as too much progress, he decided to reverse the train back the 100 metres and wait around for a bit longer! The train got cleared by customs amazingly quickly, 4 hours and we were on our way (these things have the potentila to take half a day). The train then tottered along into Istanbul, somehow taking 7 more hours in the process. This was no big deal because as it so happened there were two English expats of Istanbul travelling on the train as well who had a good supply of Bulgarian wine (it tastes much better than you think!)
You see now why all these travel shows showcase Istanbul, everyhtings a sight here .... but its a pity that its getting rather heavily touristed. Luckily, been totally the off-season and the media making light work of reprting the ins and outs of Bird Flu, it is mercifully relatively quiet here. Yesterday I walked around the mosques and took a ferry to the Asian side and back ... there seems to be a national obsession of drinking tea here, as there is with trying to hawk carpets. As is always the case when staying in hostels, its been a blast meeting other travellers with origins and stories far and wide. Ive been surprised though with the amount of Korean and Argentinian visitors here, spent the majority of last night with two Argentinian girls sipping away at their national drink makke, really nice! Amazingly still yet to run into an Isreali backpacker, who seem to dot the world everywhere (but hey, theres a 100% guarantee of not meeting any in Iran).
I thought that Id meet quite a few people going to Iran when coming to Istanbul, and that has been true, with one problem, It seems that everyone else here in the hostel who has applied for an Iranian visa has been swiftly rejected ,,, god knows why they gave me one! There is one English guy who got his this morning, though not after jumping through hoops and paying ridiculous amounts of "agents fees." I'll be heading off with him to Tehran tomorrow probably,
5 more weeks or so and back in Oz.
James
