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Published: June 11th 2011
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We've been pretty busy today being tourists. The weather hasn't been great but it has been good for doing all the walking that we've done today. Deb is feeling fine but Terry has blisters on the soles of his feet, his arthritic knee is hurting and he's got Deb's cold.
We started the day by walking across the Galata Bridge to the other side of the Golden Horn. The bridge is lined with fisherman with huge fishing rods attempting to catch something. I guess that they must do OK because there are plenty of them. All men, women don't appear to fish in Turkey. We think that the fish that they were catching were anchovies or sardines, that's the size that they were - their huge rods seemed a bit of overkill for such tiny fish.
Once across the bridge we walked through a commercial area on our way up to Sultanahmet Park to visit Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque. The thing that we've noticed about Istanbul commerce is that it seems to occur in clusters. Down the road from our apartment is a street full of light fittings stores and today we passed the camera stores (all
lined in a row), the wedding stationers (all in a row), and a cluster of dive shops. I guess it makes it easy to shop around for a best price.
Our first stop was Aya Sophia. We'd seen long queues outside there yesterday and so decided an early start there was the best. We didn't have to queue long and purchased some headphones for a self-guided tour. Aya Sophia was built as a church by the Emperor Justinian in 537 and it remained a church until the Ottoman Conquest of 1453. After that, it was converted into a mosque by Mehmet the Conqueror and remained a mosque until 1935. At that time Ataturk had it converted into a musuem. To call it a church is perhaps not doing it the justice it deserves - it's huge and is dominated by the huge main dome of the building. There's an upper gallery that contain a number of impressive mosaics that date from the mid-15th century.
After that it was off to the Blue Mosque. The Blue Mosque is just across the park and is a relative newcomer having been built in the early 1600s. The mosque was built by
Sultan Ahmet who seems to have been a young bloke trying to make a name for himself - he built the Blue Mosque as a monument to surpass the grandeur and beauty of Aya Sophia. He did OK and it's pretty impressive. Poor bloke died a year after it was finished, at the ripe old age of 27. We were able to visit the interior of the mosque and loved its blue-tiled dome. It was a bit of a disappointment that the beauty of the dome was obscured by cables holding huge chandeliers in place.
After that we walked to the Grand Bazaar. Neither of us enjoyed the Grand Bazaar as much as we expected. The bazaar seems to be set up for tourists with effectively a huge number of the same sort of shops - carpets, pottery, leather and cheap clothes. We were disappointed that we couldn't just stop and admire carpets in windows without being accosted by a salesman trying to sell you a carpet. It certainly made us move on and not even consider entering the store.
The Spice Market was more our scene. We'll definitely go back there again - I just wish that
we could purchase stuff from there to bring home. Mounds of spices, teas, Turkish Delight and all sorts of fancy dried fruit. Deb was amused to see a young bloke flogging part packs of Viagra - not sure if they were just single tablets or the whole leaf. I guess he was 'spicing up' someone's life.
From there we headed for dinner at a 4th or 5th Floor restaurant with great views of the Galata Tower across the Golden Horn. The number of people in Istanbul is just mind blowing. The traffic is amazing. I'll try never to complain about Melbourne's traffic ever again.
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