Day 6
Snow! :D
So Istanbul is roughly the same latitude as New York and it gets about as cold. Because it's so humid, rain is common, with the occasional snow flurry. They only get only about one major snow storm a year, and as luck would have it, it hit this morning. The scattered snow from yesterday didn't go away, but built up into a good-sized snow storm, which makes the city look even more beautiful -- I got a few great pictures of Sultanahmet in the snow -- but crapped all over our travel plans. Tomorrow's trip to Ephesus is postponed until maybe Sunday, and just getting around today was a pain.
We only made it about halfway up the hill before the traffic and snow building up in the streets convinced us that driving was suicidal, at best. Traffic is normally insane, with everyone basically counting on everyone else veering aside at the last minute to avoid collisions, as far as I can tell. Drivers here laugh in the face of turn signals and seatbelts, and the snow didn't make things any safer. So we hoofed it through the steep streets, struggling to stay on our feet, until we made it to the local taxi ("taksi") station. Apparently the guys there are real assholes, and it took a while for us to get a taxi while Tanya's mother got into a shouting match with one of the drivers. Finally, we made it to a metro stop and braved the public transportation sans our Turkish hosts. Did I mention that the Turkish metro is fantastic? It's clean, well-lit, comfortable, and they have TVs on the trains! It even surpasses D.C.'s metro, my previous favorite. So we made it back to Sultanahmet with no problem.
After only having to check one map, Claudia and I made it to the Istanbul Archeology Museum. Once again, I am blown away. Apparently, when archeology was starting to develop as a science and become popular, the Ottoman Empire was still rich and relatively powerful. So they snapped up loads of artifacts from Greece to Egypt and all of the Middle East, which, by the way, includes some of the oldest civilizations in existence. It's a fantastic museum literally overflowing in archeology. Case in point? The Museum of the Near East, one of the museums in the complex, is flanked by a pair of Hittite lion statues at the entrance. The Hittite Empire is over three thousand years old, and they were just sitting there, outside one of the smaller buildings.
Inside, they Museum of the Near East covered ancient empires I hadn't even heard of. Hittite, Phrygian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, you name it. They had statues, jewelry, carvings, everything, all the sexiest artifacts of ancient archeology. In the exhibit on the evolution of writing, they had not only the world's oldest international treaty but the world's oldest love poem. It was amazing! They had so many amazing artifacts literally within arm's reach there.
Next, after an hour or two, was the main archaeological museum building, just past the courtyard filled with a scattered garden of statues and pillars. I could go on and on about the main buildings. There was so much stuff! Keep in mind the Ottoman Empire basically collected tribute in the form of archaeological artifacts from all of their various and sundry nations, so they had ancient Near Eastern aritifacts, Trojan artifacts, Mycenaean artifacts, ancient Greek artifacts, Roman artifacts, Egyptian artifacts, Phoenician artifacts, Byzantine artifacts, and more I'm sure I'm forgetting. They had pottery, sarcophagi, beads, jewelry, arrowheads, gravestones, mosaics, etc., etc. Three huge floors filled to the brim, whole reconstructed buildings, open storage crates overflowing with pottery shards, basically everything that could have been saved in more than four thousand years of history in one of the most historically rich areas in the world. My god. It was too much to believe. We spent at least four or five hours just walking through and gaping, unable to more than drift aimlessly from exhibit to exhibit by the end of it. I'll have tons of pretty pictures later, but the statues of Alexander the Great were my favorite.
In short, yay history! After than, it was getting late, so we scurried down to the Sunken Cistern, an enormous water cistern built by the Byzantines, took some photos of the historic mosques, and hopped on the lovely metro home. Piece of cake! Now, delicious dinner and maybe clubbing late tonight. At this point, I think Turkish food deserves special mention. I don't know how I'm going to get used to regular meals, because here I've been having two massive meals a day, breakfast and dinner. Breakfast is lovely, a wide selection of bread, cheese, jam, eggs, and, of course, olives. I've taken to skipping lunch entirely just so I have room in my belly for dinner, which usually consists of delicious meat and some other traditional Turkish food. In fact, I'm going to go have myself a delicious Turkish dinner now, as the call to prayer echoes out from the mosques as I wrap this up. Cheerio!
So Istanbul is roughly the same latitude as New York and it gets about as cold. Because it's so humid, rain is common, with the occasional snow flurry. They only get only about one major snow storm a year, and as luck would have it, it hit this morning. The scattered snow from yesterday didn't go away, but built up into a good-sized snow storm, which makes the city look even more beautiful -- I got a few great pictures of Sultanahmet in the snow -- but crapped all over our travel plans. Tomorrow's trip to Ephesus is postponed until maybe Sunday, and just getting around today was a pain.
We only made it about halfway up the hill before the traffic and snow building up in the streets convinced us that driving was suicidal, at best. Traffic is normally insane, with everyone basically counting on everyone else veering aside at the last minute to avoid collisions, as far as I can tell. Drivers here laugh in the face of turn signals and seatbelts, and the snow didn't make things any safer. So we hoofed it through the steep streets, struggling to stay on our feet, until we made it to the local taxi ("taksi") station. Apparently the guys there are real assholes, and it took a while for us to get a taxi while Tanya's mother got into a shouting match with one of the drivers. Finally, we made it to a metro stop and braved the public transportation sans our Turkish hosts. Did I mention that the Turkish metro is fantastic? It's clean, well-lit, comfortable, and they have TVs on the trains! It even surpasses D.C.'s metro, my previous favorite. So we made it back to Sultanahmet with no problem.
After only having to check one map, Claudia and I made it to the Istanbul Archeology Museum. Once again, I am blown away. Apparently, when archeology was starting to develop as a science and become popular, the Ottoman Empire was still rich and relatively powerful. So they snapped up loads of artifacts from Greece to Egypt and all of the Middle East, which, by the way, includes some of the oldest civilizations in existence. It's a fantastic museum literally overflowing in archeology. Case in point? The Museum of the Near East, one of the museums in the complex, is flanked by a pair of Hittite lion statues at the entrance. The Hittite Empire is over three thousand years old, and they were just sitting there, outside one of the smaller buildings.
Inside, they Museum of the Near East covered ancient empires I hadn't even heard of. Hittite, Phrygian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, you name it. They had statues, jewelry, carvings, everything, all the sexiest artifacts of ancient archeology. In the exhibit on the evolution of writing, they had not only the world's oldest international treaty but the world's oldest love poem. It was amazing! They had so many amazing artifacts literally within arm's reach there.
Next, after an hour or two, was the main archaeological museum building, just past the courtyard filled with a scattered garden of statues and pillars. I could go on and on about the main buildings. There was so much stuff! Keep in mind the Ottoman Empire basically collected tribute in the form of archaeological artifacts from all of their various and sundry nations, so they had ancient Near Eastern aritifacts, Trojan artifacts, Mycenaean artifacts, ancient Greek artifacts, Roman artifacts, Egyptian artifacts, Phoenician artifacts, Byzantine artifacts, and more I'm sure I'm forgetting. They had pottery, sarcophagi, beads, jewelry, arrowheads, gravestones, mosaics, etc., etc. Three huge floors filled to the brim, whole reconstructed buildings, open storage crates overflowing with pottery shards, basically everything that could have been saved in more than four thousand years of history in one of the most historically rich areas in the world. My god. It was too much to believe. We spent at least four or five hours just walking through and gaping, unable to more than drift aimlessly from exhibit to exhibit by the end of it. I'll have tons of pretty pictures later, but the statues of Alexander the Great were my favorite.
In short, yay history! After than, it was getting late, so we scurried down to the Sunken Cistern, an enormous water cistern built by the Byzantines, took some photos of the historic mosques, and hopped on the lovely metro home. Piece of cake! Now, delicious dinner and maybe clubbing late tonight. At this point, I think Turkish food deserves special mention. I don't know how I'm going to get used to regular meals, because here I've been having two massive meals a day, breakfast and dinner. Breakfast is lovely, a wide selection of bread, cheese, jam, eggs, and, of course, olives. I've taken to skipping lunch entirely just so I have room in my belly for dinner, which usually consists of delicious meat and some other traditional Turkish food. In fact, I'm going to go have myself a delicious Turkish dinner now, as the call to prayer echoes out from the mosques as I wrap this up. Cheerio!