Turkey Trotting in Istanbul

Welp, I've been back from Turkey for two weeks now and haven't found the time to tackle this blog post till now. Actually I don't have that much time so it's probably going to be more brief than I would like. But my week in Turkey was phenomenal so I have to share about it! It all started out with an early morning and a flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul, on which I sat next to the sweetest lady who is a doctor from India that I adored and loved talking with. At the airport, we met our tour guide Negip who we all came to absolutely love during the trip. We got our first glimpses of Istanbul from the windows of our rockstar tour bus and it was PACKED with people! It turns out Istanbul has 14 million people living in it, who knew it was so huge?! Anyways, Istanbul is a really cool city with mosques everywhere, beautiful views of the Mediterranean, and the half of the city I stayed at is in Europe, so now I've been to Europe! Dinner that night was quite the process- dinner in this country is reeeally dragged out haha apparently it was the short version but it took like 2 hours for them to serve us all the parts of our meal. Both before and after dinner there was free time where I explored the city with some friends. We visited a cool mosque across the street from our hotel, experienced the first of many beautiful sunsets on the trip, found a bazaar, and roamed the empty streets at night.

Mosque in Istanbul

Istanbul

Day 2 was on foot where we saw cool sites of Istanbul- I just absolutely loved this city! The Blue Mosque was definitely a highlight but so was Topkapi Palace and the Basilica Cistern. Oh and the famous Grand Bazaar! And then of course the cruise on the Bosphorus was phenomenal too, I can't pick a favorite part of the day!

Blue Mosque

Blue Mosque

Blue Mosque

Blue Mosque- the interior is SO intricate and beautiful. It's mostly blue on the inside which is why it's nicknamed the Blue Mosque (its real name is Sultan Ahmed Mosque). Can you believe this was all made in just 7 years in the early 1600's? And it is still in use as a mosque today.

Blue Mosque

Topkapi Palace- this place is now a big museum but was previously a palace and is just covered with beautiful tiles like these! We also saw a ton of other cool things in it like old swords, huge diamonds, a hair from Muhammad's mustache (strange), and lots of beautiful old royal treasures.

Basilica Cistern- this is the largest of hundreds of ancient cisterns under Istanbul. Columns were reused from previous structures in order to build it, which is why some of them are really intricate.

Basilica Cistern- this is Medusa's head, reused to support a column in the making of this cistern. We were all falling over as this picture was taken haha.

Grand Bazaar! Unfortunately we only had an hour here, which was just overwhelming because it is so huge! Thousands of merchants and little shops make this place a maze and there are beautiful ceramics everywhere like these.

European side of Istanbul from our cruise on the Bosphorus

Bosphorus cruise- this cruise was beautiful and a perfect ending to the day. We saw a lot of the city from the boat as we got to relax and take it all in, while watching a beautiful sunset.

This sums up the first two days of the trip and the majority of the things we did in Istanbul (we saw the Hagia Sophia at the end of the trip, don't worry I'll get to that!). It's late and I have an early morning tomorrow, but hey I'm just happy I got this far on my blog post! I'll post this now and do another blog post tomorrow about the rest of the Turkey trip and include some gorgeous pictures of the Mediterranean, I promise!