Just kidding... Sort of.
Guys, why am I not a History major? Had I been a History major I could have been blogging to you while still in Istanbul... because History does not require a language, so the fact that Turkish is a mostly useless language wouldn't matter. But no, I'm an International Relations major taking the more useful (and admittedly prettier) Arabic blogging from Jordan. Don't get me wrong, I like Amman and Jordan a lot, but I loved Istanbul.
I mean really, how can you not love a place this pretty?
Now I'm going to attempt to cram four Istanbul days into one blog post... Let's see how this works.
Now I'm going to attempt to cram four Istanbul days into one blog post... Let's see how this works.
Lesse... I left off at the day we walked along the old city wall and visited the Chora Church. Good times... I miss Istanbul... Anyway. Onwards to Wednesday. We decided to take a vacation from our vacation and took a ferry to the Princes' Islands, the quintessential Turkish vacation spot. Well, we visited one island anyway, but they all kinda looked the same from the ferry. The biggest island, Buyukundu (the one we visited), is notable for a fantastic view at the top of a very long hill (although it was not as steep of a hike as Lonely Planet claimed), a small monastery (we didn't go inside because it cost money and the real reason for the trek up there is the view), an old orphanage that is supposed to be the second largest wooden structure in the world, and supposedly Leon Trotsky's villa, but we couldn't find it.
Horse-drawn carriages were available for a tour of the island. We walked instead.
The monastery at the top of the hill.
We also visited Topkapi Palace that day. It was your typical "I am really wealthy and important and I need to show off my wealthy importantness" palace. It was a palace back in the Ottoman days, but now it's used as a museum to showcase all of the emeralds that the Ottomans ever made/received/or stole. So many emeralds. Needless to say, I was not terribly impressed with Topkapi because I got bored after the 300th emerald/diamond/gold/unobtanium* encrusted water flask. The grounds were pretty, and the view was gorgeous, but I don't have any good pictures of either, so moving on...
That night we met up with the same friends that we went to the James Joyce Irish Pub with and set out to find Galata House again. Galata House is an old converted British Jail that Beth recommended to me, owned by a Georgian couple, Nadire and Mete We found it and rang the bell (yeah, we thought that was weird too), and were let inside by a lovely elderly Georgian lady, Nadire. There was only one other group in the restaurant that night and they left shortly after we got there, so at first I was a little concerned that this was going to be one long night of awkard. Turns out I had no reason to worry though, because the benefit to having a quaint little Georgian restaurant to yourself is that the cute little Georgian woman tells you stories and plays the piano and sings for you.
Nadire was born in Austria in 1945--her parents moved there during the war from Georgia (again, the country guys, not the American state). When she was little, she moved with her family to Istanbul and she's lived there ever since. While she was growing up her mother taught her how to cook and play the piano, and although her career prior to the restaurant was as an architect, she pretty exclusively uses her cooking and piano-playing skills for her restaurant. The food was delicious; I had beef stroganoff for dinner and chocolate cake for dessert. After feeding us and offering us multiple baskets of bread, Nadire played us a few Russian songs and sang to us, and tried to insist that I play the piano when I mentioned that I used to take lessons. Fortunately she stopped pleading me after a while. Little did she know that I can barely play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" anymore, let alone a real piece.
Outside of Dolambache Palace
Plant clock outside of the Clock Museum at Dolambache.
Aaaaaand, now I'm back in Amman. My next couple of posts will also be Istanbul-themed, although I've covered most of it. Mostly I want to show you guys pictures of desserts, so watch out for that.
*No, not really.
-Title dited because Blogger is being stupid and insists that I posted this on Sunday, when in fact I posted it on Tuesday. Sunday was Night 70, Tuesday was Night 72.
Horse-drawn carriages were available for a tour of the island. We walked instead.
The walk around the island was beautiful and was covered in fall-ish leaves like this one, I was so happy!
The Orphanage. It's actually ginormous, but this was my best picture of it. It used to be a hotel, but then it was converted into an orphanage, and now it's just a crumbling building where some gypsies seem to be squatting.
Later that night we had delicious, delicious waffles and tea and coffee, and possibly some baklava. That was kind of a theme throughout our trip. I believe we started the next day off with a visit to the Basilica Cistern, which was pretty damn cool. It was especially cool considering the fact that I hadn't seen any pictures of the Cistern and therefore had no idea what to expect (I say as I put up a picture of the Cistern to spoil y'all):
Sadly, pictures do not do it justice. As I said to a friend of mine, most of the reason that the Cistern is cool is due to the lighting. They were very clever with the lighting so that the columns are reflected in the water in the perfect way to make the room look bigger and cooler. Also, the whole place looks like it's on fire. It would just be a damp, not very special dark room if it weren't for the lighting.
This is the base of a column, one of two Medusa's heads in the Cistern. This one is upside down, whereas the other's head is tilted to the side. The plaque said that no one knows why they're positioned this way, but I looked it up later and it seems as though most people think that the heads were stolen and the best way to fit them to the columns was to position the heads this way.
That night we met up with the same friends that we went to the James Joyce Irish Pub with and set out to find Galata House again. Galata House is an old converted British Jail that Beth recommended to me, owned by a Georgian couple, Nadire and Mete We found it and rang the bell (yeah, we thought that was weird too), and were let inside by a lovely elderly Georgian lady, Nadire. There was only one other group in the restaurant that night and they left shortly after we got there, so at first I was a little concerned that this was going to be one long night of awkard. Turns out I had no reason to worry though, because the benefit to having a quaint little Georgian restaurant to yourself is that the cute little Georgian woman tells you stories and plays the piano and sings for you.
Nadire was born in Austria in 1945--her parents moved there during the war from Georgia (again, the country guys, not the American state). When she was little, she moved with her family to Istanbul and she's lived there ever since. While she was growing up her mother taught her how to cook and play the piano, and although her career prior to the restaurant was as an architect, she pretty exclusively uses her cooking and piano-playing skills for her restaurant. The food was delicious; I had beef stroganoff for dinner and chocolate cake for dessert. After feeding us and offering us multiple baskets of bread, Nadire played us a few Russian songs and sang to us, and tried to insist that I play the piano when I mentioned that I used to take lessons. Fortunately she stopped pleading me after a while. Little did she know that I can barely play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" anymore, let alone a real piece.
Nadire's piano. This is the piano she learned to play on when she was like, six. So it's a 60 something year old piano that still sounds beautiful.
The walls of the restaurant have been mostly re-done since it was a British jail, but Nadire and her husband kept some of the old walls up, and you can see writing on the wall written by the prisoners. Some of it was in English and we could read one bit that was counting the days, "Sunday... Monday... Tuesday..." Spooky.
We also explored Istiklal Street again that night. It's a cool street with a lot of clubs and brightly lit stores. Jill and Hannah spazzed out in excitement when they found a Salad Station restaurant (they're vegetarians). I found a good burger place down the street.
Goofy star statue wearing a fez on Istiklal.
Okay, just a little bit more, bear with me. I didn't take very many pictures after the night we visited Istiklal. The next day was Ataturk's deathday. Yeah, Kemal Ataturk, the man who secularized Turkey, is still important enough and deeply revered enough that at 9:05 AM, on November 10 (the date and exact time that he died), a siren that sounds exactly like a tornado siren wails through Istanbul and everyone, including buses and cars, stops in their tracks for a whole minute to remember Ataturk. We got up early that morning (ugh, Ataturk, why couldn't you have held out for another like, two hours?) and wandered out to the main road to see traffic stop. It was pretty cool, and kinda surreal. The people along the street were all frozen, it felt weird to be moving among them. It was like one of those movies where time stops and the main characters are the only ones moving.
After traffic started moving again, Hannah and I went to the Archaeology Museum and the Istanbul Modern Art museum (Jill had a Turkish bath day). I loved both museums, but it would have been weird to take pictures of pottery shards, and we weren't allowed to take pictures inside the Istanbul Modern. Note for people who intend to travel to Istanbul in the future: If you want to see the Archeology Museum, budget a whole day for it, not just three hours. There are three buildings associated with the Archaeology Museum, and all of them contain cool things. The biggest one has four floors containting Turkey's history starting from thousands of years ago, up until today. It also has a lot of information on important sites throughout Istanbul, including the old city wall, the Chora Church, and a lot of Istanbul's mosques, all of which were lacking in plaques, so in retrospect I would have gone to the museum first.
The Istanbul Modern wasn't a modern art museum in the way I usually think of modern art. It didn't have pretentious paintings and sculptures that no one has any hope of understanding. By "modern art" they meant "contemporary art," which I really like. They had a great exhibit on women artists in Turkey and the ceiling in the basement was covered entirely in flying books; books hanging from the ceiling, which was pretty cool.
So I may have an excuse for not taking pictures in the museums, but I don't really have an excuse for not taking any pictures of the Grand Bazaar. I just didn't. Look them up online. There's not much to say about the Grand Bazaar except that it was gigantic and overwhelming and overpriced. Although, I did buy a pair of excellent purple sneakers there. I'm really excited to show them off in the states.
Okay, we're almost there, last day! On our last day we said our goodbyes to the Mavi Guesthouse staff (except Valentina, who wasn't there) and took the metro out to Dolambache Palace. It was a little bit like Topkapi, but more opulent. I liked it more than Topkapi for two reasons, though. First, the rooms inside the palace were set up in the way that they would have been set up back in the Palace's heyday. Second, they had a bird house that was off limits to tourists, but a somewhat sketchy Turkish man (who turned out not to be so sketchy after all), brought us in and showed us the canaries and gave all three of us real peacock feathers. Unfortunately, Dolmbache did not let us take pictures indoors, so I only have a few pictures:
*No, not really.
-Title dited because Blogger is being stupid and insists that I posted this on Sunday, when in fact I posted it on Tuesday. Sunday was Night 70, Tuesday was Night 72.
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