October 12 - Tuesday - Istanbul

The schedule for Tuesday is a full day tour of Istanbul, taking in the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, Grand Bazaar, and the Hagia Sophia (St Sophie).

Our first sight of the morning was the Queen Victoria, Cunard Line, pulling into port - more or less parallel parking in front of us. It's amazing to watch these big ships manuever as though they were ballet dancers.

Cunard's Queen Victoria

Our tour started early in the morning, and we headed for the old town. If we were to come to Istanbul on our own, we would surely want to stay in the old town. It's absolutely exquisite, with wonderful narrow cobbled streets, beautifully decked out outdoor and indoor restaurants and hotels, cleanliness ... the works. Absolutely exquisite!!!

Our first stop was the Blue Mosque.



Blue Mosque


It used to be that a woman had to cover her head when entering a mosque. All the tourbook literature will tell you that. But that's no longer true in Turkey. However, you do need to remove your shoes - man or woman. The mosque is beautiful. The carpet was interesting - it's woven so that there are obvious parallel rows in which the men walk and then kneel.

Next, we went to a Turkish carpet shop and saw a demonstration of how Turkish carpets are woven. The representative there told us that only Turkish carpets have double knots. I will have to look this up on the internet some time (but not with this slow connection). I thought Persian carpets also had double knots. The most durable carpets are woven with wool over cotton threads.




Beautiful woven double-knotted Turkish carpet

 We watched a woman weaving a silk carpet. To me, a needleworker, the process was
fascinating. I could have watched all day.




Silk carpet weaving (double-knotted) demonstration


Our next stop was at the Grand Bazaar. Grand it is! We have never seen so many shops in one place. The amazing thing was that a high percentage of them were jewelry or gold shops. Wow! Who buys all these pieces of jewelry? Of course, we said the same thing about the carpets. A decent size floor carpet - perhaps 6 x 10 - might cost $3,000 and upwards. We thought no one from a tourist ship would buy them, but we were wrong. Some did!




Grand Bazaar


For lunch, we went to one of those exquisite restaurant hotels (small, very European,
personal) and had a great meal in a glass gazebo. The best of all worlds, outside but
protected from the rain.



Lunch in a glass gazebo - elegant


Then it was time for a visit to the Harem at Topkopi Palace. I think this was the favorite stop for our tour guide as he played Sultan and we played his harem.



The Harem ... and the Sultan

 We spent a lot of time at Topkopi. Not only was the Harem and the other buildings absolutely beautiful, but the grounds were so inviting - grassy, treed. Lovely.

Our last stop for the day was the Hagai Sophia, the St. Sophia church. It was originally a Byzantine cathedral and later turned into a mosque by the Ottoman conquorers. The Ottomans plastered over all the Christian symbols and created their own symbols throughout the mosque. In the 1930s, when the last Sultan died and Turkey became a Republic, the government declared it a museum. A restoration trust fund had the plaster removed, and now the Hagai Sophia is an amazing representation of both Christian and Islamic symbols throughout it's amazing interior and exterior.

Hagia Sophia

Our flickr Istanbul pictures: Istanbul

October 11 - Monday - Istanbul

We left the hotel at 11:40 on Sunday (Oct 10) to board the ship. We had reserved the smallest of the verandah cabins, but because the cruise isn't fully booked, HAL upgraded us free to the next larger size. There are staterooms larger than this one - the deluxe verandah and a penthouse, but we would have been satisfied with the even the smaller one.

Prinsendam

The Prisendam is the smallest of the HAL line, and it's more or less a miniature of other HAL ships. Our stateroom is on the 10th deck (the Verandah deck), one down from where we eat most of the time (the Lido) and two decks above where most of the onboard activities take place, such as the casino, the library, the activities desk, the auditorium, internet cafe, etc.)

The rain promised for Athens, which we were very fortunate to have escaped during our two days there, came as we were leaving. We had two beautiful sunny days in Athens to do our walking and gawking. The ship captain said we could expect to have great weather for Istanbul, but it didn't happen! We had a clear sky on Monday night, but by Tuesday morning, we had a nearly constant drizzle. We toured Istanbul in our raincoats, but that didn't keep us from enjoying our visit.

We have Verizon capabilities on our phones on board. Our phones recognize the Verizon Cruise Ship signal, but I sent a test text message to Lauren a couple days ago, and he has yet to receive it. Who knows? I did receive a few text messages from home, telling us that we had messages on our home voice mail, so we know that the Verizon service works. That was nice, because we can pick up our voice mail via the internet.

The good news is that wireless internet reaches our cabin. The bad news is that it's a slow connection - but, good news again, it's good enough for e-mail. I took the computer to a public area, where the connection was a little faster, but at a maximum of 11 mbps, it's too slow to upload many pictures. I've decided to blog with just a few pictures, instead, and hope for better service in our hotel in Rome so I can upload everything before I forget what the pictures are about.

Sunday night, I was able to spot Jupiter crossing the sky, and early on Monday morning, mighty Orion was there in the sky, just as it would have been at home. I could see the large eye of Taurus, but there were too many city lights for me to make out the remainder I don't think I'll see anything more for the next few days unless we move out of this weather system.

Last night was Istanbul - the spice market ... (the fragrance was heavenly)

Istanbul spice market

and a boat ride on the Bosporus.

Bridge over Bosporus at night

Lauren went with the group to visit the Underground Palace, which is actually one of many ancient cisterns that was in use before Ottoman times. A few of us were leery of wet and slippery stairs descending into the sistern, so we stayed behind. The ancient builders of the cisterns used pillars which had been knocked down in earthquakes in other, distant, places. They took the pillars in sections from their original (or last) locations and reassembled them here, to fortify the roof of the cisterns. Our guide said there were an unknown number of cisterns beneath the city. When they build a new hotel, more than likely they will uncover a new cistern. Some of the pillars are from late B.C. periods.



Underground cistern in Istanbul

 Our flickr Istanbul pictures: Istanbul