Another great stop. Lots of rain, especially the first part of our stay. Interesting city on the Bosphorus strait that separates Europe from Asia. The first video starts with the view from the hotel rooftop, looking out on the Sea of Marmara, with the Bosphorus strait just to the left, leading to the Black Sea. Then the Ayasofya/Hagia Sophia which is a 1500 year old building that has been a Greek Orthodox church, a Catholic cathedral, a Mosque, and is now a museum. It’s very beautiful inside but you only get one shot because my battery ran out. The dark pictures are the Basilica Cistern, an underground water storage building built in the 6th century that is over 450 feet x 210 feet and can hold almost 3 million gallons of water. 336 marble columns hold up the roof. One of the neat things in there is a huge upside down stone medusa head that nobody knows the significance of. It was a really cool place to visit. Next are a few shots of the Grand Bazaar, one of the oldest and largest covered bazaars in the world with over 3000 shops on 60 streets. That works out to about 2000 jewelry shops, 500 T-shirt shops, 499 leather shops and one bathroom. It gets 250,000 to 400,000 visitors a day. We were lucky enough to find a jewelry shop and bought a Hello Kitty necklace. The best line we heard from one of the shopkeepers: “Would you like to buy something you don’t need?”. The video finishes up with the really great Sultan Ahmed mosque (also called the Blue Mosque). It was absolutely beautiful.

The second video is long and will be too boring for most. We have heard the ezan (or adhan or azan) (call to prayer) from the mosques in a few places now. First in Morocco (it woke us up every morning in Essaouira), and most impressively in Istanbul. We went up to the roof most nights at sunset to listen and could hear the call simultaneously from about 6 different mosques in the area. The video is from the courtyard of the Sultan Ahmed mosque and is the Ikindi or Asr – the late afternoon call to prayer in it’s entirety.