Success at last!

So, booking our hotels in Turkey has been more "interesting" than we anticipated. Our first choice hotel in Istanbul, the Empress Zoe, was already full by the time we tried to get a room there (our travel guide advised to "book well ahead"...with 2 months to go we thought we had enough time but apparently not!). We chose another Istanbul hotel, plus a hotel on the islands and a hotel on the Asian side of the water, and tried to book through their online reservation forms. No confirmation, no reply. We tried calling to follow up, but couldn't get through. We tried emailing the email addresses posted on their websites. No reply. Michael got referrals and information about a travel agent here in Abu Dhabi and one in Turkey, but even they would not respond to our calls and emails!

This afternoon, however, we learned that to dial into Turkey you need not just the country code, area code and phone number, but also an "international dialling code" unique to the country you are calling out of. We've never called a country that required one before, so we hadn't realized we needed it. After looking up that code the phone numbers for all our hotels suddenly worked like magic, so we were finally able to talk to live people and reserve our rooms.

In Istanbul, we will be staying at Turkoman Hotel. This hotel is close to our first-choice location and close to the big attractions like the bazaar, the blue mosque, and Topkapi. Then we will move to the islands for one night, and stay at the Halke Palace Hotel. After that we will ferry over to the Asian side and spend two nights in Bursa at the Efehan Hotel.

We are greatly relieved to have our rooms booked after 2 weeks of trying. We will be in in Turkey over ANZAC day, so even though the main focus is Galipoli we assume it is a high -demand season all over. We were starting to wonder if we were going to have to sleep on the street!

As for the rest of life...we attended a presentation on the ABC's of Carpet Buying hosted by the American Womens' Network this past week. We now have a better idea of some of the things we should be looking for--and watching out for!--when carpet shopping. We also went over to Pat's Antiques Exhibition this week. The woman who owns this business shows her wares a couple of times a year; some are small touristy things that you can find many other places, but many of her things come direct from Oman. We decided to splurge a bit and buy an Omani Mandoos (marriage chest). Pat said she believes this chest is between 80-100 years old. The decoration is done with hammered metal and metal studs and is quite beautiful: