derek

Istanbul is not what I expected. The city is ultra-modern. I think it has more Starbucks than all of North Carolina. There’s countless McDonalds, Burger Kıngs and other American companies. Frankly, I don’t care for the city too much. Its absolutely huge, chaotic and inconvenient. Getting anywhere requires at least an hour — more if it’s a heavy-traffıc time. Anyways, here’s some things I’ve been doing and seeing in the city:

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The Spice Bazaar (otherwise known as the “Egyptian Bazaar”). If I remember correctly, it’s around 500 years old. Huge, filled with tons of shops selling candy, spices, clothes and other things.

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Typical candy shop.

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The Blue Mosque — one of the central mosques ın the city.

Istanbul is so modern, ıt’s easy to forget that you’re ın a Muslım country. The main reminder comes at prayer time, when all the city’s mosques’ loudspeakers play the call to prayer. Oddly enoughi the call to prayer is in Arabic — a language the Turks don’t speak.

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The Hagia Sofia Mosque. It was built not long after Jesus’ death and was, for some time, the biggest church in all of Christendom. It remained a Christian church until the Ottomans seized Constaninople (as Istanbul was then named) and turned it into a mosque around 500 years ago. It remained one until the 1900’s when it was turned into a museum.

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Inside.

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The underground cicstern. I forgot when it was built — sometime ın the Byzantine Empire I think. It was built to hold water for use in the city. The cicstern also holds statues of two Medusa heads — one upside-down, the other laying on its side. Historians have no idea where they are from or how they got there.

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Medusa.

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My hosts in Istanbul — Aslı from Turkey and Adam from Australia.

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Two more days in the city and then I fly to Poland. Unfortunately, plans changed and I will be skipping the ferry to Ukraine. That’s life.