We got up and had the free breakfast that the hostel offered. It's nothing fancy but better than nothing, and it's not like I've been eating luxuriously otherwise. Our first stop for the day was up to the Grand Bazaar - I've been here before and remembered it being interesting. Unfortunately, either my memory is wrong or it's changed a lot, because today it's exclusively horrible tourist stuff. I will never understand people buying random shirts by French luxury brands at a huge markup because they're in an unrelated tourist trap, but evidently that's a big thing or these places wouldn't stay in business. We didn't stick around for too long and wandered further north until we passed over the Golden Horn. The bridge here is packed with fisherman casting off into the channel with some success, though I hope that those fish aren't going to restaurants. The water doesn't look very clean. As we walked across the bridge, a guy dropped the brush to his shoe-shining kit as he was walking past and JP returned it to him. The guy very enthusiastically offered to shine his shoes in return, but we were trying to keep moving and declined.

Up north a little further, we stopped by Galata Tower. It was very crowded with tourists and is surprisingly expensive, as with nearly everything in this city. It was something like $31 just to go up, which I thought was a bit steep, but the view from the top was really nice. The building is very cool and there are a bunch of exhibits inside, the most entertaining of which is a really stupid flight simulator game where you could use XBox Kinect style motion tracking controls to steer a paraglider, allegedly on the route of someone who did that hundreds of years ago. The controls barely worked and the graphics would've looked dated on a PS2, but I appreciate the creativity all the same. From here we headed toward the ferry to the Asian side. On the way there, a second shoe-shiner dropped his brush, and it became clear that this is some sort of scam that preys on people's generosity, though it wasn't clear to me how it worked. We saw it once more and that evening someone in the hostel told JP that he'd fallen for it - apparently they demand money after cleaning your shoes, which seems like it would be a very easy thing to say no to since you obviously owe them nothing, but I guess not. Anyway, the ferry ride was awesome as it navigated between the huge freighters coming from the Black Sea. The city looks best from the water, I think.

The Asian side has much less going on than the east. There were a few things we looked into doing, but once we were there it turned out that most of those things weren't as accessible by public transit as we'd hoped. We did see a mosque, though, and spent some quality time with the many stray cats that the city's famous for. I liked that this side of things is so much less busy than the West, but it's too bad that there isn't much to see. Eventually we took a ferry back and I napped in the hostel for a while. I haven't been sleeping well with JP here - as much as I enjoy his company, I've had a rough few days in the sleep department and I find that travelling together effectively eliminates the time I had to myself. The incredible pace and scope of my travels has thus far only been possible because I routinely spend substantial amounts of time alone doing essentially nothing and tuning out the world, whether that's walking through a park and listening to podcasts or sitting in a cafe writing the blog. With more permanent companionship, I have no such opportunities to recharge and end up staying awake late into the night catching up on "doing nothing" time at the expense of sleep. I noticed something similar happen last year when working very long hours - if I have a choice between either time to myself or getting an adequate amount of sleep, I always end up choosing the former. Under normal circumstances spending a day together wouldn't have been a challenge at all, but these aren't normal circumstances and I'm definitely worn down by 3 previous months of having been on the road. Most of the other travellers I meet are operating on similarly lax schedules to mine and it's not usually a problem as a result, but the fact that JP only has a few days to cover such a huge city is relatively incompatible with that sort of pace.

After napping, we went to get dinner. The restaurant we settled on was, again, fairly overpriced and even more transparently a tourist trap, but there's nothing on this side of the city that isn't. They would do a really stupid ceremony thing involving drumming with spoons and shattering the lid to a ceramic pot whenever someone ordered one of the menu items. Needless to say, it was incredibly annoying. The food was fine but did not justify the price or having to sit through a dozen shattering clay pots and spoon drum sessions. We went back to the hostel and chatted with some people before going to bed, where I again couldn't sleep much. We might try to go out tomorrow night with a nice Australian guy.

Istanbul is in many ways exactly as I remember it, but in so many others not at all what I expected. The number one thing I don't remember are the tourists. The massive crowds (off-season, at that), the crazy prices, the seemingly endless expanse of mediocre restaurants that no local would ever dream of visiting... I remember Istanbul being incredibly beautiful, and that's correct, but it's a shame that so many people (both residents and tourists) have caught on to that. Maybe it was always this way and being 11 shielded me from the worst of it, but I don't think so. At least I like the cats just as much as ever.