Some things I saw/did:
Hagia Sophia
The Blue Mosque
Rode the ferry from the european side of Istanbul to the Asian side lots of times
walked everywhere
took off my shoes when I went inside
ate lots of dried fruit and nuts
ate doner (!) and durum and drank fresh squeezed pomegranite juice
made lots of turkish friends
made lots of austrian friends
made lots of german friends
saw the sistern basillica (and undergroud basillica)
drank Raki (traditional turkish liquor that tastes like death)
went to the spice bazaar
went to the grand bazaar
went dancing
couchsurfed with Emre, Emre, and Samil.
Why Turks are nice than Romans:
one time a family squished onto a bench with me and didn't speak any english but kept smiling at me and then they got up and bought some sesame rolls from a cart nearby and specifically bought an extra one for me
anytime adam and I looked a little bit lost some turkish person would run up and ask if we needed help and where we were going and always pointed us in the right direction
another time i was sitting on a bench outside of the spice bazaar and a turkish man sat down next to me and we talked for almost an hour about lots of stuff and I found out he was vegetarian also (and I think he may have been the only one in the entire city!) and realizing how much trouble i had avoiding meat in Istanbul proceded to feed me dinner that he has just bought at the market!
there are a lot of blind people in Istanbul and every time one of them looked like they were having navigational trouble or headed for a deadly set of stairs one or many people would grab the blind persons arm and take him/her wherever she needed to go.
Istanbul was everything all at once: asian and european, modern and traditional, enormous but tiny. Walking around in Taksim felt almost like 5th Ave in New York but I could hear prayers being chanted in Arabic from all the mosques nearby next to the clicking of fashionable women's high heels on cobblestone.
And here are some pictures:
this is Zurich, not Istanbul... i went there for a few hours on my way home and it was kind of a ghost town but there were these people playing horns. very swiss.
This is outside the spice bazaar in Eminonou
also outside the spice bazaar
people preparing doner in Taksim square near Emre's house
Lots of spices inside the spice bazaar
dried fruit and "turkish delights" in the spice bazaar
view of the city from the european shore of the bosphorus
some lady selling pigeon feed in Eminonou
Fish market near Sirkeci
taken from the Ferry to the Asian side.
stray cat inside Hagia Sophia. stray cats were everywhere in istanbul.
byzantine mosaic from Hagia Sophia when Istnabul was Constantinople
Inside Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya)
inside the Basillica Cistern (medusa beheaded)
Asia
Turkish couple in the park
the outside of Hagia Sophia
a rooster and some other fowl at an outdoor pet market
view from Karakoy
Islamic cemetary at some Camii (mosque)
the fountain and courtyard at a mosque in Eminonou
lady selling pigeon feed in Sulkhametet and a man carrying a cart of stuff.
Istanbul Unversity!
inside the Grand Bazaar
I guess I didn't really take that many pictues. And what I enjoyed most about this city was meeting lots of people. I don't have any pictures of them unfortunately.
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