We have finally arrived after what feels like days of travel, getting good at catching bits of sleep sitting up though.

It was reasonably cool in Istanbul today 21 degrees when we arrived so very pleasant, could even have put a jersey on tonight.

The city is very green with heaps of parks and trees around, the amount of threes on the waterfront in the new part of the city is astounding.

Our hotel is lovely and is within a 5 minute walk from the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and the Grand Bazzar is only a 2 minute walk!! Although, sadly it is closed tomorrow.

Had a walk around this evening and came across a local artisan market, amazing stuff all hand made and several of them were doing demonstrations of marbling, wood carving, calligraphy, embroidery, wool felt, jewellery.

We were hounded a bit to eat at several different places, had a lovely dinner of a Meze platter, yum.

We tucked up in bed early tonight, try to keep ahead of the jet lag.

The sun was shining it was a beautiful day and I got to see the mountains around Vancouver.

We started off today by having our morning coffee at Pat’s favourite cafe. 
In Hayley’s neighbourhood we have seen two of these, both different, they have books in them that you can take books from and put books into for anyone to use.

We went to Michaels which is an upmarket craft supply store it’s huge, then we went to Indigo which is a large book store. Came back to Hayley’s neighbourhood and had a beautiful fresh salad lunch, looked around some shops, got supplies in to cook her flat mates dinner yum. A great night.

 This was a block of cheese!! It was huge just the right size to fit on crackers.

Vancouver is a beautiful city, very clean and lots of trees. Walked through a lovely community garden today.