Istanbul, Turkey – 08/26

(Michelle) On Sunday morning, we went to the Grand Bizaar which is a crazy maze of an indoor medieval shopping mall. We got lost several times.
In the afternoon we took care of some errands to get ready for Monday (where we will go round 2 on the Chinese visa attempt). TJ also had to prep for his Fantasy Football draft… You can leave the U.S., but you can’t leave the FF league or you will lose your spot forever. Unfortunately for TJ, his draft starts at 1am Turkish time and we have to get up at 6am to start our search for the visa.
I will post here a nice picture of the Bosphorus river taken from Topkapi palace.

(TJ) The Grand Bizarre is huge and you could find just about any knock off clothing item that you wanted there, except for track suits. It’s so big that Michelle got lost several times and I had to lead us back to where we needed to be. Interesting thing to see but you get the feeling the sellers are just licking their lips at all of the tourists who come through the doors. I cut the day short so that I could diligently prepare for my fantasy draft. Every thing goes fine coming up to the draft: my internet connection is good, my Google chat is set up, I’ve talked to the hotel staff and said that I have a very important meeting that starts at 1am and will take 4 hours and they are fine with that. Every thing is fine until about 10 minutes before the draft when I can’t chat with DeCorte anymore. Turns out the two resident computer genius’ (Hofer and Petko) in the league have knocked out DeCorte’s internet connection while trying to hook up their computers to the wireless. So I end up having to call DeCorte thru Skype to get updates every couple rounds and make quick decisions till 4am, painful. The lesson is never trust Hofer or Petko around a computer even if they say that they are professionals. If you guys are reading this I blame this incident on the Spawn having an awful year and Steven Jackson and the Rams as a whole, probably more Steven Jackson and the Rams.