Travel Journal

2002-10-20

Lazy day...

We met some of our fellow tour members for dinner last night, and wound up at a touristy, but inexpensive and yummy, restaurant. I wound up ordering the same thing we'd had for lunch with the rug merchants -- totally by accident, since I had no idea what I was ordering. I always find having no clue what you're going to wind up with to be one of the joys of travel. One of our fellow tour members, Hal, is a vegetarian, and somehow wound up with a meat dish (we all clearly heard him order a vegetarian dish). He didn't notice until he took his first bite, at which point he remarked that it was the first meat he'd had in 10 years. (He ate it cheerfully, though.) The rice pudding was completely fabulous -- we're going to have to try it again elsewhere to see if it's always so delicious!

After dinner, we came back to the hotel and I tried to help another tour member, Hugh, with the Internet terminal. I was able to get him on-line, but whoever set up the computer has the security settings locked down so tight as to make the thing practically unusable. (Javascript and ActiveX are both disabled, for example.) Luckily for him, one of the two Webmail accounts he has was sufficiently low-tech that he was able to send e-mail to his kids. (Hugh, Sharon, Hal, and Helen are all retired and have grandkids. Sharon and Hal are both former teachers, while Helen was a school secretary and Hugh worked for the Department of Agriculture.)

Anyway, after puttering about for a while, we eventually went to sleep, and I didn't wake up again until almost 11am! (John didn't sleep as soundly, and reports that there was a spectacular thunderstorm.) We'd clearly missed breakfast, so after we got ourselves organized for the day, we headed out to the Mosaic Museum.

Or so we thought. We must have walked past it 4 times before we finally found it, and I'm sure this greatly amused the merchants whose shops we kept walking past. The museum is located within the Arasta Bazaar, a row of shops that was established by Sultan Ahmet just outside the Blue Mosque (around 1615) to provide rents in support of the Mosque. In the 1950's, some archaeologists were doing excavations near the Blue Mosque, and found an enormous quantity of roman-style mosaics from around 550 AD, during the rule of Emperor Justinian. It's a shame that the original color has been dulled over time, as they must have been quite spectacular when they were new. One of my personal favorites was of a dragon eating a lizard, and another was of a boy chasing geese with a stick.

We had lunch at a restaurant featuring a lot of European food (it was on the way to our next stop), where I actually wound up having an omelette and John had a crepe. At least it wasn't McDonald's.

We then headed to our next stop, the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. This turned out to be spectacular -- even though we're going back later with the tour, it was nice to have as much time as we wanted to look at everything. It features an enormous collection of carpets, quite a few Koran cases, Koran stands, beautiful metalwork, and historical displays about Turkish life. In that section, there was a display containing a great deal of technical information about traditional wool-dying techniques. The museum also featured a special exhibit of beautiful modern Turkish pottery (similar to modern American art pottery) in the middle of a room containing vast carpets and other antiquities.

We didn't finish there until after 4, at which point it would have been too late to go to any more museums (which generally close at 4:30), so we visited an ATM, a pastry shop, and a convenience store before heading back to our room to do laundry and relax. At 6:30, we'll be meeting our tour companions for dinner again; I'm hoping to try some Turkish Pizza.

One thing I've been finding interesting about the museums here is that none of them have any problem with us taking our daypacks into the museum -- a far cry from the (perhaps justified) paranoia in other countries we've visited."

Mosaic Museum

Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts

Thoughts from the carpet shop

Unlike Turkey, where large numbers of people have lived since before the dawn of recorded history, the vast majority of people in the US are descended from immigrants who all came within a relatively short period of time (a couple of hundred years), and who have little in common except their shared government.

I wonder if that is why Americans (including me) have so much trouble truly understanding the kind of entrenched ethnic conflicts that come up between, say, the majority of Turks and the Kurds here."