Night 85: Stress

Guuuuyys.... study abroad is stressful!

No shit, Meg, life is stressful. Suck it up.

Fine. But I'm going to complain about it first.

I'm stressed out. For the most part, there have been some pretty predictable stessors during study abroad, most of which I've blogged about here:

-Safety
-Arabic
-Cultural differences
-Homesickness
-Loneliness
-Money
-Safety
-Arabic
-Some more Safety, and some more Arabic, just for good measure.

All in all though, this semester has mostly been less stressful than regular Beloit semesters. Sometimes being in Jordan feels like a nice break from the real world. I don't have to worry about club politics, or even really American politics, I don't have social things to organize or attend or worry about attending, I don't have to worry as much about classes (except for Arabic), or lots of other things that I ordinarily stress myself out about at Beloit. But now with the end of study abroad approaching, the real world is coming to get me and it is STRESSFUL. To be fair, I think on a scale of 1-10, I'm at about a 6 right now, which is not that bad, but still. I'm frustrated with how little Beloit tells its study abroad students about what is going on at home and what we need to be working on right now. I feel like usually there's paperwork to fill out at this time of year, and I have no idea where I'm living next semester, and I feel like I must be missing something important but I don't know what....
I'm also feeling super disconnected with home right now. I barely talk to friends at Beloit and I have to nag some people pretty hard to actually talk to me, and I don't know how my dynamic with people at school will have changed when I get back in January. At the beginning of this semester I was so homesick, and I missed my geeks and the awesome geeky, awkward, nerdy awesomeness that is Beloit. I thought that while the people here are nice, I would never make close connections with them like I have with people in Beloit and it made me incredibly homesick. I still miss my geeks and I'm off the charts excited about going home, but... I've made friends here. I like them. We've created a little community of our own here in Jordan and we've gotten to know each other pretty well, and the conversations have become so much more fun and interesting, and hanging out with people here is easy and fun... And I'm probably never going to see any of them again. I have friends in far-flung places like Colorado, Washington, Alabama, Washington D.C.... Some friends are closer, in Wisconsin or Minnesota, but odds are we'll all keep in  touch on Facebook and that'll be that. It frustrates me and it makes me concerned for the future. If I end up living far far away from Wisconsin and Beloit and Madison and the community that I've become a part of there, will the same thing happen? Will I stay Facebook friends with my college friends and nothing more? Gah, I don't even.

Growing up is hard.

Okay, Sucking It Up starts.... now!

Night 83: In Which My Mom Comes to Visit and I Can't Come Up With a Clever Title

How can you tell you're in Jordan? When almost every photograph on your blog is beige, beige, and more beige. It's difficult to write a blog about how awesome one's weekend was when the color of the pictures does not accurately portray what the beige places actually look like. 

Anyway. My mom came to visit me this last week! It was fun, despite the beige-ness of the photographs. She got here on Wednesday night and I ended up skipping class on Thursday so that we could go exploring together. It may or may not effect my overall grade because CIEE is stupid. I told them that my mom was in town and I wanted to skip one class so that we could leave early in the morning for Petra, but they were like "No, only if you're sick." Even my Arabic teacher thinks this rule is stupid. I should have listened to the people that told me to just fake sick. :P 

Again, anyway... We stayed in a nice hotel in Amman that night (having a mom that works in the travel business is great--all of the hotels we stayed in were paid for by someone not us), then the next day a driver picked us up and took us to some of the sites along the way to Petra. We went to Madaba and Mount Nebo, both of which I've been to and blogged about, but we also went to Karak Castle, which I hadn't been to before. It was a Crusader castle, a lot like the one I visited way back when I first went to Petra, Shobak Castle. This one was in the middle of a city though, and arguably cooler. It also had lots of climb-y bits: 

 

The entrance to Karak Castle. 

The view from a precarious ledge of Karak Castle. 

The Crusaders seem to have been big fans of windows.

After Karak we got to Petra, but didn't actually go inside until the next day ('cause we got there after dark). We stayed in a really, really nice hotel and let me tell you guys: luxury makes me uncomfortable. It's not a case of feeling like this is a poor(ish) country and feeling frustrated by the luxury, not at all. Jordan depends on its tourism business, it wants/needs more people to come here and spend money on luxurious hotels. That's a good thing. I just don't like all of the attention they show you at fancy hotels. It makes me feel weird. But anyway, on to the next day... 

We got up at fuck o'clock in the morning so that we could have Petra all to ourselves and our guide. At first I was like "Meh, I've seen Petra and wasn't terribly impressed by it, why do I have to get up so early?" But it was definitely worth it. The first time I saw Petra I had basically just done a two-day nature trip out in the middle of nowhere, and then we went to Petra with like 4,000 tourists and it was busy and hot and loud and crowded and I didn't like it. This time, it was cool and empty and I liked it significantly more. It's still not my favorite site in Jordan (I'd say that's probably a tie between the Dana nature reserve and Wadi Rum), but it was ten times better when it had about a tenth of the people. So, pictures, because my camera had battery life this time!

The obligatory Treasury picture. 

There are lots and lots of houses within Petra. They look a lot like caves, but they were houses in the Nabbatean days. Apparently, they were also houses for Bedoins until 1985. They got kicked out by the government so that Petra could be a tourist destination. Now they live in a separate city that you can see from Petra, and they have special selling privileges in Petra. They don't need a permit to sell things to tourists, and I think it's reaaaally hard for anyone to work there who didn't live inside of Petra (or who isn't descended from someone who did) when the government kicked them out.

My mom! 

Adorable donkey is adorable. 

More caves/ houses. 

Old city walls and columns, kind of falling apart. 

The largest (or maybe only?) free-standing building in Petra. It's also sort of earthquake-proof. Or something. I wasn't entirely listening to the guide at this point, heh. 

I don't remember what this is, but it sure looks cool, huh? :D To be fair, we saw this bit of Petra without a guide. The guide took us through the Siq at the beginning of Petra, past the Treasury and through the city to the place where you start the hike up to the Monastery (there's also a restaurant at this point, but we didn't eat there because of a stupid mis-communication on my part). After the guide left us, we wandered around Petra unguided which is just as much fun, but less informational. They're not really into signs over here. So we climbed around and explored a lot. I liked being able to show my mom just how much you can get away with here that you just can't do in the States. I have climbed on so many things here that would be barricaded and hidden away by barbed wire and giant KEEP OUT signs in the States. 

"Strong bridge!" 

So after Petra we left for the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth. I'd already been, but I know that my mom was pretty excited about bobbing and floating the Dead Sea. She also managed not to get any of it in her eyes like I stupidly did the previous weekend... Other than the stinging, it is a pretty cool experience, and the mud actually does make your skin feel good. For the most part, we just relaxed at the Dead Sea. We ate great steak and watched some belly dancing, and we got massages on Saturday morning... It turns out massages are nice, but I can honestly say that I've had better neck massages from friends than the full body massage I got at the Dead Sea. It was a cool experience though, I had never had a professional massage before.

The Dead Sea and a random person floating. The hotel that we stayed at had a beach with a view of the sea, but you had to walk down some stairs and over some rocks to get to the water, so I left my camera up at the beach, so no pictures of the two of us in the water. 

I had school on Sunday, so we had to leave the Dead Sea on Saturday afternoon. We had dinner with my host family and I'm so glad that my mom got to meet them because they are basically the best host family that anyone could ask for. We had chicken and potatoes for dinner by the way, very zaki. Sunday (after I had class) was mostly spent wandering around Amman. There's not actually that much to do in the city. It's such a residential city and there aren't that many cultural sites to see or museums or basically things to do. I took my mom to the Citadel (see one of my first blog posts for more) and over to Rainbow Street (the ex-pat center of Amman), and we had coffee and tea, and then I took her downtown to explore some of the shops, and we ate dinner at Hashem's. I don't remember if I've mentioned Hashim's here before, but it's a tasty and fairly famous restaurant in Amman. It's vegetarian and is basically just street food (falafel, ful, hummus, pita) served at some plastic tables, nothing impressive. But the King ate there once, there's a gilded framed picture and everything! 

Yeah, so that was my weekend. Thanks for coming to visit me Mom, I had a great time! :) 

Also, reason number 240 that I love my host family:

Lara brought a plate full of candy to my room today because she was eating candy, so I had to eat candy too. The Ghiradelli and the candy corn were actually gifts from my mother to my host family, but they don't really like dark chocolate so I'm going to end up eating most of the dark chocolate. I am okay with this. 

Night 74: Good News and Bad News

So, good news or bad news first, guys? Bad news? Okay.

Bad news #1: I forgot my camera at home today and so I have no pictures of Ajloun or the Dead Sea. And by "I forgot my camera," I mean I thought I left my camera at home but it was actually in my bag the whole time. Hi, my name is Meg. I've been doing shit like this since 1991 and will continue to do such things for many years to come.

Bad news #2: Turns out the Dead Sea burns the crotch area. It's unpleasant.

Bad news #3: We didn't go on the archaeological hike in Ajloun today, we went to the Dead Sea instead. I'm going again with my mom this Friday, so I will be going to the Dead Sea twice in one week. My life is so hard, huh?

Good news!

Good news #1: I went to the Dead Sea today.

Good news #2: I painted a space-themed classroom in Ajloun, it was awesome! We painted murals in three classrooms for the school in Ajloun today, and ours was space-themed. We painted a sun, a moon, some stars, Saturn, and a rocket ship. We also had a border going around the room of stars with English alphabet letters inside of them, as well as Arabic letters. Pretty nifty. I wish I had pictures, but I do not, see Bad news #1.

Good news #3: While there are still ~32 days left until I get to go home, there are only 15 more days of Arabic classes. This news kinda made my day. This means that of the 32 days, there are 15 days of Arabic, 8 days of weekend, 4 days of finals, and 5 days of I don't know what. But I know what it's not. It's not Arabic. :D

Good news #4: I have a blister from my fantastic new purple shoes. Obviously, this is not good news; the good news is that my blister did not burn or even hurt at all in the Dead Sea. Weird, but good.

Good news #5: My sort-of host sister that doesn't live with us (she's thirty), had twins on Wednesday! Pretty exciting.

Good news #6: My mom is coming to visit in a few days! We're going to Petra and the Dead Sea and it'll be great.

tl;dr: No pictures (hopefully you noticed that), Dead Sea burns unpleasant places, ow, I painted space, I measure time in weird ways, baby twin host nieces, my mom is coming to visit me next week.

Night 74: Food of Istanbul

Okay guys, time for pictures of lots and lots of food. Specifically dessert-like food.

Also, I would like to apologize for the bad formatting of my last couple of blog posts (including this one). My internet is being stupid and for complicated reasons this means that formatting is really difficult. :P

 Loads of colorful rice pudding and fruits. This particular window display is in a dessert shop that we went to pretty much every day. Mostly we were there for the free samples of Turkish Delight, but we also ate there a few times.

Kitty! This was our very first meal in Istanbul. We all had delicious omelettes, and the kitty hopped up on the table to finish off Jill's breakfast when she deigned to leave a few scraps on her plate. This cat also tried to eat my purse.

Ratatoille cake. At first I thought that this cake and the following two cakes were mostly fondant, so they were pretty, but probably not tasty. However, it turns out that these cakes are covered in marzipan, not fondant. WANT. I love marzipan.

Smurfs. This was particularly cute since it reminded us of the University of Jordan, where freshmen are referred to as "smurfs."

This cake was from the delicious dessert shop that gives free samples of Turkish delight (the shop is actually called Hafiz Mustafa, but we always referred to it as the "free samples place" or the "chocolate baklava place," or by the end of the trip, "our place"). It was sooo tasty. It also had bananas in the filling, which was interesting. That day we also had hot chocolate :).

This was the waffle that I ate on Buyukundu, one of the Princes' Islands. All waffles in Istanbul are this beautiful. Most come with ice cream. I also got a waffle later in the trip that had peanut butter on it, which was amazing because peanut butter does not seem to exist in the Middle East. The day that I got the peanut butter waffle, Hannah had a giant crepe with THREE scoops of ice cream.

Chocolate baklava from Hafiz Mustafa. The white baklava was added to the plate by our waiter. He said it was his favorite, so we should try it. After we paid, he brought us a plate full of tiny squares of Turkish delight. Best waiter ever.

On our last night in Istanbul, we had dessert for dinner. This, of course, was Hannah's idea, and it was spectacular. I'm pretty sure we confused the hell out of the Hafiz Mustafa staff, though. Hafiz Mustafa is structures such that it has a dessert shop on the first floor where you can buy individual pieces of Turkish delight and baklava, and candy boxes to take home. Upstairs is a sit down restaurant where you can order hot chocolate, coffee, baklava, cake, etc. We sat upstairs, but because the menu does not have some of the items from downstairs, we had to bring out waiter down to the counter and point at all of the things we wanted. He was confused at first, but then caught on and started suggesting things to us, including the chocolate cookie pictured above. My favorite was the pink thing. I think it was coconut something. Then, we went back upstairs and when he asked us for our drink orders, we were like "No, you don't understand, we're not done ordering food yet." We then proceeded to order chocolate cake, the pudding that looks like creme brule (above), and some cheesy pastry things. Then we ordered drinks. The waiter was quite pleased, and later the head waiter came by and offered us free apple tea. Best dessert place ever.  

...Night 70: So Take Me Back To Constantinople

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.

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 walk around the island was beautiful and was covered in fall-ish leaves like this one, I was so happy!

                                                      The monastery at the top of the hill.

          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.

 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.

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:

                                     

                                                  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.

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: