Time out, Istanbul

I got my last travel book yesterday, entitled "Time out Instabul." It had the highest ratings on Amazon, so I thought that would be good. I do like Rick Steves' better so far though. This one has advertisements in it...I paid for a book with ads. Seriously.

Anyway, it has a lot of great information about cultural activities. It is concise and each section is seperated by neighborhood. I think this will be useful to carry around with me while walking. It's slick and full color.

The Arts & Entertainment section looks great. While it doesn't rate attractions like Rick Steves' it offers many more choices. They have a nice night life section, including the places to go to see belly dancers. And get this, I am flipping through the book and who do I see? The dude from that German film Crossing the Bridge! Ha ha. He's on a boat, playing the bass, with hair whipping through is long goatee. Gross!

Oh and I just found out that there are factory 'outlets' where you can buy European and American clothing for cheap. Drool. Basically they are large markets that sell rejects from H&M and Miss Sixty and such. The labels have been ripped off, but you can buy a pair of jeans for about 40 YTL ($32). I have to go to this!

Adam and I are still working out details on our trip. We have plans to do this more on Wednesday. He's going to check with the hotel on a few things and we're going to figure out our transportation options. According to the hotel's Web site, they have shuttles that run to the two major tourists parts of town. It would be great if I could just take one of those every day. Hopefully I could get picked up again too. That would be awesome!

Anyway, so my books are proving useful thus far. I read the Rick Steves' one about twice a day and I plan to flip throught this new one more at lunch. The only one that hasn't been useful is the first one I bought with the flip out maps. We'll see if that comes in handy once I get there.