Istanbul Day 5

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Today was wonderful! We slept in till about 9:00am then headed off to the Grand Bazaar to do some shopping. Shopping here involves a lot of haggling and bargaining...everything can be negotiated. Rule of thumb is to take whatever price they give you cut it in half to get close to the right price. We ended up with a few trinkets here and there. Mom is quite indeiscive and we ended up spending almost 4 hours in the Bazaar and the surrounding markets. She did end up with some cute black shoes, the man selling them to her I think fell in love with her. He kept asking me to leave so he could be alone with her...ummm I did not! Look for the picture.

Speaking of, we had no idea how the men would react to American women, if they thought we were to flashy in our shorts and t-shirts or if they would be nice to us. (Istanbul is 99% muslim and many of the woman are completely covered..sometimes you can only see their eyes). Anyway, turns out the men here love American women. One even asked my mom how many camels she would sell me for!

We decided to do a cooking class in the evening so we could learn a little bit about Turkish cuisine. After browsing online we decided to do one called Alaturk which ended up being right around the corner from our hotel. It started at 4:30 and there were two other couples in our class with us. We had a 5 course meal comprised of:
-Ezogelin Corbasi: red lentil and bulgur soup with dried mint and chili pepper
-Zeytinyagli Taze Fasulye: green runner beans cooked in olive oil, onion, garlic and tomato
-Kabak Mucveri: Zucchini patties with herbs and cheese
-Hunkar Begendili Kuzu: Lamb Stew in tomato sauce on smoky eggplant puree
-Incir Tathsi: walnut- stuff figs in syrup

We cooked the entire meal from start to finish with the help of the chef/owner. The entire time she was telling us to make very precise cuts and make sure everything looked very pretty and put together. We couldn't figure out why everything had to be perfect when it was just us eating it. Turns out, the cooking school is also a restaurant and the food that we cooked was served to the other patrons who came in later. I don't think they knew we prepared their meal, I didn't hear any complaints though! And don't worry, mom has already promised to host a dinner party when we get back and cook all these delicious recipes. We really are so glad we did this cooking class as we learned so much about various spices and foods that are unique to the Turkish area. When we visit the Spice Market tomorrow we are hoping to bring some back.

We finished the cooking class and dinner around 10:00 and decided to walk around the city a little bit as it really comes alive at night. As we were walking past one carpet shop I happened to look at the sign and it said Basdogan Asia Minor Carpets "Istanbul, Adana, HighPoint, Vermont." We thought, surely that doesn't mean our little town of High Point...we had to find out! So we walked into the store and apparently the owner does have a store in High Point, NC and is going there in a month for market! So everyone look for his store. Not only was that cool but it turns out 10 years ago he discovered a little room under his store. He called the Turkish archeological department and upon further investigation an entire palace was discovered buried under the streets of Istanbul connecting all the way to the Blue Mosque and AyaSofya. The palace was built in 324-337 by the Romans before the Ottoman Empire was even around! The history channel did a documentary on Turkey and all of its underground mysteries that are yet to be uncovered including this particular palace. Hard to believe they are still making new discoveries today!

Other things we did today:
-tried some Turkish delight. Maybe we tried the wrong kind, but to be honest, mom and I didn't love it. We will stick with the baklava instead.
-walked into a few random mosques and saw where a few Sultan's were buried.
-Tried the pomengranite juice that everyone is selling on every corner. They used about 3-4 pomegranites to make just one cup of juice and the total price was only 5 Turkish Lira which is about 2.50 in US money. You can't even buy one pomengranite for less that 3 dollars in the US. It was delicious.

Overall we had a great relaxing day. Tomorrow is our last full one and we have so much left to do and see before we come back. So I'm off to bed as we are going to be waking up quite early tomorrow.

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