Istanbul

In Istanbul we again enjoyed the luxury of staying with friends/family/parents' friends. In this case, it was my parents' friends, formerly living in Inglewood, Taranaki, now in Istanbul, Turkey. Practically the same place, really! Mark and Joy were very hospitable. On our first night there they met us after the flight and we all headed to a restaurant for dinner; on the second night we were served a lovely homemade chicken roast meal, and on the third night we enjoyed the leftover chicken in a creamy pasta dish. Yum!

But perhaps you are more interested in our sightseeing adventures. Well then. We started our time in Istanbul with a visit to the Topkapi Palace museum.

entrance to Topkapi Palace

We expected it to be more of a palace than a museum, but once we got in I could see why it was called a museum. We got to see numerous fancy structures and rooms, true, especially since our ticket included the Harem section, but a good number of the rooms were used for housing exhibitions, like in a museum.

 a ceiling in the Harem

 in the Harem

 stained glass window in the Harem

 likewise

There were several rooms with lavish, opulent items from the Treasury, be they the rulers' own, gifts from other countries or spoils of war, including several ginormous gems. There was a series of rooms with religious relics, sort of like in some Catholic churches; the items included Moses' staff, David's sword, various swords of various relatives of the prophet, and rather a lot of small reliquaries holding bits of the prophet's beard. There was an armoury, with a sword taller than John. There was a room with timepieces. There were kitchen rooms, with crockery items displayed, as well as the confectionery section, with some extraordinarily intricate jugs for sherbert. All in all, it was most interesting, and we spent longer than expected looking at everything, a good 4 hours or so. If we had invested in the horrendously expensive audio guide, who knows how long we may have spent there!?

 fancy doorway!

fancy doors - mother of pearl!

fancy doorway!

We had a bit of a wander round the touristy area, Sultanahmet, before heading home, and got to see the Hippodrome with an obelisk and a serpent column. We decided the Istanbul tourism department is doing a good job, as the city seems very nice and clean, with Sultanahmet a pretty area for walking around. The metros we took, too, apparently all installed between 1-3 years ago, are all really clean and spacious, without all the graffiti that tends to cover the metros in other places (especially Italy. Especially Rome).

On our way back, striding along with purpose, a random guy hailed us from the side of the street, asking if we were German. We stopped and chatted for a bit, as he was friendly, and kept asking us questions. Where were we from? How long in Istanbul? First time here? You don't have Turkish goods in New Zealand, eh? I let John do most of the talking, as I had been cautioned that it's best for a western woman in the predominantly Muslim nation to a) not expose much flesh and b) probably best to avoid looking at/being friendly with men there. Apparently many of them have a pretty skewed perception of western women as being loose, free and easy, gained from the media. Thanks, celebrities!

Anyway. After a couple of minutes, the roadside guy identified himself as the owner of a shop nearby, and invited us to follow him to get his business card. We had sensed he wanted something. We weren't overly keen to go, but it was just his business card – we could grab it and be on our way. He led us into the shop, and took John down a flight of steps. I decided I'd just wait up there until they came back, but he insisted I come down too – Turkish hospitality! John muttered to me, “We need to get out of here.” Word.

The guy referred back to how we don't have Turkish goods in New Zealand, and started blatantly trying to sell us stuff. He motioned us to some carpets, then suggested other goods when we weren't interested. John reminded him about the business card. He gestured us to look at a smaller carpet instead. I said we really needed to go, and John said if he could just give us his business card, we could come back to have a look (yeah – as if), but that we needed to go now. He directed our attention again to other goods (my specificity shows just how much attention I paid to what he was trying to get us to look at), and we realized there was never going to be a business card. A deceitful ploy! We said we had to go, despite his protestations of Turkish hospitality, said “no, no!” and just rudely left, climbing up the stairs past another guy coming down with a little tray carrying two cups of tea. Another ploy!

We escaped into the fresh air, and managed to get to our ferry 2 minutes before it left to go back over to Mark and Joy's side of the city. See – we really did need to go! Anyway, this dude had picked the wrong couple to try and coerce into a sale. For non-confrontational shoppers such as us, this was the absolute guaranteed worst way to go about getting us in a buying mood. All it did was strengthen my non-buying mood into a definite, absolute, unshakable, on principle opposed to buying a single thing mood.

We never got approached like that again though. Maybe it was the menacing looks we adopted ever after.

The next day we were in a much more amenable mood to buying things, as we headed off with Mark and Joy to the Spice Bazaar, followed by the Covered Bazaar. The Spice Bazaar would have been heaven to our foodie relatives and friends – spices and other exotic food things piled high all round. As it was, I found the other bazaar more interesting. We were still residually suspicious of any friendliness on the part of the shopkeepers, who were still overly outgoing for our liking, but we did have a good time, especially with Mark and Joy expertly guiding us to some of the cheaper shops nearby as well.

Istanbul's famous Covered Bazaar

and inside

That afternoon we visited the Hagia Sofia – a huge thing! It wasn't the prettiest church – I mean museum, as of 1935 – we've seen, but it was one of the most massive.

a fancy structure out the front

 inside

slightly the worse for wear in parts

 massive!

Massive! Still!

We then went to see the Blue Mosque, me using my hoodie to conform to the head-covering requirements. I had brought my scarf just in case, but my hood seemed to work just as well; in fact, better than the scarves of many other tourist ladies. You could tell who the tourist ladies were by the sloppily-done headscarves, leaving hair poking out in all different directions (the hoodie was also a dead giveaway). Anyway, the mosque itself was fancy, with pretty designs on the walls. It was also pretty packed with all the visitors.

 the outside of the Blue Mosque, and John

big inside, too

pretty!

We ran into Mark and Joy again at the ferry port, after they had spent all day shopping, and they took the opportunity to show us some proper baklava (I always want to write balaclava). They took us to the best baklava place in Istanbul, and John and I tried a plate of 6 different types of pistachio baklava. It was delicious! Very sweet, and yet somehow we managed to finish it all between the two of us (pigs).

On our last day in Istanbul we visited a trio of museums, starting with the biggest, the Archeological Museum. We saw a range of items from Cyprus and the ancient Middle East – most interesting for me was an inscription from a tunnel built by King Hezekiah as a precaution/preparation for a siege! - as well as a bunch of statuary and archeological finds from the Istanbul area over the centuries, which mainly looked very similar to what we'd seen in the Athenian Archeological Museum.

There was also a section on the excavation of Troy, divided into the different layers which corresponded to the different settlements that had existed there. The exhibits mainly consisted of pottery shards; I believe this was because the guy excavating it was most interested in what lay at the bottom of all the layers, convinced he would find Hector's palace, so he was rough and careless with the rest of it as he dug through. Indiana Jones would be shocked! as Indy always takes the delicate approach to archeology. It's always interesting to see supposed mythical tales by Homer and the like being validated by archeology, though, so good on rough archeological dude for that part, at least.

The part of the museum I liked best was the translations of cuneiform tablets. You can look all you like at vases and pottery and not learn too much about how people lived and thought in the ancient past, but reading what they wrote provides a great window. There were mythological stories, receipts and records of loans, parts of laws and records of import taxes; there was a note about a group of smugglers, one of whom was getting cold feet, and it was up to one of the group to make sure things still turned out alright; there was also part of a letter from a queen petitioning the king from another land to send her one of his sons as her new husband, as her first one had died. There was a note under the last inscription saying that apparently the son that was sent was murdered on the way. Intrigue!!! There was a whole section of the museum closed for renovation, but even so, it took us a decent length of time to get through what was open.

Next was the Tiled Kiosk Museum, which contained brightly coloured rooms – covered with tiles, come to think of it – displaying various ceramic crockery in the centre of the rooms. We'd gazed our fill of crockery in the kitchen room section of Topkapi Palace, so we looked round this place in about five minutes.

Last was the Museum of the Ancient Orient, which both John and I found the most interesting of the three. I think I've fallen prey to the “bigger is better” mantra, and tend to find the bigger things interesting in museums. There were mummy cases from ancient Egypt, big statues of people and animals, big tiles taken from the wall of Babylon depicting mosaics of animals, big friezes displaying a procession, as well as lots of slabs depicting banquets and feasting. It must have been a popular activity back then and there.

After our museum visits it was time to be off, taking the metro for an hour to catch the shuttle bus to the other Istanbul airport. Mark very kindly accompanied us to see us off. It was perfect timing to catch the bus, which was just as well, as it took 80 minutes to get to the airport – twice as long as we were expecting – due to terrible traffic, I think. You will be delighted to learn that once we arrived, however, we got on our next flight without any problem. Whither? Come back next time to find out!