Day 96

Thursday April 24th

We arrived in the Istanbul Train Station early in the morning. After gathering our stuff and checking in all the local tourist office to pick up some maps we started off to the hostel. We really hate spending any money, so we hiked across the peninsula, bags in tow, to get there. This path took us right in-between the Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque, the two most prominent sites in Istanbul. A little bit down the hill from these we found our hostel. After throwing down our stuff we made our way to the Aya Sophia as our first stop and checked out one of the most famous sites in the world. It was well sweet. It was under-repairs, we a impressive in-itself scaffolding construction in the main dome area. This took away from the visual effects of the dome, but you could definitely see how this was a mighty impressive church in its day. I found the mosque additions rather tacky as they placed a mihrab in the wrong location and then put these big signs around the central naïve. I am happy to see that since the Turkish Revolution, they have made this into a museum. Afterwards we got some baklava and apple tea at this nice little restaurant and then headed off to check out the hippodrome. This was actually quite lame and featured three obelisks. One, they stole from Egypt, one was only about 10 feet tall, but apparently in the past was much taller. The other, the Rough Stone Obelisk, they really don’t know where it came from or anything about it. How does that happen? We also checked out the Basilica Cisterns, which featured some crazy ambient red and orange lighting, coupled with some unique mood music. It was certainly a strange setup to the cisterns. After this we headed over to the Blue Mosque, which was built to rival the Christian Aya Sophia. Howver, the couldn’t replicate the interior design features for the dome, so they just built some huge elephant feet columns, and then went crazy on the architecture on the outside. It’s gorgeous, and strangely the women didn’t have to wear the headscarves in it. This threw me for a loop. I liked that I could label a number of the architectural features from my class. We sat in the place for awhile and then headed off to dinner. For dinner we wandered down to the bridge where we ate under the bridge in this floating restaurant strip. It was actually quite nice. Afterwards we wandered back, picking up some candy that was way to sweet and made me actually feel kind of ill.