Night 66: Now It's Turkish Delight on a Moonlit Night

It was actually Turkish delight on a sunlit morning, but hey.

Anyway, guys. It is going to be so difficult for me to go back to Amman on Saturday. I like Amman a lot, and I do really love the people there (except the cat-calling boys), but I think if I were going to be here for longer, I could potentially really fall in love with Istanbul. It's not just the wonderful first-world luxuries that don't exist in Amman (toilet paper! green grass! dark chocolate!), although that's definitely part of it. I love so much of the city itself, though. It's got all of the good bits of Europe, combined with all of the good bits of the Middle East with very little of the bad bits. I love the architecture, the mosques are gorgeous, and I love the cats, the cobblestoned streets, the Bosphorus river, the beautiful lamps, street food... I really love Turkey and yeah, it's going to be difficult to go back to the desert at the end of the week.

And on that note, pictures and stuff. I'm more than halfway through vacation here, and we've done a lot in a short span of time, even going at a pretty leisurely pace. We got into Istanbul at around 6:00 AM Saturday morning, dumped our stuff at the hostel, and then headed out to do all of the most touristy things Istanbul has to offer.

This is our hostel, the Mavi Guesthouse. It's pretty great. The owner, Ali, is super sweet and the atmosphere here is great and very friendly. I also like it that when people ask me where I'm from, I don't have to just say "the States," I can add "but I'm living and studying in Amman" and I have all of these travel stories and advice to give for people traveling in the Middle East. It feels awesome.

Anyway, after dumping our stuff at the hostel, we headed over to the Hagia Sophia. MORE pictures, because the Hagia Sophia was pretty amazing. A little history for those of you who don't know--the Hagia Sophia was a Byzantine church called Saint Sophia before the Ottoman conquerers took Constantinople in 1453. It then became a mosque, the Hagia Sophia until the 1930s when Ataturk secularized the mosque and turned it into a museum. It still looks like both a mosque and a church, and it's pretty fantastic. When it was converted into a mosque, the Ottomans covered up a lot of the frescoes and mosaics because they depicted faces of  religious figures, which is not allowed in the Islamic faith. In the last 50 years or so, it's been partially restored, but both the mosque bits and the church bits are shown pretty much equally.

This is the inside of the Hagia Sophia (for the outside, see my previous post). The interior had these low hanging lights (turns out most mosques here have them) and I thought they were pretty breath-taking, so I took a few pictures of them.

Pretty lights.

This was the view from the upper level. I don't know what most of the Arabic on the walls said because it was calligraphy, which is hard to read even if you know the alphabet, but the thing in the far back of the picture says "Allah."

Mosaic on the upper level.

After the Hagia Sophia we went across the street to the Blue Mosque. It was built after the Hagia Sophia as sort of the rival Hagia Sophia--it's a lot prettier on the outside, and is beautiful on the inside as well. Of course, when we got there it was prayer time so we had to sit outside for a little while, but that was okay 'cause the grounds of the mosque were gorgeous as well.

Blue Mosque.

The courtyard within the grounds of the Blue Mosque.

Inside the Blue Mosque.

Pretty lights (Blue Mosque style).

We did a lot of other things that day, but I don't really remember them and I didn't take pictures, so moving on to the second day. Most of the day was spent exploring our neighborhood (Sultanahmet) and the Galata neighborhood. On our walk, Hannah and I saw a Turkish delight shop that looked a lot like a candy shop in the States, where you pick out pieces of candy, put them in a plastic bag and pay based on weight. This means cheap candy, right? Wrong. It means $20 Turkish delight because the dumb Americans can't convert kilograms into pounds. Oops. Fortunately we had two bags, so we just gave up one bag and ended up spending more like $6 on Turkish delight, but still. At least it was delicious.

The rest of the afternoon was pretty much the afternoon of mosques. We visited three or four of them.

Courtyard to a mosque that I don't remember very well.... Pretty much all of the mosques we've been in here look the same on the inside, with the same blue tile that's gorgeous, but not very memorable after five mosques.

Ceiling in one of the mosques, most of their ceilings look like this.

                                          The Suleymaniye mosque! My favorite mosque.

                                 

                                     

The view was pretty excellent.

                                                            FALL LEAVES SO PRETTY

                                                                  Even more pretty lights.

 

               The ceiling was even more gorgeous. Most mosques here have blue tile, which is pretty, but gets old. This one was mostly white with some red and black and yellow, it was really pretty.

                 Then we ate outside. I wish that I could eat outside of beautiful mosques every day.                    

After eating we visited the Spice Bazaar. It was a little hard to find and I'm still not convinced that we found the main part of the bazaar, but we definitely found something. It mostly seemed to be a pet/plant bazaar that happened to have some spices. We wandered into a pet store and found cages and cages of animals, including your standard fish and birds and hamsters, as well as puppies (yeah, that made me sad too). Some of the stranger animals were chickens and ducks (they were in cages like all of the pets, but presumably they were not being sold as pets per se), and chipmunks. Yeah, chipmunks. Maybe Turks keep chipmunks as pets?

Adorable chipmunks for sale, I'll take two please.

The plan for that night was supposed to be head to the Galata tower, explore, and have dinner. The Galata tower is worth seeing basically for its view of Istanbul, as well as it's being a cool old thing to see. It's had a few different uses, has been rebuilt at least once, but most interestingly some guy in the 17th century flew from the top of it using wooden wings.

Approaching the Galata Tower via narrow, cobblestoned streets reminded me of the Siq at Petra just before reaching the Treasury, it was great.

The view from the top of Galata Tower.

                                          I found a Storm Trooper lurking outside of the Tower.

Okay, so you remember how I said the "plan was supposed to be..."? Yeah. The plan did not go quite as we had planned, but we still had a good night. The plan had been to eat a nice dinner at a Georgian (as in the country, not the American state) restaurant that Beth had recommended to me. However, the restaurant, Galata House, was closed for Eid (the Muslim religious holiday that means I get to have this wonderful week off. Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca happens during this Eid. The other Eid happens after Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting). So instead we went to the only Irish pub in all of Turkey (also sort of recommended by Beth). It had really good food and it felt like a pretty genuine Irish pub. It even had Guinness, although apparently that was a recent installment since Lonely Planet claimed the pub had no Guinness.

Then we ended up hunting for dessert. We ended up settling on ice cream, but there are many, many dessert options here in Turkey, including really delicious-looking rice pudding:

On to the next day! We did a lot of walking on this day, kind of by accident. We took the metro to the Chora Church, a smallish church that was converted into a mosque just like the Hagia Sophia, but has been restored to look like a church as much as was possible, unlike the Hagia Sophia. It has some of the most goregous mosaics I've ever seen, although it doesn't really compare to the mosaic map of the Middle East (see the Jesus Lost His Sandals post for pictures) in Madaba.

                                                               Outside of the Chora Church.

Beautiful frescoed ceiling of the Chora Church.

The largest, most intact mosaic at the Chora Church. Mary and Jesus. Also, the gift shop at the church sold tin cans of air. Seriously, the can said "Air of Istanbul" and didn't have anything inside it, other than the air.

We left the church and walked along the old city wall for a few miles, got a little lost, and ended up walking all the way back to our hostel. I estimate we walked about six miles that day.

Top of the wall.

We think that this is part of a castle. Our map told us that there would be a castle along the wall walk, but this was the closest thing we could find in roughly the right spot. We also passed a playground that was kind of built into/around the wall, that was pretty cool. Then some kids threw a firecracker at us and we left the area pretty quickly. They also threw a firecracker into a trash can.

I've done so much more in the last few days, but that blog post will have to wait because I've put up too much stuff already. It will include the amazing Basilica Cistern, the Princes Islands, and actually eating at Galata House though, so stay tuned. Also, here's a picture of some pretty lights: