Ok, so here are some pictures from a few trips compiled into one. We've made several trips to the bazaars, few pics of that. Also we made a trip to the galata tower circa 1348. cool story: According to a story recorded by Evliyâ Çelebi in the 17th century, Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi, in 1630-1632, glided with artificial wings from the top of Galata Tower in Istanbul and managed to fly over the Bosphorus, landing successfully on the Doğancılar square in Üsküdar. Also I've got a few pics of a castle which I know nothing about. We saw it while on a [View Full Entry]

---

---

Mostly over the past few days we've made several trips to the spice market and old bazaar. I have a few pictures left over from the bazaar which I will post but yesterday we made a sweet trip to the basilica cistern. Here's a link about it if anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_Cistern. All of the pictures I have were taken by other people because my camera wont seem to hold a charge for longer than a day. We also took a trip a few days back to the Kanyon mall which is a pretty neat modern building (a link to that: [View Full Entry]

---

---

Yesterday 7 of us took a few cabs over to the mosques. We only saw hagia sophia from the outside because it is a museum and we will be returning later to go inside. We did, however, go inside the blue mosque and the bazaar. This seemed to be a very touristy area. Most all of the vendors spoke english and would say things like "come inside please" and if you ignored them they would respond again with "i need your money." Not particularly poverty-stricken people, but I suppose it got them attention. We did make friends with a young police [View Full Entry]

---

---

Settled into our apartments in Taksim. The apartments are very nice and very warm with radiant heating. The only occupants in our whole building include the Auburn University Students, so I feel very safe. We have our own locks on our apartments, but the front door also stays locked with buzzers for those outside needing to talk to us. We even have satellite tv, although I don't understand most of the channels. We only just arrived to the apartments around 6 and it was already dark out leaving us with pretty much no time to do any exploring yet today, but [View Full Entry]

---

---

Ok, this is really just a test to see how writing blogs on this site works. I leave tomorrow for atlanta and fly out 12:30 eastern time to a layover in detroit. Then from there we leave for Frankfurt for a grand total of 2 nights. Hopefully I'll have some pics of my short stay in Germany to upload. Also, here's a link to the place where we will be living: http://www.salimbyapart.com/dil/ENG/1.htm [View Full Entry]

---

---