Istanbul, Turkey

We thoroughly enjoyed Istanbul. It is beautiful, clean, colorful and filled with well-preserved history and funny, friendly people. The weather was perfect during our stay, and the many parks and plazas were filled with flowers. I would highly recommend adding Istanbul to your list of places to visit, if you haven't already.

We were told before we visited that Istanbul is sometimes compared to San Francisco. I understood why once I saw the landscape. It is a city of hills rolling right into the river and the a bay. Two views from the rooftop bar at our hotel: One very unusual and interesting aspect of Istanbul is that it is a city that is divided across two continents; the half on the northeast side of the Bosphorus River is in Europe, and the half on the southwest side is in Asia. So the bridge you see in the second photo actually links Europe to Asia! The Bosphorus flows from the Black Sea in the north in the Marmara Sea, which leads to the Aegean Sea, which eventually leads to the Mediterranean. It has been an important trade route for thousands of years.

John & Cathy flew over from Annapolis and met us in Istanbul. The four of us did some touring together; Cathy & I then had a few extra days of siteseeing while D and John attended their conference. We managed to see all of the "must see" sites in the city, including the Blue Mosque, with it's vast interior covered in blue tiles: The Aya Sophia Church, built 1500 years ago as a church, converted to a mosque during the Ottoman Empire and now a museum with both Christian and Islamic artifacts, including amazing 11th & 12th century Christian mosaics:The underground Cisterns, dating from the year 532 AD, which provided fresh water to the entire city: Topkapi Palace, which must have been the model for some of Disney's palaces: And the endlessly fascinating bazaars, where you can buy almost anything...We tried to visit the Kariye Museum to see the best mosaics in town, but found out after our 20 minute cab ride that it is closed on Wednesdays! Here is D (pretending to be) bummed out...Actually, D loved our trip, and he was vastly entertained by the people of Turkey -- even the hawkers have a great sense of humor, and try to charm you (not bully you) into buying their wares. Here's D enjoying the back-and-forth with a persistent but entertaining carpet vendor, who really wanted us to visit his local shop. You can see that D is having a lot of fun with it! Cathy and I took a lunch cruise on the Bosphorus River:And from the boat we enjoyed a view of the terrace at the Dolmabahce Palace......where the conference's Gala Dinner was held the previous night......and where the headlining act was Tarkan, the "internationally known pop sensation". Based on my (admittedly unscientific) polling of people from three countries sitting at our dinner table, he's not actually that well known outside of Turkey. But he was entertaining and fun to listen to, and all of the cater-waiters at the dinner seemed very excited to see him!Speaking of eating, we did eat very well in Turkey. Delicious food. And you have lots of choices from street vendors, including roasted corn on the cob...mussels...cherries...pretzels...and gyros...We ran into this fellow on our walk through a city park. We aren't sure of the significance of the costume, but we did see market stalls devoted to sales of these outfits for little boys. We had a lot of fun and would love to see more of Turkey someday.