Istanbul Days 3 and 4

Sorry this is taking so long! I'm almost done with the other entries.

On Friday, we went around in smaller groups and explored the city. In the morning, Jean, Lilly, Erin, and I went to the bazaar again to shop for more gifts. I spent more money than I had intended, but I bought some really cool things.

In the afternoon, Jean, Ellen, and I decided to go to the Turkish Bath since everyone had been talking about how great it was. We didn't really know what to expect, but we decided to get massages since it seemed like a nice way to relax. When we got there, we were handed a towel and a pair of panties each and shown to our changing area. We changed and managed to find the area where we entered into the bath. We walked through one room into another and then we were led into yet another room. This room had a giant marble slab in the middle and was really warm - not quite sauna hot, but it was pretty warm. One of the attendants in the room came up to Ellen, who was in front of us, and ripped off Ellen's towel. She tried to protest, but to no avail - the towel was already laying on the slab, waiting for her to lay down and get massaged. Jean's towel was taken off next, followed by mine. We all felt a little awkward at first, but everyone in the room was wearing the exact same thing, so we tried to get over it. We saw other people getting massaged, and we realized we were about to get into a really awkward situation. There wasn't any way around getting massaged, so we decided to just suck it up and deal with it. Our "massage" wasn't so much a massage as it was a full body scrub by an old, sweaty, obese woman in her underwear while we were wearing only bikini bottoms. To say it was awkward is to seriously understate our feelings at the time. After our scrub/massage, we went into another room to the hot tub. When we left there, our towels were gone and we didn't know where to find new ones. There weren't any new ones in the room where we were, so we ventured topless into the next room where the attendant was covered head to toe. Thankfully, she pointed us in the direction of new towels and we went back to the dressing rooms to change. It was definitely a bonding experience between the three of us and a funny story to tell everyone when we got back to the hostel.

Everyone met back up at the hostel to go to dinner with Jack and Nancy at a nearby restaurant. The food was pretty good, and it was nice to eat all together. After dinner, we headed back to the hostel for a belly dance show. The belly dancer was wearing five-inch heels while she was dancing - impressive! She brought up people from the audience to dance with her (it was a small group - I don't know if I'd really call it an audience). It was pretty entertaining to watch. Two people in our group - Eduardo and Erin - got up to dance with her. Erin had mad skills, too.

On Saturday, we went on a trip to the Princes' Islands by boat. On our walk over to Nastia and Liza's hotel, we met some stray dogs who decided to be our friends. They kept play-fighting, but it made a lot of the people in the group nervous. The dogs kept lagging behind and then running up to catch up with us. One of the times they were running to catch up, one of them ran straight through my legs, almost making me fall over, and reminded me of the time in middle school when my dog ran into me on the beach and broke my toe. We got on a bus at the hotel and drove to the water, where we got on the boat that was going to take us to the islands. It was a really long ride over, and it was foggy, but we had a really good time on the boat, playing cards and chatting. The islands we went to theoretically didn't have any cars (except for emergency vehicles), so they were really quiet. It was really nice. We made friends with a bunch of the stray dogs on every island and had a pretty quiet day wandering around the islands. On the last island we went to, we got to ride horse carriages around the island. It was my first time in a carriage, and it was really fun. We even raced another carriage.

Our boat

Jean, me, Lilly, and Grace on the boat

The adorable puppy we named Scout

After we got back from the islands, we went to dinner near our hostel, which took a really long time, but was really good. While we were there, we saw a fire truck outside with its lights on, so we were really curious what was happening. When we got outside, it smelled like smoke, but we couldn't find a fire anywhere. We went back to the hostel, and after about 5 minutes back there, the electricity went out. We didn't know why it went out, but the people who worked there distributed candles and we all went into the 6-person room downstairs and played games. I was feeling kind of sick, so I decided to go to bed early. Apparently the electricity came on in the middle of the night, but I wasn't awake for it.