My First Day in Turkey

After finishing a delicious lunch served by our fantastic waitress:

We hit up the city, first visiting the Blue Mosque.  This mosque is a huge complex built during the reign of Sultan Ahmed I.  It is known as the Blue Mosque because of the blue tiles that cover the walls of the mosque.

The outside of the mosque was absolutely stunning:

Unfortunately, I felt like the inside of the mosque had fallen into disrepair.  There was trash on the ground, there were black stains on the wall and stones looked cracked and very worn.  The pictures of the inside look nice though!

We weren't allowed into the very inner part of the mosque where people were praying.  Instead we had to stay outside in the courtyard.  The sermon was blasted out of the mosque by loudspeakers at the top of the courtyard, which I found extremely interesting.  Christian services tend to be very self contained, but Islamic services seem to try to involve everyone in the surrounding area, delivering the Word of God (Allah) to them whether they were willing or not.

Next up was the Hagia Sophia, but we were sidetracked on our way by a particularly aggressive and garrulous Turk.  The man claimed to have intimate knowledge of our way of life, especially of our home state, North Carolina.  But he basically used his knowledge to trap us on the sidewalk, so he could convince us to buy an oriental carpet from him "FOR CHEAP".

We continued on to the Hagia Sophia, which turned out to be the high point of my day.  The Hagia Sophia was originally constructed as a Christian church and was consecrated by Constantius II in 360 AD.  In 1453, Sultan Mehmed conquered Constantinople and converted the church to a mosque.  The Sultan covered up many of the christian paintings in the church.  Finally, it was converted into a museum by Attaturk in 1935 and restored to its original glory.

The mosque opened up into this massive, grand inner sanctum which was taller than any cathedral I had ever been in and much wider as well.  It.  Was.  Beautiful.

Right outside of the Hagia Sophia, the prime minister of turkey was attending a presentation involving some relic related to the Hagia Sophia.  I just thought it was cool that I got to see the prime minister.

Next we went to the Galata Bridge, which is a bridge that stretches over the Golden Horn (a river that feeds into the Bosphorus).  The bridge was actually constructed in two layers.  The top layer is for cars to drive over.  However, the bottom layer contains many restaurants where one can grab a snack or more, while enjoying the scenic river.  On both layers, people were fishing off the sides of the bridge.

Here are some pics we took from the bridge:

We stopped at a modern, clubby little restaurant and sat outside to get something to drink.  Our waiter was absolutely hilarious.  We let him use our camera and he wouldn’t stop taking our pictures until we yelled at him to cut it out:

After regaining our strength, we went west, back towards our hotel.  We entered into a part of town completely filled with vendors.  It was absolutely fantastic – the streets were packed, everyone was selling their goods, shouting in Turkish – it was a lot of fun.

They are selling rat poison right in front of food. lol

After we visited the bazaar, we got some food (I ate musakka) and returned to the hotel to prepare for our next big day in Istanbul.