Turkish Delight–Part 2

On Sunday we grabbed a late breakfast at a busy Turkish restaurant.  I got some sort of traditional noodle dish that was layered with cheese.  Paul opted for a skillet with eggs and sausage.

We took it easy and headed back to our apartment to relax some.  I had fun watching the street activities from our window.

It’s hard to see from the photos, but this woman had a bucket she’d lower to the ground and someone comes by and puts bread in it for her

Next on our to-do list was to take a bosphorous cruise.  We chose to walk to the quay to catch the boat.  We had fun watching the fisherman…there were always so many on the bridge.  But we really couldn’t figure out what they were doing, it never seemed like they caught anything… in Paul’s words “These are the stupidest fisherman I’ve ever seen.”   And then we realized that the dozen or so tiny little fish that they had on their lines weren’t the bait… that’s what they were catching!  Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to judge :)

We lucked out with our timing for the cruise as we didn’t look it up beforehand—we were able to catch the only half-day tour and hop right on.

Front row seat

Someone started feeding the birds and they flocked!  They kept up with the boat for hours

Headed downstairs to warm up and read up on what we were actually viewing

 

Brrrrr

We tried out one of the fish restaurants below the bridge for dinner.  Paul was loving the seafood options.  I opted for yet another bowl of lentil soup :)

On the way back to our apartment, we walked by a barber shop.  On one of Paul’s coworker’s advice, we stopped in for Paul to get a straight blade shave.  His face was soooo smooth after that.  I think he should shave that way every day :)

Clean Shave

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On New Year’s Eve we headed back over to the Sultanahmet area to check out the Blue Mosque & Hagia Sophia.  Hagia Sophia was closed, but we did make it into the Blue Mosque.  We showed up during prayer time again, but decided to wait it out and make a little more progress on our Game of Thrones books.  Once inside, I started wandering and taking photos.  Then I got yelled at for being in the main area where apparently only men can be. Oops.  Overall, I have to say I wasn’t too impressed, but then again we’ve seen a lot of mosques.

Next we stopped by Basilica Cistern which was only a few hundred yards away.  We found this a bit more interesting :)

We still had some time to kill before we met up with Paul’s sister L who was going to visit with us for a few days before heading to Lebanon to support some missionaries.  We decided to head up to Chora church based on Paul’s mom’s recommendation.  Over the past few days, we had been so surprised at how walkable Istanbul was and how everything seemed so much closer that it was shown on the map (opposite problem from Beijing… yet somehow we still ended up in a similar situation).  So we opted to take the bus as far was could and the walk the rest of the way.  Wow.  Not so ideal.  We walked through a few shady parks to get there.  And then by the time we got there we didn’t even have time to check it out because we realized that we needed to be heading back to Beyoglu to meet up with L.   So we tried to take a shortcut which ended up being even scarier than the shady parks.  There were multiple times that I thought we were going to be jumped by a gang of teenagers as we were walking through their ghetto.  I was wearing my new boots which wasn’t making the whole escapade any easier.  And I couldn’t figure out where we were on the map.   Eventually we found the bus stop and hopped on the next bus.  Then we transferred to the metro line.  Of course, our tram stopped for some reason for 15 minutes and wouldn't let us off.  Finally they got to the next stop and made us all get off.  We waited and waited for another tram that had enough room for us.  During this time L called to see if she was at the right Starbucks.  We felt sooo bad!  In Paul’s words, “What’s the #1 rule when you’re meeting up with someone in a foreign country?  You are at the meeting point on time.”  Yeah, we failed miserably.  Once we caught a tram, we took it to a new stop that would be closer to L than the usual one we had been taking.  We hopped off and instead of taking the funicular thing up the hill, we figured it’d be faster to walk.  So many bad decisions, I can’t even tell you.  After a lot of huffing and puffing, we eventually found L sitting so patiently at Starbucks.  We ran up out of breath and soaked with sweat even though it was only 40°F out.

City wall that we walked along on our way to Chora Church

She waited for us… and didn’t hate us! :)    We tried to cover up our gaffe with a fresh squeezed orange juice :)

For dinner we checked out Café Aria which was also recommended by Paul’s parents.  I can’t remember what we had, but I’m sure it was good.

We spent some time wandering Istiklal and then headed back to our place for a relaxed New Year’s Eve.

Mmmmm… Turkish Delight.  So good!