However, when we woke up, this is what we saw. (Going from left to right)
Wow! We couldn't have asked for a better day.
To help orient any curious readers, I've painstakingly prepared a map showing the location of our hotel in the city.
The water at the top of the map is the Black Sea, which serves Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia. The water at the South is the Sea of Marmara, which opens into the Dardanelles, which opens into the Aegean Sea, which opens into the Mediterranan Sea, which opens into the rest of the world.
The strip of water going through middle of Istanbul, called the Bosphorus, links the two seas and is the narrowest international waterway in the world. As one can imagine, its strategic importance throughout history has been massive. Wikipedia tells me that it was largely due to Stalin's desire to control it that turned Turkey towards NATO membership in the 1950s. The Bosphorus is also regarded as the border between Europe and Asia in Turkey.
Anyway, in the photos above we are looking out on the Sea of Marmara and back across the western side of the city. If you look towards the bottom left of the map you can spot a large white-ish area; that's the airport.
The hotel provided a Turkish breakfast in its little cafe on the top floor. The view was nice.
We walked back up to the large pedestrian mall called Sultan Ahmet Square. It sits directly over top of the site of the Hippodrome, the chariot-racing center built back when Istanbul was called Constantinople. Today it's only marked by obelisks and columns that poke up through the surface; the rest of it is buried beneath the pavement.
This Hippodrome column was built 1500 years ago and is the oldest standing structure in the city today.
Right on Sultan Ahmet Square and only a few blocks from our hotel is the Blue Mosque. It's the national mosque of Turkey and probably the most impressive by sight. It was built in the 1600s and is marked by six huge minarets pointing up into the sky.
Tourists are allowed inside the mosque but have to keep to one side of a barrier. As we were making our way towards the entrance I was mobbed by a guy who started spouting tourist information at me. He followed us up the path and just before we went inside let me know that "I'll wait for you at the exit; you can come see my shop."
Sigh...
As you can see, the inside is impressive but kind of empty and cavernous. Islam does not allow artwork of its saints and generally frowns on decorations of any kind inside places of worship. Still, it's nice to look at.
I managed to find us a side exit and we slipped away from our tourist guide. It was the last time I let anyone try to help us find our way around.
At the other end of square is the Haghia Sofia, another huge old mosque. (I can't even tell you how many times I tried to call it "Saghia Hofia").
I discover later that it was actually first built as a Christian cathedral in 530, when the city was the capital of the Byzantine empire. After the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453 and renamed it Istanbul they converted most of the churches in the city into mosques.
The minarets are an addition, but otherwise the mosque is mostly unchanged externally from its Byzantine days (as always happens when one religion conquers another, all the interior art was destroyed jubilantly).
The mosque is now a museum and therefore costs money to get inside, so we decided to wait and explore a bit before going in. As it turns out, we never did go in, though we both wanted to.
After that we left the square and headed back through the city to the Grand Bazaar. It was a bit of a challenge for my navigational skills, but we made it eventually.
The Grand Bazaar is huge covered marketplace and is a famous tourist destination. There are 4000 little stalls inside and just about any sort of trinket or item of clothing you can imagine is for sale somewhere. The owner of each stall stands at the entrance way and tries to get passerby's into his shop. Most them have an eagle eye for white skin and would start shouting at Lindsay and I in English as we got near--usually something like "Hey Angel", or "Hey Cinderella", which I guess was meant for her.
Many of the aisles are much narrower and chaotic than the one above, but I didn't take any photos of them. In order to buy anything here you have to haggle with the shopkeeper for the price. At one point I was in a shop with a guy trying to sell me a chess board; by the time I left, which took quite a bit of persistence, he had come down to half the price he quoted when I first asked.
Outside the Bazaar it was a short walk to the University of Istanbul. We didn't go inside--by the looks of the security guards the entrance, I'm not sure we could have if we wanted to. Notice the gigantic Turkish flag; it's everywhere in the city.
We decided to make our way back to the main square, mostly because I had spotted a Starbucks and was frothing at the notion of a venti dark roast. It was also time for lunch.
We passed quite a few mosques on the walk back, which isn't surprising: there's over 3000 of them in Istanbul.
[Next Istanbul Post]
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