Happy Turkey Days!

I realize its not yet Thanksgiving back at home, but I just finished up my turkey days in Istanbul and had an awesome time!

The first day in Istanbul I spent walking around with three of my friends. Our ship was parked on the Asia side of the city, but we walked from Asia to Europe and took lots of pictures of ourselves on the bridge that connects the two continents (I know people that have stood in four states at one time, but not many people who have done two continents at the same time). So we ended up spending most of our first day on the Europe side. We had breakfast in a cute little patisserie where the guys spoke no English at all, so we placed out orders by pointing – which is always fun. We walked through the spice bazaar and were just absolutely inundated by smells of spices and teas that were wonderful, especially when compared to the smells we’ve been recently assaulted by in India and Egypt. The spice bazaar was really fun, the salesmen here were so much more easygoing than they had been in most of the other countries, they didn’t hassle you the moment you walked in, and would serve you delicious apple tea once you got a little more involved in the sale. We left the spice bazaar and wandered our way uphill looking in little stores with no particular destination in mind. We found ourselves drawn to the shops selling hats, gloves, and scarves, because for the first time this whole trip, it finally felt like the right temperature for the season – and for me, in November, that means cold and rainy. And that’s what we got. We were all happy to see red and brown leaves falling off trees because autumn doesn’t actually happen in a lot of countries it seems. But, back to our meandering walk, at the top of the hill we found a pretty mosque that we looked at, it was prayertime, so we couldn’t go in, but we stopped for lunch at a café across the street and then went back into the mosque afterwards. It was a pretty place, we wondered if maybe it was the blue mosque or something, because we thought that was supposed to be somewhere in the area, but realized the blue mosque is probably something you know you are seeing when you see it (this one really wasn’t impressive enough) so this one was just a smaller mosque, of which there are many dotting the city and making the skyline very pretty. From the mosque, we continued wandering through the hilly streets and little stores in a meandering sort of way. We found lots of cute little shops and ogled lots of cute Turkish guys, and so that was a fun afternoon. When it started to get darker and colder, we headed back to Asia and on our way back to the ship found a place selling really cheap phone cards so we all took the opportunity to briefly call home and that was nice. Mom had to rescue cookies from the oven, so she couldn’t talk long, so I grabbed a cup of hot chocolate and waited for my friends to finish up their conversations in a little café nearby.

The second day in Istanbul, I spent exploring the Asia side with my friend Sam. We started off the day with fresh squeezed orange and pomegranate juice from a street vendor and a loaf of fresh baked bread from a baker as we climbed up a hugely steep hill to the Galata tower – from which you can see an incredible view of the city. We then continued walking along the hilly part that sort of overlooks the river and the other bank because it was super pretty up there and we came upon a tiny little art museum, where, funny enough, they were having an Andy Warhol show (because I don’t see enough of that back in Pittsburgh). But we decided to go it and it was fun, because they had an interesting collection of modern American/Western art and also a collection of more traditional Western oil paintings of Turkish people done rather stereotypically or imagined (sexy ladies in harems and the like) and from the blurbs you could tell that even though the pieces were lovely, the Turkish museum didn’t really approve of their content or their context. We walked from the museum toward Taksim (one of Istanbul’s many districts) stopping in churches and window shopping along the way. We had lunch, got over-charged for food we didn’t mean to order, and left frustrated. We kept walking through the business district and eventually found our way to an outdoor theater and form there to a pretty park where we see-sawed for the first time in years. Both of our cameras take video, so we filmed each other bouncing up and down on the see-saw (teeter-totter? I’m never sure what to call them) and its pretty funny to watch. We finally reached the Dolmabache palace (which was our ultimate goal for the day) but it was closed when we got there, so that was sad.

The third day, we took a boat ride up the bosphorus to a tiny little fishing village. The ferry ride was a lot of fun, the scenery was just beautiful, we sailed past the ruins of lots of stone walls and fortresses. We had lunch in the little village (yummy fresh caught fish!) and then decided to walk around because we had a few hours before the next ferry would come to pick us up. We picked a random direction in hopes of climbing up into the hills for a good view of the river and ended up finding not only a spectacular view, but the ruins of an ancient castle that you could climb around on. The view from the very top of the hill was incredible because you could see the bosphorus on one side and the black sea on the other. The day was clear and sunny, and it was absolutely perfect to spend the afternoon climbing on potentially dangerous rocky ruins. On the ferry ride back, we made sure to sit on the other side of the boat so we could check out everything on the other side of the river. We got back into Istanbul just as the sun was starting to set, and it was the most incredible moment to see all the mosques backlit by the sun from the water with seagulls flying all around. We stopped back into the spice bazaar to buy more delicious teas and Turkish delights and then walked back across the continents to find dinner in Asia. We went back to the ship for a while, but went back out to spend the evening in a Turkish café/bar, smoking a hookah and drinking yummy apple tea and super-strong coffee (like in Egypt, smoking a hookah/shisha/waterpipe is totally the cool thing to do). We made friends with our server, it was quite fun.

The next day we took the tram to Sultanamet – which is one of the most important districts to visit in Istanbul when you’re touristing there, because that’s where the blue mosque and the haggia Sophia are. We tried to go to the blue mosque first, but we got there during prayer-time so we weren’t allowed in. So we walked across to the Hagia Sophia and went in there first and it was absolutely amazing. The story behind the place is that the majority of what still stands was built as a basilica around 400 ad., but when the Muslims took over the city in 1400, they turned the church into a mosque by adding minarets and covering up lots of the old Christian frescoes. Since then, the place has been secularized and the frescoes have been uncovered, so now its an incredible combination of Christianity and Islam. The inside of the Haggia Sophia was most definitely one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. It was huge and so ornate, it was unbelievable. There were two art shows within the hagia Sophia. On the first floor was an exhibition by a Turkish painter of turkey and mosques and other cultural things done in a somewhat abstracted, contemporary fashion, they were very cool, very fun to look at, they were also all for sale, but completely out of my price range. The exhibition on the second level was of photography of the haggis Sophia itself – they were absolutely beautiful photos, so wonderfully detailed, they captured the place so much better than my little tiny pictures with my little tiny camera ever could. Seeing the photos and the real thing at the same time was magical. When we left the Hagia Sophia, we went back to the blue mosque and it was open now. It too was very beautiful inside, but also sort of felt like just another beautiful mosque (its rather ridiculous how many mosques I’ve seen in the past two weeks after having never been inside on until this point in my life) it was lovely, but by no means as fantastic as the Hagia Sophia. Then we had lunch at a street corner café – we had these sliced meat sandwiches that are THE thing to have (they’re called doner sandwiches) they are for sale absolutely everywhere. Then we went to the grand bazaar and spent a few hours being overwhelmed by the enormity of the place and resisted the urge to buy large-scale stained glass/light pieces (he offered me a pretty good deal by the end of it, but there was no way I could have gotten in home). After the bazaar, our group split up, and Erin and I headed back toward the mosques in search of the basilica cistern that we had heard was really cool. It took a while to find, because the whole place is underground, with only a small ticket booth above ground. The cistern is a huge underground cavern supported by 360some columns that used to store water back in the day of aquaducts. Now, its open to the public and when you go down, it feels like what the creepy place in the phantom of the opera probably feels like. Its wet and slippery, and sortof creepy with eerily lit columns and the sound of dripping water from the rain. It was a place with definite atmosphere, it was very cool. There are two large medusa head sculptures in the back of the cistern, one of which is upside-down, the other is sideways, and no one quite knows why they were built that way, but they were.

On our last day in Istanbul, Erin and I decided to sortof take it easy. We slept in and then took a tram back to Sultanamet because our goal was to see the Topkapi palace that had been closed when we had tried to go there the day before. Since we got there in the morning, it was open, and we spent a long time looking through the multiple courtyards. It was a very pretty place, there are four gardened courtyards and all of the palace rooms have been turned into museum spaces where they exhibit collections of historical Turkish things. We saw everything from carriages, to a collection of Chinese pottery, to clothing and jewelry, to portraits if the sultans, and an armory of swords and rifles. It was a really interesting opportunity to learn a lot about Turkish history simply by looking at the artifacts and reading the little blurbs about them. The palace was very different from the European-type castle that I had sortof been expecting, the layout of the courtyards was different and it wasn’t build up tall at all, it just spread out to cover lots of ground. Anyways, it was different. The view from the palace of the bosphorus and the other side of the city was also quite incredible. I wouldn’t mind living in the palace and having a view like that. Erin and I walked back from the palace, exploring a little bit more as we went and then stopped back into the hookah place to spend the rest of the afternoon watching the soccer game and drinking more tea. It was fun, it was nice to end on a sort of relaxing day. As my third to last country, I’m realizing that I’m ending the entire voyage in a more relaxing way, I no longer have huge cross-country train trips coming up, and I’m planning on spending a little more time just getting to know individual cities, the back alleys and the teeny cafes and all that good stuff. I think it’ll be nice after all the busyness.