When I arrived in Turkey I had to pay an airport tax but I didn't have any money so the guard let me walk across the line and withdraw money from the machine. I met some Americans who I shared a taxi with to the historical center where they knew were some hostels. The hostel I stayed at wasn't that big but was multi storied. It had a cool bar area on the top level where you could buy beer and food and hang out with other travelers. I met some pretty interesting travelers there. There was one free wheeling guy who was from New York and used to work in a hotel and had met all the WWF wrestlers. He had tattoos all over his arms that me made himself with pen ink. There was another Dutch guy and a South African girl who I hung out with a little bit. We went to a bar under the hostel where everybody was smoking apples from bongs. I smoked my brains out but didn't get buzzed.

My first full day there I did a tour of the historical center which was full of interesting sights. The first place I went was the second biggest mosque in the world after the one in Mecca. It was a few hundred years old and very pretty from the outside, but on the inside it was very plain and empty. Then I went to the other mosque almost as big across a grass field from the first one. On the outside of the second mosque I was greeted by a snazily dressed Turkish man who was very insistent that he give me a tour of the mosque, so I let him. We had to take our shoes off for this mosque on the south side which was more interesting because it was more decorated and colorful than the first one. After touring the mosque the man insisted that I go to his store and look at his rugs that he wanted to sell to me, but I wasn't interested, but he kept insisting until I decided I didn't trust him enough to go to his place. He was acting so strangely I though he might mug me or something. I felt bad to just leave him there begging me to go to his store. He didn't seem to understand that there was no way he was going to convince me to buy a rug. Rugs seemed to be one of the main industries in these parts besides tourism.

There were men all over the place trying to sell rugs. I'm sure I could have made a living buying rugs there and selling them in the states if I had of wanted to. I quickly learned that these Turkish were like the Moroccans in terms of being annoyingly persistent. I didn't want to be rude and ignore all the calls from the men trying to get me into their shops. But after stopping and talking to more than a few of them, I had to start to just say hi to them and keep walking regardless of their please to stop and give them my time.

After the mosque I went to a museum that had a large number of statues from the days of Constantinople. This part of Istanbul used to be the center of Constantinople. Constantinople was founded by the Emperor of Rome called Constantine who lived around the second century AD around the time of the fall of Rome. He decided to change the location of the Roman Empire and call it the Holy Roman Empire. Constantinople was build with the same idea as Rome. They had baths, and a Coliseum and a Circus Maximus. But after a thousand years it fell to the Muslims who built their own mosques and palaces directly over the sight of old Constantinople. Just across the street from the large mosque was the ruins of the baths of Constantinople, which were now under ground. I did the tour of the baths which still had the original pillars and water as they once did. About a hundred meters from the baths were the ruins of the Circus Maximus, which was now a park, but it was interestingly in the exact shape of the original Circus Maximus. It even had the original central spire and arch.

I also did a tour of the Muslim kings palace which was behind the large mosque. The palace consisted of a series of rooms encased within a huge court yard that was protected by a large wall. Near the entrance was the room where the kings harem lived. The palace also served as a museum that had what was supposedly the arm of John the baptist and the footprint of Mohamed. I was interested to see that Mohamed's footprint was very wide and about a foot and a half long, meaning that he would have had to have been at least about eight feet tall. It didn't look like a realistic foot print though because it was too wide and square looking. The museum was also full of beautiful jewels and crowns and elegant pottery and kitchen ware. The most beautiful place in the palace was a patio on the outside on the edge of the cliff overlooking the straight. In the middle of the patio was a small building that had a central room that was full of pillows set in a large square for the nobility to hang out and eat grapes and watch their entertainment perform for them.

One night there was a very sick person in my dorm room. I could smell the foul stench of sickness in the air, and the next day I was very ill. But I didn't really notice how sick I was until I was already on a bus headed for Golipoli. I barely stood the ride down there, and by the time I found a hostel and got a room that I shared with some other travelers; I just crashed and slept for four days. I was more deliriously sick than I had ever been in my life. I had terrible cold sweats and kept imagining that I had the world in my hand but I kept crushing it, but as soon as I opened my hand the world immediately formed perfectly again, and I crushed it again. When I finally got better I did the tour of Golipoli. I knew about Golipoli from the early 80's movie with Mel Gibson. Golipoli was a famous battlefront of World War One where the English sent thousands of Australians to their deaths trying to get control of the straight that led to the Black Sea. The trenches were still there complete with the wooden supports, however a bit shallower. Even the tunnels they dug were still there. The road that our tour bus drove on was between the trenches of the Turkish and English, which were within a stones throw of each other. In fact, they did throw grenades at each other. It was so gruesome that anybody who was in the front trench was surely to die within a few minutes from a grenade being thrown into their trench. The guide told us that the soldiers on the opposing sides grew an affinity for each other and were attaching well wishing letters to their grenade's.

The next day I went to the bus station to buy a ticket for the ruins of Troy which I was excited to see, but a slimy looking man approached me and insisted that he buy me a coffee. I had already heard of tourists and met tourists who have fallen for this famous trick of strange men buying tourists coffee that is laced with a drug that makes you pass out so they can rob you. I told him to piss off and I just got sick of being in Turkey, and suddenly decided I just wanted to go straight to Katmandu and get my brothers bike and start touring around India. So I took a bus back to Istanbul.

I stayed in another hostel in Istanbul, for what reasons I'm not sure of. This new hostel wasn't as quaint and was larger. It had a large buffet room for the tourists to eat. I remember overhearing an interesting conversation between two older travelers in their forties or fifties. One guy was a Canadian high school teacher and the other was an Australian guy. The Canadian teacher was talking about how a lot of the teachers at his school have slept with their students. I found it funny how they buddied up like that and were acting like they were teenagers.

While I was sleeping in my bunk I noticed that I had asthma, which was the first time I had felt that sensation since I had asthma for a year when I was six years old. I thought it was just residual from the sickness, but it stayed to this day. In my room I had these two intrepid American traveler girls who had been traveling all through Morocco and loved it, and I was glad that there were tourists who had the ability to see the bright side of that country which does have a lot of cool cultural traits.

The next day I took a plane to Katmandu, but I had a three hour stopover in Karachi Pakistan, and for that three hours I felt like I was in Pakistan. The women in the checkout line were dressed in long muslim dresses and acted rude to me and obviously didn't speak any English. On the plane ride out I looked out the window and saw a sprawling city of dirt roads and unpainted rock and mud buildings just like the towns in Morocco.