Day 10: Istanbul

Having no schedule allows me the freedom to just walk out of the hotel and literally get lost in the city. As long as I can find my way back before dark, I'm OK. So, today, I woke up and wandered in the general direction of the tall spires I saw last night (while enjoying my Turkish delight). The spires turned out to be part of the Hagia Sophia.

The Hagia Sophia was amazing. It's enormous on the inside and everything is so intricately painted, carved, and mosaic'd. I took plenty of pictures that I will post on my Flickr account. I need to read up on the history of this place though. The people that occupied it seem fascinating based solely on their relics and some of the translated paragraphs that were printed on the walls in the museum area.

After getting my fill of weird new architecture, I left and wandered some more. The next place I found was the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (A.K.A. The Blue Mosque). Despite the fact that the place was filled with tourists, I felt that it should be treated as a sacred place and I didn't bother taking out my camera. It's hard to pull out the camera when other people in the same area attempting to pray - it just feels kinda wrong.

A little while later, I found the Topkapi Palace. It's a huge landscaped area with several buildings on it. The were different sections in the palace to display different aspects of it's history. I saw the treasury and armory. Those guys really liked everything to be jewel-encrusted. It's like someone had an ancient Bedazzler and bedazzled everything. The views from the palace were amazing as well. Standing on a fine marble balcony the sultan was able to look over the entire Bosphorus Straight.

These buildings were all beautiful, but they were similar experiences - I felt ignorant. Just seeing beautiful things is nice, but without knowing what you're looking at, it doesn't really make a huge impact. ... I feel that most places are defined more by what their purpose is and what has been done there than by what they look like. So, without knowing the history of these places, I can only appreciate their physical beauty. I suppose that's the benefit of having a tour guide. I wish, naturally, that I could see these places in their full glory - that I could see them when they were in use by the people that built them. That would be truly amazing. Since they are all ancient, I must turn to modern places that currently have things happening in them to experience this aspect of traveling... and I'll read up on Wikipedia later to figure out what the hell I've been looking at during my trip, heh.

I decided to wander around in an attempt to experience modern Istanbul. I had a delicious banana shake and complimentary chocolate covered coffee beans at a very large coffee shop called Coffee World (I later discovered that this was some sort of chain). Inside the coffee shop was a second shop, Chocolate World. I had a complimentary truffle too - very tasty! I walked and walked and walked some more and eventually found myself back at my hostel, Cordial House. It was too early for bed (still light out), so I walked just up the street to a local cafe, the Dervis Cafe. The entrance to the cafe is just a stone archway on the side of the street. Once you enter the arch, you walk down a narrow tunnel and then into a clearing covered by an arched wooden roof with large skylights. It's very secluded from the noise of the city streets. I sat down and had some hot tea and Tavuk Shish (like shish kebob, but chicken instead of beef). The only sounds around me where people speaking in Turkish, backgammon dice rolling across the boards, and some interesting Turkish music. It seems that there are two types of cafes in Istanbul, those with people playing backgammon, and those without. I prefer the cafes with backgammon - they have a similar atmosphere to good coffee shops in America. People just seem to be there to hang out and relax rather than to get coffee... I wish I could bring some parts of Istanbul with me back home...