Duck, Duck, Turkey!

We have finally arrived somewhere warm!  :)  We left London yesterday and arrived in Istanbul in the evening.  I don't actually have a heck of a lot to write about yesterday since the entirety of the day was spent traveling.  The travel time does add up, that's for sure!  We left our lodging at Harrison's B&B mid-morning for Stansted Airport (no Heathrow craziness for us), dropped off the rental car, and made our way through the airport.  Airport security did not like my toiletries case, so I got to hang out with the British version of TSA for a while, but a very nice officer sorted me out and let me pass.  Phew!  I was surprised at how strict they were, actually, and it made the US airport policies on liquids seem rather unenforced.  Anyway, our flight was quiet, and we arrived into Istanbul at around 8pm local time.  Our good friend Kim met us at the airport.  Kim is a friend of ours who graduated with Jim from Dartmouth, and she is currently in medical school here in Turkey.  First and foremost, it's wonderful to see her, but we're also very grateful for a Turkish-speaking tour guide who lets us stay with her in her apartment!  Quite a nice combination, actually, as we've already experienced in the UK, minus the Turkish, of course.  The trip wasn't over though.  Istanbul is a huge city (1 Istanbul = 42 Icelands!) so we had a bit of traveling left to do to get to Kim's apartment.  We got on a bus and drove for a while, passing under a Roman aqueduct on the way!  I know I wrote that London has a lot of history, but I'm going to venture out on a limb and say that Istanbul has even more.  :)  They seem to have managed to combine the ancient and the modern pretty well, though, as far as I have seen.  The modern paved road goes right under the millennia-old aqueduct, which I find pretty amazing.  We then drove over a bridge to cross from Europe to Asia, simple as that.  What?  Yes, it really is that simple to switch continents.

Today we ventured out to see what is possibly Istanbul's most famous attraction and landmark, Hagia Sophia.  Hagia Sophia was built in the 500s and is really beautiful and amazing.  It has been both an Orthodox church as well as a mosque (but not at the same time!), and it is now a museum.  I cannot even fathom how they built such an enormous building with such a huge dome in the 500s.  They had no engineering software and no power tools.  They relied only on their precise calculations and massive manpower, and the result is quite impressive!

The interior of the building is grand and expansive, and has a history almost as arching as it ceiling, about which Kim provided several useful lectures for us.

The mosaics in Hagia Sophia are quite detailed and many of them have survived admirably.  It's interesting that in a few of the mosaics, most of which are of Jesus, Mary, or the saints, they put in the emperor and the empress, as well!  Here's the Emperor Constantine IX and Empress Zoe hanging out with Jesus:

While we truly enjoyed touring this piece of ancient history, we also got caught up in a bit of a treasure hunt.  Apparently, according to legend (or maybe just Kim's book on Istanbul), some ancient someone got pretty bored during a lengthy Orthodox sermon and scratched a medieval galleon (a type of ship) in full sail onto one of the marble panels.  We scoured the walls of the Hagia Sofia for a long time to find that small snippet of aged graffiti, and Jim finally located it on the upper level balcony, hardly distinguishable, but there!  I think we probably looked rather silly peering at small nicks in the marble while almost ignoring the grandeur around us, but for whatever reason it was great fun to discover evidence that bored people *will* doodle, no matter the setting or century.  :)

After that, we had lunch and then wandered the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul.  (I know that seems strange, but it's not as bizarre as you'd think... get it?  Bazaar?  Sorry.)  The bazaar is actually not bizarre in the least.  It's a clean and orderly labyrinth of small stores selling oodles of jewelry, scarves, and carpets, etc.  Very fun to wander through, but not recommended for people with a bad sense of direction or a penchant for impulse shopping.  Most of it was indoors, but it also continued outdoors, spilling down the street much further.  In fact, the section we exited through seemed more aimed at Turks than tourists and sold outfits for Turkish life's big events, including engagement ceremonies and circumcision parties, neither of which I knew about before today.

And everybody needs some spices... I love the mix of colors!

We're really enjoying our time here so far, and we'll even get to celebrate Jim's birthday here on Thursday before we go to Cairo on Friday!  More soon.