The first stop today was the Blue Mosque. It's a really gorgeous work of architecture and had an immensely crowd flooding in. They had a lot of info panels describing the tenets of Islam and made a rather vain effort at paint the Quaran as some sort of feminist manifesto. As nice as it is, there isn't really much to do there, and the huge crowd made sticking around less palatable than it would have been otherwise. I've also found that these mosques have a habit of looking much larger from the outside. We hopped a few feet over to the archeology museum. At €15 it wasn't insanely expensive, but I'm really missing my Balkan museum prices here. This is one I've been to before, but it was definitely worth seeing as an adult. There's a lot of good stuff in it.

We then headed north again to try and find somewhere less swamped with tourists and eventually found a cool main street lined with shops. While this area was very busy, it was almost entirely locals there as far as I could tell. There aren't many big tourist attractions up that way so I don't think most tourists explore that far north. We got Turkish coffee at a cafe up there (I don't usually drink coffee but it only seemed right), and mine featured some sort of insect that resembled an earwig. I spit it out and showed them to get the coffee for free - honestly a deal I'll take any day of the week. We rode a cable car over by one of the universities, watched a kid hang off the back of a trolley, and tried unsuccessfully for quite a while to get into a park that seemed to double as a fortress based on how difficult it was to enter. We rode the metro around too, and I was very impressed by the quality of the subway. One of the lines we took is clearly very new and fully automated. This is the sort of exploration and discovery that I like the most about travel - while I'm certainly not above visiting the big spots, it's feeling out a city in a more smaller scale way that I find the most engaging. The big attractions offer curated and predictable experiences, but spontaneity is mostly found elsewhere.

We eventually made it down to an area right under the huge bridge to Asia. The bridge and skyline are amazing by night as they light up with many different colors over the water. There were a lot of cool restaurants and bars around here, and we ended up getting a ton of food that was actually quite reasonably priced. It's still not Albania cheap, but I'll take what I can get. The Australian guy from last night met up with us and we attempted to ride the bus down closer to Galata to see the nightlife. That plan ran into issues since the bus seemed not be running the route that we thought it was, but also because we kept getting parked into bus lanes by other busses. The driver would honk constantly and at one point got out of the bus to yell at another bus driver. He'd also forget to close the doors about half the time, so we had a little bit of a breeze for much of the ride. Driving around here is absolute chaos and the streets are very much a free for all - I have no idea how we didn't crash at least a few times in the 30 minutes or so we were on the bus. After realizing we were going the wrong direction we took the metro to a nice cocktail bar and had some good mixed drinks. They gave us some olives with toothpicks and got mad at me for setting them on fire in the candle, but I don't think they spoke enough English to effectively scold me. On the whole, Istanbul's nightlife seems much more active and lively than I'd expected, though I can't really claim to have seen that much of it. I was really running on fumes by the end of the night there.

It's been interesting contrasting my experience with Istanbul from all those years ago with this one, and I'm going to have to do some work to figure out what differences are just memory vs actual change. It's a beautiful city and I feel like one day I might be able to more wholeheartedly recommend visiting, but given the crowds, scammers, and prices it's hard to do so without qualification at the moment. It's also been a great experience travelling with JP - there's a reason we've been friends for well over a decade now and it was a ton of fun exploring the city together. That said, the contrast to my usual routine also taught me valuable lessons about the advantages of solo travel, and of how different my current mental state is from what it would have been before coming to Europe.