This trip to Istanbul was actually a BUISNESS trip, as I was meeting with a potential customer for my company.  I am NOT the normal customer service person, but Belgium was close enough to “in the neighborhood,” that they decided to send me.  They sent me and not other Daniel, because other Daniel is actually a lot better at the “installation” part of the job.

I won’t bore you (or break confidentiality) by posting any pictures of my visit to their laboratory, but after the business of the morning had concluded, they took me out to lunch, and you are DEFINITELY getting pictures of that.

We started with a selection of appetizers – dips, bread, salads sausage.  All of this was just as amazing as it looks.  And then – the meats:

I want to emphasize that my hosts were absolutely generous throughout all of this – they were constantly loading more food onto my plate, and making sure I was trying all of the interesting bits.  The hospitality really was incredible – if you have a chance to be taken to lunch in Turkey by locals, do it.  I was lucky enough to be taken out TWICE.  (See tomorrow’s post for more details.)

Finally, dessert:

Filo pastry, honey, and pistachios, so a lot in common with baklava, but thinner and more subtle.  Also strong tea and sherbet, which in this case means cherry juice with lemon and mint. A fitting end to a staggering meal.

After lunch, I was returned to my hotel to type up my notes, but then I had the afternoon free to go see more stuff.  So stuff I saw!

In particular, I wanted to go visit the Grand Bazaar.  After the prior day’s experience at the Spice, or Egyptian, Bazaar, I wasn’t optimistic about the actual stores, but I very much wanted to see the architecture.

On the way there, I snapped this picture of the entrance to the Istanbul University.

Quite an imposing entrance, that.  Definitely fancier than anything at MY undergrad.  The first part of the bazaar I explored was a street with booksellers, and that was lovely – quiet, shady, and with some amazing Arabic calligraphy on display.

The booksellers’ street was located slightly apart from the rest of the bazaar. As I approached the MAIN building, I was suddenly surrounded by fake handbags, fake perfume, and a surprising number of people trying to sell me socks, of all things.  THIS was about what I was expecting.

Still, the architecture of the main bazaar, once you got past the sock merchants, really was spectacular. These corridors went on forever.

But after exploring the whole building, I wasn’t even REMOTELY interested in buying anything.  Instead, I wandered off in search of a nearby geocache. After I got to the coordinates, I read the description, which said something like “This geocache is near one of the most famous mosques in all of Istanbul.”

Wait, what?  Never mind the plastic tube in the hole in the wall – I want to see that.

This is the Süleymaniye Mosque, the one I could see from my hotel room.  In addition to being spectacular on the inside (and far less crowded than the Blue Mosque), it also boasts an amazing view over the Golden Horn.

I exited the mosque by the back streets around the university, and had a nice walk through a student neighborhood.  Hard to believe these quieter streets with people drinking coffee and studying were only a few blocks from the batshittery of the bazaar.

Not having a better plan, I just kept walking all the way down to my transfer station on the metro, which was easily another half an hour in the Istanbul heat.  By the time I got back to the hotel, I was absolutely exhausted, but somehow still full from lunch, so I had a nice appetizer plate in the hotel restaurant and called it a day.

I arrived in Istanbul on Saturday evening, and my client meeting wasn’t until Monday, so I had all day Sunday to explore the city.  I had also allowed two more days for potential followup meetings, and my flight left on Thursday morning.  Did I spend Tuesday and Wednesday in a nuclear pharmacy?  Stay tuned…

But for Sunday, I knew the big tourist sites were going to get crowded, so I needed to get moving early, and pick one site to do first before the crowds arrived.  And there was really only one possible choice.

The Hagia Sophia was built by the emperor Justinian I in the 530s.  Although it is currently used as a mosque, the building predates Islam itself.  It’s coming up on fifteen hundred years old.

And they just let you go in and walk around.

Now to be clear, they don’t let you walk everywhere. Quick history of the building: It was a Catholic church for the first 500 years of it’s existence until the Great Schism separated the Eastern Orthodox faith from Catholicism.

It remained Orthodox from then until the Fourth Crusade showed up to steal the bronze horses and otherwise generally pillage stuff. Back to Catholicism for a bit until the Byzantines managed to retake the city. However, they couldn’t hold on to it, and when the empire was defeated by the Ottomans in 1453, the Hagia Sophia became a mosque.

Among other things, this transformation required putting the mihrab, or prayer alcove, off-center, since Istanbul is close enough to the holy lands that Jerusalem and Mecca have a detectable difference in direction.

The building remained a mosque until 1935, when it became a museum.  It was converted BACK to a mosque in 2018.  This latest transformation is a bit of a bummer from a tourist perspective, since it means we are confined to the second floor balcony.

But the second floor balcony is HUGE, and we still get to walk around this fifteen hundred year old building.

Truly a stunningly memorable experience.

After leaving the mosque, I walked down the street to the museum that was included in my ticket.  That was… less stunning.  The second floor had some nice historical artifacts, like this golden arm.  (Eat your heart out, Frank Sinatra.)

But to get to them, we first had to walk through a goofy-ass multimedia presentation on the third floor.  Every room had a projection and “exciting” music, and we were given headsets with narration in our language of choice.  But the music was so loud, you literally could not hear the narration over it.

It was fascinating seeing Christian artifacts described with the same dispassionate neutrality applied to non-Christian artifacts in western museums.

The Hagia Sophia museum is just across the hippodrome from the actual Blue Mosque, so I got in line to see that.  It is certainly nice, architecturally, but the crowds were starting to detract from the effect.

Moving on, it wasn’t quite time for lunch yet, so I wandered off to see what else I could see.  I found a small cistern that charged way too much for admission, and also had a DIFFERENT goofy-ass light show playing on a loop.  I would have rather just let them turn the lights on so I could SEE the ancient architecture.

By the way, this is NOT the famous “Basilica Cistern.”  Rather, this is the cistern of Theodosius.

Right. Coffee time.

I’m not coming to Istanbul and NOT getting Turkish coffee, and this place seemed pretty nice – it was down the end of a long stone walkthrough.  The container in the middle held Turkish Delight (although NOT served by a pale woman in a sled), and the cup on the right is sherbet, which is NOT an ice cream in this part of the world.

Went back to the square, ticked off some simple pictures for Geocaching, and then I decided it WAS time for lunch.  I found some great reviews of a nice place nearby, but when I got there, it was closed for a private function.  One street over, however, I found a perfectly nice fish restaurant, so I got a fish.

I also got an audience.

This little beggar sat there the ENTIRE duration of my lunch hoping I would trip and feed them. I did not.

Coming back up to the main square again, there were a few possibilities for other major attractions, (such as the Basilica Cistern and the Topkapi palace) but, as expected, they had all gotten super crowded.  Instead, I went to the quite interesting Archaeology museum.

Here’s an exhibit showing the various layers of Troy, with artifacts extracted from each one.

Here’s Artemis, the patron goddess of ARTMS, my employer.

And finally, here’s me taking a selfie in front of a sculpture that looks like it’s taking a selfie.  Remember THAT running joke?  No, of course you don’t.

It was late afternoon by this point, so I started walking back towards the Golden Horn in hopes of visiting the spice bazaar and then going and finding some food.

The spice bazaar is a large enclosed shopping structure.  The building is fascinating and historic, but as far as I can tell, the vendors are effectively a) all identical and b) all crap.

There’s also a little pet and garden area tucked in to one corner of the exterior.  It’s fun seeing pet food sold in exactly the same way as sumac powder.

To finish the day, I crossed the Golden Horn again, and went to an excellent rooftop restaurant called Tershane Karaköy.  What was so excellent about it?  Well, THIS was my view during dinner.

And the food was pretty damn good too.

Phew – that was a long day, wasn’t it?

During the week from Monday to Friday, my coworker and I did our job thing at an industrial park in a tiny town in Belgium.  There are pictures, but the pictures are of things like my dosimeter readings and cyclotron pinouts, and I assure you, neither are of the slightest interest.  I may post some pictures of Nivelles, the town where I was staying, but all together, they’ll probably make one post right at the end of the stay.

Let’s therefore jump ahead to Saturday, the 21st, and my first day in Turkey.  First off, I’d like to point out that Turkish Air served me a whole ass meal on a relatively short 3.5 hour flight from Brussels to Istanbul.  It was really good, too.

On arrival in Istanbul, a nice person from the company I would be visiting picked me up from the (ridiculously enormous) Istanbul airport and took me to my hotel.

Now, I had selected this hotel because a) it was relatively near the customer and b) it was on the “approved” list in the expense reporting software. But it turned out to a) be a really nice hotel of the “uniformed bellhop refuses to let you touch your own luggage at any point” variety and b) 100 meters from the Theodosian walls. (More on the walls in a later entry.)

Got up to my room and was struck by the view.  Also immediately misidentified the largest building visible from my window.

The large mosque on the horizon is not the Blue Mosque, built by the Sultan Ahmet I between 1609 and 1617.  Don’t be absurd.  It is clearly the Süleymaniye Mosque, built by Suleiman the Magnificent from 1550 to 1557.  I don’t see how any reasonable person could have gotten that wrong.

Also holy crap was the view from my room amazing.

Since it was now dinner time, and I didn’t plan on doing any complicated sight seeing, I decided to take the metro to the waterfront and see if I could locate a fish sandwich, or Balık ekmek.  This particular variety of Istanbul street food had been mentioned on several travel videos we watched before arriving.

The first interesting thing is that the metro station where I disembarked, Haliç, is actually in the middle of a bridge across the Golden Horn.  Definitely not where I expected to find myself on debarking the train.

I wasn’t complaining, though.  And sure enough, basically as soon as I got off the bridge, I found a nice person on a boat willing to sell me a fish sandwich.  It was delicious, and I have no idea why I look so grouchy in this picture.  Not great at selfies, I guess.

Oh, that’s also a super famous tower in the background.  I’ll climb that later.

Sandwich consumed, I just walked along the waterfront enjoying the ambiance, the view, and the sunset.  Along with precisely 35,231 other people.  Istanbul is a BIG and populous city.

But you know what?  Everyone out enjoying a nice summer evening had a remarkably similar vibe in Istanbul than it did in Belgium two nights earlier, or in Vancouver the week before.  Which is pretty cool when you think about it.

I mean figuratively, of course.  Literally it was hot.  Not Tokyo in August hot, but still hot.

Here’s one more sunset shot from the north side of the Golden Horn, because why not?