...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:

Night 62: Now It's Istanbul, Not Constantinople

I'm in Istanbul! BRB, Jordan.
I'll post for real soon, but first, a few lovely things about Istanbul:
-Istanbul is clean. I can breathe in a lungful of air here and not feel like I just smoked two cigarettes on top of inhaling gas fumes.
-Istanbul is GREEN. There are fall-esque leaves here!
-Istanbul is in Europe. Yes, hopefully you already knew that (unless you're the guy at Wells Fargo that wasn't sure if Turkey was a country or not), but really. It feels so very European here and it's wonderful.
-kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkl. This was written by Herman. Herman is a cat. He snuck into our room at the hostel and he's adorable.

Also, picture:

                                        The Hagia Sophia. Byzantine Church turned mosque.

Night 55: In Which I Accidentally Go Biking Through the Desert

Okay, so maybe the "In Which I Accidentally" posts are getting a little old, especially since I'm not really using that word correctly. But I meant to go to Ajloun today but actually ended up going on a bike trip through the desert. That's an accident, right?

I can just hear Inigo Montoya in the background saying "I do not think that means what you think it means."

In any case. My day was pretty awesome. It began with me holding the door open for Batman. Or, a five year old version of Batman anyway. A tiny little Jordanian boy left my building with me this morning dressed up as Batman and carrying a Spiderman lunchbox (Christian schools here have school on Saturdays). He ran to his bus shouting "Yom Halloween!" Cutest ever.

My plan for today was to go to the University at early o'clock to get on the bus to Ajloun and go paint a school all morning, then hike to an archaeological site on what is supposed to be one of the best hikes in Jordan. I'll have to find out whether or not that's true after the Eid break though, 'cause we did not go to Ajloun today. Since only two of us showed up for Ajloun (myself and my friend Elizabeth), the trip was postponed. However, at the same time, a bunch of other CIEE kids were straggling into the University to meet up for one of CIEE's mini-trips, the Desert Castle trip. At that point, Ahmed pulled Elizabeth and I aside and told us that the Ajloun trip would happen after Eid, but that since we are (and I quote) the best CIEE students for showing up for Ajloun when no one else did, we got to go on the Desert Castles trip as well! We also got some free Ajloun postcards.

Now, some of you may remember that I really wanted to do the Desert Castles trip, but decided to go on the Biblical Jordan trip instead. Man, am I glad I did 'cause I got to do both! The trip consisted of a bus trip out to the desert, where we saw two pretty fantastic castles, then a lot of biking, and a trip to a marshland. First off, the castles. The first castle we reached was called Kharaneh, and was pretty excellent for climbing around in, and there were lots of nooks and crannies to explore:

The second one was a castle with a giant well and a water pump and an old reception hall that is currently being restored. There was a lot of scaffolding, which diminished some of the cool factor, but also added to it. When I was younger, I remember reading books and watching movies about the kinds of archaeologists that restore historical sites like this one and I thought it would be the coolest job ever. I've since taken an archaeology class and changed my mind, but still. The people restoring this castle have pretty excellent jobs and I took quite a few pictures of them:

Ignore the strange man I don't know in the photo. 

Empty well!

Restoring the awesome frescoes. 

Ceiling fresco. 

After that we went biking through the desert! I'm not sure what desert, or if the desert has a name. But it was pretty flat and dead and looked quite a bit like South Dakota. It was still really cool though, if a little rocky and hard to bike on. We biked about 25 kilometers (15-ish miles) through the dust and sand and rocks. We saw giant camels (twice as big at least as the camels we rode in Wadi Rum), one of which I thought was a statue like  those big plastic buffaloes or cows you see near gas stations in the Midwest. But no, it was just a giant camel. We also came within about 100 miles of Iraq, so that was pretty cool.

Nothing funnier than a Bedouin man trying to get cell service with a herd of camels in tow. (No joke, that's what he was doing). 

The trip was cut a little short due to ALL the studying, but we made on last stop at the Azraq wetlands. It's a desert oasis/marshland that has a number of endangered species, as well as some water buffalo (the water buffalo were the only animals we saw). It turns out that not only did Jordan previously have awesome animals like rhinos, elephants, and cheetahs, but the country used to have a whole lot more water, too. The elephants and rhinos and cheetahs have been gone for a long time, but only 20 years ago we would have been neck-deep in water on the paths we were walking on. It was a little sad. But the water buffalo were cool, and the watery-marshiness felt like home.

And now I'm tired. My butt hurts like none other and I have a midterm to take tomorrow. Momkin (maybe) a smart person would have stayed home to study today, but this day was totally worth the potential lost points on that test. Still, studying and sleeping time!

Night 54: Oh, We're Halfway There! ... Whoahhhh, Livin' on a Prayer!

I've had Bon Jovi stuck in my head since we were halfway to Petra almost a month ago. I blame Elizabeth.

Yeah, so I'm halfway done with the semester. Halfway to home and Christmas and my own bed and unlimited internet that doesn't conk out on me every other day and ENGLISH.

I'm excited. Can you tell?

Yeah, other than being excited about being at the halfway point, not much is going on here. Maybe that's why this halfway thing is so exciting. I knew October was going to be long, but I didn't know it was going to have so many un-blog-worthy days. Most of my time in the past couple of weeks has been spent in class, studying, reading, and watching TV with Lara and Janet. Also Skyping when my internet is working. It's been a homesick-filled month. BUT things are going to get exciting really quickly. Even though I have midterms this week, and I have my hardest exam on Sunday (3-hour MSA exam, blech), I'm going to Ajloun to go hiking tomorrow. We'll also be painting classrooms in the school with REAL paint. Woooo. Also, I'm going to Istanbul next week for a solid seven days! I am pumped, and I'm sure there'll be a ton of great stuff to post in November (not to mention pictures)!

Also, as most of you probably know, there was a pretty bad (7.2) earthquake in Eastern Turkey this week. This is not going to effect my trip, as the quake was hundreds of miles away from Istanbul. It was a pretty devastating earthquake though; I don't even want to talk about how many people died (fortunately it was during the day, so people weren't in bed sleeping). And I feel strange about being a tourist in a country that's receiving aid without doing something about the fact that there was a natural disaster in the area. So if any of you feel like donating/have enough money for that kind of thing (trust me, I know how guilt-making it is to see a link to donate to a good cause when you have next to no money in your bank account, so no pressure), here is a link to the GlobalGiving Turkey Earthquake Relief Fund: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/turkey-earthquake-relief-and-recovery-fund/.
Here is a link on statistics and updated info on what's going on in the area, as well: http://earthquake-report.com/2011/10/23/very-strong-dangerous-earthquake-in-eastern-turkey/.