Istanbul, Part 3: The Bosphorus and Beyond!

Wednesday afternoon we took a cruise up the Bosphorus. It was good to get out of our tiny little neighborhood, which has the historical sites but is obviously only a tiny slice of Istanbul. We went up the channel between the European side and the Asian side of the city. Fun, cheap, freezing, and all the apple tea you can drink!

One of my favorite foods that I can remember when I spent time in Turkey before was manti. It's like ravioli, but smaller, and the sauce is actually made of yogurt. So I dragged the girls around looking for a manti place, which we found, and consumed. (The manti, not the place.) I think Greek food is way better than Turkish food, so other than that we didn't really set out to purposefully sample the local cuisine. We did so, but it's all the same in this area of the world I think; it just goes by a different name.

Wednesday night Janell and I went to a Turkish bath ("hamam"). As I mentioned, I got to experience a true Turkish bath in the town of Bolu several years ago. The village ladies all came down once a week for their bath & the weekly gossip. The family I was staying with had three girls, and they thought I should have the full experience - so they hired someone to "bathe" me, exfoliate my skin (translation: rub 12 layers of skin off my body), and wash my hair (translation: nearly pull my scalp off my head), while they watched and laughed. :)

The one Janell and I went to (pictured here, from their free postcard) had a huge marble slab in the middle that was heated, with rooms around the edge with basins and faucets pouring cold and hot water into them. After you are foamed up & have a massage on the heated slab, you pour the water over yourself in one of the rooms to rinse off. In the back we floated in mineral pools. A few hours of this and we felt perfectly refreshed. :) This particular hamam was built in 1584 by a sultan for his wife.

Such was our trip; a little roaming through the Grand Bazaar and fending off aggressive shop owners and their propositions, listening to the call to prayer, dragging our suitcases down cobblestone streets, and then it was time to come home. Athens home. :)

Istanbul, Part 2: Sights and Wonders

I thought it would be good to get out of Greece for a few days. Turns out, leaving one non-English-speaking country and going to another non-English-speaking country isn't really much of a change. I remembered some words and phrases from my time there several years ago, and much of the city planning, architecture, and sights and sounds reminded me of, well, Turkey.

Wednesday morning we hit three of the major tourist sites: the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, and the Basilica Cistern. The Blue Mosque was built in the 1500s. Impressive from the outside,

a mosque on the inside. :)

The Hagia Sophia, not as impressive on the outside (except in this photo, which I did not take),

but pretty amazing on the inside.It was a church, built by Justinian in the 530s, and later converted to a mosque in the 1400s during Ottoman rule, and was destroyed and rebuilt several times in between. There are many mosaics from the early church period that were preserved when the Muslims plastered over them. And of course, no European historical site would be complete without scaffolding.

Last, I wanted to go into this cistern, built in 532. If you remember my obsession with caves and tunnels in Israel last year, you will know why I wanted to see this. :) There are 336 columns in here, canibalized from other buildings. It's huge...

Complete with a creepy Medusa head (two, actually), at the base of two of the columns:

Istanbul, Part 1: "Problem! Obama!"

Janell and I and another friend from here in Athens, Britt, went to Istanbul for a couple days. Britt and I needed the 90 day EU stamp in our passports and Janell needed another country to cross off her list. We had the standard list of things to see, and did a pretty good job of it. Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Basilica Cistern, and Janell and I went to a Turkish bath. I went to one out in a village several years ago when I was in Turkey, but I thought Janell needed the experience as well. :)

We arrived Tuesday afternoon and I gave the taxi driver directions to our hotel. "Problem!" he shouted immediately. "Where you from?" "We're American," we replied, to which he exclaimed, "Obama!"

I get this a lot, actually. Living overseas, when someone finds out you're American, sometimes that's the only thing they can think of to identify with. So they'll give a huge thumbs up and shout "Obama!" and then your conversation is over.

It took us about 20 minutes of blocked roads, police everywhere, and detours to figure out that the problem actually was Obama. We could get nowhere near the historic district of Sultanahmet, where our hotel was, because our president was there, shutting down the entire city for his tour of the Blue Mosque.

He finally had to drop us off near the huge bazaar and let us try to find our way to our hotel on foot. Ha. We gave ourselves quite a tour of the area, unfortunately only through the dingy backstreets, before we asked the 12th person for directions and found the place. By the time we left today, of course, we knew exactly where we were, but no such luck upon first landing in the city.

Here is a door.

(It's from the Blue Mosque. I am obsessed with doors.)

next stop...

Visa trip...see you in a couple days!

Photo from here.

a favorite memory

This picture flashed on my computer desktop's rotating picture viewer slide show thing the other day. It takes me back a few years...let's see, 2003, I think. My birthday, July 11, 2003.

I was in Turkey for the summer, six weeks, with a girl named Angie from the east coast (a short term missions program through the organization Christar). I was there exploring possible long term missions, and I wanted to be in a Muslim country. Turkey had always stood out to me for some reason, so I decided to quit my job at Children's Hospital in Seattle and go to Turkey (en route to Los Angeles, where I would move in September '03).

Angie and I were together sometimes, and separate sometimes. We spent a few weeks in Ankara staying with missionary families and teaching English at a little Christian bookstore, a week in Kayseri, a smaller city where we stayed with separate Turkish families and I visited a really rural village and had to go to the bathroom outside, a week on the Aegean Sea at a Turkish high school church camp where we entertained the kids and visited Ephesus (on my birthday - in the pic), a stop in very cool Cappadocia, an extra week for me in Bolu, a college town, staying with another Turkish family...and always back to Ankara. I love Ankara.

One of the girls in Ankara that I got to know was Derya. She lived in a highrise near one of the missionary families I stayed with and taught their kids Turkish. She was a very new Christian. She read the Bible with such awe that Christianity started right there where she lived, and she never knew. "I mean, I am FROM Galatia!" she would exclaim. All the biblical sites she knew well, but not as biblical sites; they were simply part of Turkey's ancient cultural heritage.

She was with us that week we were at the camp on the Aegean. I can't remember if she was a camp counselor or what, but it worked out for her to come to Ephesus with Angie and I one afternoon. It happened to be my 24th birthday - one of the best birthdays ever spent. It was 9 million degrees but the city is amazing. I have lots of pictures that I just looked through for the first time in probably 5 years. (Poor quality, as it was before I had a digital camera. Before I left for Greece I found the CDs in a box and uploaded them onto my computer.) But this picture in particular is so great to me...

Angie and I were sitting up in the Great Theater. The acoustics in these things are always supposed to be really great. At the top you can hear a whisper from someone standing in the center below. Together, we had read Acts 19:23-41, the riot in Ephesus over Paul's teachings that ended right in that theater. In the photo, Derya is standing on the stage below us. She took her Bible and read aloud the book of Ephesians in its entirety with passion and conviction. :) How amazing to her (and us) to be standing in the very place that these events took place, and so many Turks have no idea. She didn't. She read as though she wanted everyone in the place to know. I will never forget the wonder and amazement and new excitement that she experienced as a new Christian exploring these ancient sites right in her own country, where her new faith had its beginnings.