So the pics below are from Istanbul, the one above my favorite from the Hagia Sophia...more pics from the rest of Turkey in a bit

Park next to Topkapi Palace...tulips were in bloom

At Topkapi Palace, the "Circumcision Room" where all royal Ottoman men were...well you get the picture. Awesome mosaics




Vaulted main chamber of the Hagia Sophia; all below from Hagia Sophia






The Hagia Sophia in the background, rising like a spaceship


Twelve Days in Turkey

From the plane's window, the first thing that strikes you are Istanbul's pastel highrises. Sky blues and creamy yellows, off whites and cinammon browns. Then the precision of minarets resolve themselves against the maze of streets. Beyond them the Bosphorus shining with hundreds of ships. It's hard to fathom the scale of this city that spans two sides of two continents.

Our subway into the Old City sped past rows and rows of apartments and storefronts, all busy with the quiet industry of afternoon. It was Friday, yom al-jum'a, day of prayer, rest and cleaning. Laundry waved from balconies, each piece an inimitable sqaure of color. Towards the Old City, or Sultanahment, the skyline opened up and we saw the strait below. On our side, the European sector of Istanbul sprawled out, further separated by the Golden Horn waterway into the older southern half and the newer, chic northern half.
Our train stopped at the tip of the southern half. Collin and I walked out, backpacks on and necks crooning up. We were thirty yards from the walls of the Blue, or Sultan Ahmed, Mosque. I turned to Collin and said "I feel like a cheap little toy", which I guess is what its builders had in mind. Six marble minarets towered over us. Each had three ornate balconies, which I later read were build in succession for the sultans' wives. The walls were inlaid with Quranic verses and set off every forty feet by two-story arched entrance ways. We climbed up the steps of one, and into the Mosque's courtyard. The entire wall, probably one hundred yards by eighty, was tiled with polished, but faded, blue tiles (hence the Mosque's English name). At the tops of the inner walls were ornate golden scripts, from the Quran or naming the caliphs. Men in abayas were filing past us, removing their shoes at the main doors, and entering with bowed heads. We couldn't go inside because of their Friday prayers. From the way they ignored all the tourists snapping pictures of them, and their mosque, they seemed used to visitors. For me, it's hard to imagine going into a church service with hundreds of tourists taking your picture or crooning for a peek inside. But then again I've never been to service at the Blue Mosque.

So the interior of Sultan Ahmed was closed to us for now. But we weren't too stressed because the Haiga Sophia was the next block up. The Haiga Sophia, seen from its exterior, is less visually engaging and more worn than the Blue Mosque. I mean it is one thousand years older. It rises from the city like an eerie Byzantine spaceship. It had just closed for the day, but I got a chance a few days later to go inside, and my God...literally.

Can't say too much about the Haiga Sophia. The last time I felt that exhilarated was climbing Long's Peak. The place is mountainous, monumental, but the best parts were the intricacies. Like the pre-Islamic mosaics on the vaulted ceilings, sparkling next to Quranic calligraphy. Or ancient Greek characters carved into even older marble building slabs.

I spent five hours wandering through the Haiga Sophia. I didn't even see one balcony and the inner courtyards and residencies.

We stayed at old City Hostel, about a two minute walk from the Haiga Sophia and Blue mosque. It was simple, clean, complete with a rooftop bar that looked out on the Strait and the city's landmarks.

The Spice Bazaar, for me, captures Istanbul. It's a covered market; the outside is lined with hundreds of stalls selling everything from rye grass to tulip bulbs to garden tools. Inside, rows and rows of little shops, mostly specializing in every imaginable spice--cumin, paprika, this orange curry powder, giant chunks of sea salt...most shops have a sweets section too, and because I really wasn't looking to buy spices in bulk, I headed straight for the candy. Turkish delight (chewy, semi-sweet starchy blocks), candied peanuts, pistachio-filled truffles, dried apricots, brown sugar coated almonds...really paradise realized for the senses. The smell of spices, the color of the candy, the free samples from the shop vendors--it was like an authentic Turkish costco. My Arabic came in handy too, many of the shop owners knew a bit of Arabic, and the word for 'apricot' and 'chocolate' are the same in Turkish and Arabic; I was on a quest for apricot-filled truffles. Didn't find any in the end, but after hours of wandering through the Bazaar I came out with 5 pounds of food (mostly sweets); got most of them for really cheap (like $25 total) because I used my Arabic to whittle down the prices.