After saying farewell to Michaela, our wonderful host in Burgas, we set out for the remaining 400 km-s until Istanbul, but unfortunately our hitchhiking didn't go so well as usual. After the first successful hour the rain began to pour, so we had to wait in a rotting bus stop in the middle of nowhere. If we placed our stuff and ourselves in the correct square centimeters we could avoid most of the raindrops leaking in so we can say it was quite comfortable. (Not.)
After the rain had gave over and we were taken a couple of villages onwards it turned out that from the three border crossing points that existed between Bulgaria and Turkey, the one we've been at was extremely rarely used. Cars passed by every ten minutes or so and neither of them gave us a lift. So we sat by the road:
While waiting for a car we hiked around 10 km-s and finally we got on a local minibus which took us to the border town. Here, with a mixture of necessity and altruistic love, I carried home a ramshackled old lady's bag which she had previously shoved into my hands during descending. On the way home she asked me four times in poor German whether or not I was a Christian. (???)
We crossed the border with a very cool turkish guy. Although we did not speak mutual words he was extremely nice! He bought us dinner along the way: we had some tasty Turkish köfte. I love Turkey.
Because of the rainy weather and the late hour we got on a bus to get to Istanbul. We looked for our Hungarian CouchSurfing friend Zoli, of whom no good pictures have been taken, but I stole a stupid photo of him from his Facebook profile:
While in Istanbul we stayed at his place. In my opinion he lives in a cool area - according to the locals it's a ghetto, but we thought it was alright. Everything we were interested in was approximately an hour walking distance away. Zoli's first thing to do was to take us to a spaghetti party, where we could finally chill out, drink beer and met a lot of cool people. During those 5 days that we spent there Zoli was extremely nice and gave us many useful tips of what to see in the city and the country. And actually even more :), but I think we've managed to see all the significant things. We visited the Blue Mosque, the Asian side of Istanbul, been to the beautiful islands next to the city, and even went partying, sometimes to totally empty, other times to almost full places, and of course we've been to the Aya Sofia, which is one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages. It is extremely suitable for performing arm-workout exercises:
Istanbul's population consists of around 15-20 million people (depending on how you're counting), with the longest diameter of 160 kilometers. Istanbul is a place where together live Arabs and Europeans, Muslims and Christians, students with excellent English and toothless telephone shop dealers, ducks and seagulls. In addition the very loud muezzins that you can hear five times a day, some native American musicians (as everywhere), the old lady who kneads pita bread in the shop window, and lots of men who fish from the bridge which is located in the middle of the city. There's an Asian and a European side (just like Buda and Pest in Hungary) and the Bosporus between them), expensive beer, cheap, freshly squeezed fruit juice and basically enough sightseeing material for a month. The one thing we were sorry about is our lack of Turkish knowledge. Otherwise we could have had conversations with a lot of interesting people.
And finally, a photo taken on our last evening in Istanbul at the main shopping street, when zombies came and ate our brain:
