Rain and Snow in Istanbul

That's right my friends and Mr.Yerp.

Two nights ago it snowed. Kids ran out of their apartments in 1 inch of slushy snow to throw slushballs at each other and play football. Many kids in our neighbourhood, especially the girls, don't go to school, but the appearance of boys running around outside instead of being tucked up in their beds at 10:30 on a school night made me believe that snow is as least as uncommon here as in Victoria. As in Victoria, the snow quickly turned to rain, and we woke up to a sunny day!

We went over to the Egyptian Spice Market the other day, and it just wasn't what I imagined. Instead of huge sacks of colourful spices, many of which I'd only seen in postcards, there were small bags of colourful spices, most of which I recognized, or had signs in English explaining what they were. Behind these bags were the usual tacky-tourist stuff (that you are all getting as souveneirs) like evil-eye keychains and ugly hookahs. The power went out, as often happens here, and although places still stay open with no power, we left to get lost in the many identical streets around the market, until I suddenly realized that we were about to walk into the Grande Bazaar, so we went and got lost there instead.

Yesterday we went to see the new Harry Potter movie, which was playing in English with Turkish subtitles, as many western movies do here. This movie was exciting, but also a bit disappointing to me, but I won't go into it in case you haven't seen it, and also because it would make me look like a dork in front of Mr Yerp (who I am very glad to find out is NOT just a creepy random man who liked the looks of my picture). Movies have assigned seating, but since ours was a matinee (though being foreigners, we were charged the regular rate), we could sit wherever. In the middle of all movies is an intermission (smoke-break, as EVERYONE here smokes EVERYWHERE - I was just happy that they weren't smoking in the theatre, like I thought they would be).

Today it rained and was cold, so we stayed home for the second day since we got here. Wait. We did go out.

Today we went to the Internet Café. My friend from Victoria (from Marigold) who we stayed with in London comes in a couple of days, so we have LOTS of plans for the weekend!

Will keep you posted!