From "More Istanbul" set

First, a disclaimer: Sadly, between the rain which lasted nearly our entire trip and the diminishing quality of our abused digital camera, we managed to return from Istanbul with a lot of really bad photos. The trip was great… wet, but great. The photos we took don’t really do that magnificent city justice.

Luckily, our travel companions also took lots of photos and links to them are included below as well.

The Photos

• Kristy’s Picasa account > Constantinople…I mean, Istanbul…I mean, Constantinople
• I uploaded more Istanbul photos to my Picasa account, in addition to my really lame How To Travel To Istanbul (and back) photo set (just in case you missed that…)
• Koumbaros Christos put his Constantinople October 2008 collection up on Picasa as well.

Some of my favorites:

• the post-hamam experience – hamam is a Turkish bath… we got scrubbed GOOD!
• our travel companions in Istanbul: Vassilis, Anastasis, Christos (r-l)
• our late night troop, gettin’ jiggy wit it
• the whole gang: (l-r) Vassilis, Irini, Kristy, Dave, Christos, Anastasis

So there you go – photos as promised. Kristy still owes us all a recount in prose, but at least for now we’ve delivered (sorta) the goods on the photographic proof. And it only took us nearly three weeks…

It’s The Journey, Not The Destination

We took nearly every type of transportation on our trip to Istanbul, and it was likely the longest trip we’ve ever taken in terms of total traveling time. If you care to try it for yourself, here are the simple directions.

Starting from Chania, Crete, you’ll take the following:

1. bus
2. boat
3. metro
4. metro again (after strike ends… typical Greek stuff)
5. train taxi (go figure: no seats available on the train until midnight, so take a taxi to the bus station instead)
6. bus
7. car

After traveling for an estimated 30 hours, you should be in Istanbul. Congratulations. Walk around and explore this incredible city.

For the trip back, you’ll take:

1. car
2. train
3. car
4. bus
5. plane
6. bus

Only 20 hours of travel, and you’ve arrived back home in Chania. How was your trip?

Well, our trip was fantastic – as Kristy will detail in wonderful prose and pictures… any day now.

Until then: non-scenic photographic proof of our journey.

So, we are here, finally! Arrived very late last night / early this morning at Irini’s house (Christos’ sister) after a LOOONG trip and some fun at the border. We will soon be venturing out to explore the city, which according to all reports is one of the most beautiful in the world. We’ll take pictures!

Oh yeah, an added surprise. I thought we were only going to the western side of Istanbul which is still on the European continent. But we crossed over into the eastern half; which means in addition to Turkey, we can now say officially we’ve been to Asia. Pretty cool

The interwebs ain’t so great here (this and the last post actually had to be republished b/c the connection died while writting them) so we’ll probably not write again until we are back home… hopefully with lots of photos.

Our destination: Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Yeah, as in TURKEY.

Some preparation music, please: http://tinyurl.com/3m9aoh

We’re going with Christos (our koumbaros – best man) – he’s been there before and knows what’s what. Maybe we’ll actually write something about it during our trip and when we return… on this poor excuse for a blog. Otherwise, we’ll at least share photos over on our Picasa accounts (see the sidebar, too lazy to link).

This should be pretty cool so I just wanted to share, but also maybe a few people back home should know where we are in case we end up in a Turkish prison (kidding… I hope).