A Whole New World

This past weekend was one of the most interesting experiences of my whole life.  It was the craziest, most fantastic time I have had in a long time.

To start my story off, I'll begin with about midnight on Wednesday night.  I was packing for my flight to Istanbul at 11:15am on Thursday.  I had my suitcase all packed (only halfway full, of course, so I'd have room for all the stuff I was planning on buying in Turkey), when I went to grab my passport.  All of a sudden, I noticed that it was not where it should be.  I then remembered that I had left it in a package, which had been leaning on my desk, which is also right next to where the trash can is located.  What I believe happened was that the cleaning woman saw the empty looking package next to the trashcan and thought it was trash and threw it out at some point.  When I started looking for it, I literally looked in every drawer of my room, in every pocket of my suitcases, and and in between the walls and the unmovable furniture.  It was gone.  So, I thought that it might just be in the trash can down the hall, so I dug through it, found our trash and it wasn't there.  Which means that it had been missing for more than a week, but it's not like you really think about your passport unless you need it, so I hadn't thought about it in a while.  Then I realized that, realistically, I was not going to make it to Istanbul the next day.  My only chance was to go to the US Embassy in Prague as soon as it opened the next day and pray that they could help me, so that's what I did.  I went there, happened to run into one of the people who work on US passports on my way there, she gave me directions to the place and helped me with everything, and I got everything worked out.  From the embassy, I had to take a tram and then a bus to get to the airport, which was very scary.  Public transportation is never something you want to have to rely on in a hurry, and it was just going to take it's sweet time that morning.  When I finally got to the airport at 10:40, I had to find the check in at an airport that I had never been to before.  When I found it, they told me that, if I had been 3 minutes later, I wouldn't have been able to check in, so I was very lucky.  Getting onto the plane was the most wonderful experience I could have imagined.  I had been preparing myself basically for the past half a day for the fact that I wouldn't make it, but I did.  

Once we landed, we found our bus to the hotel and there was culture shock immediately.  In the airport, they were people doing construction and there were sparks flying from the tools onto the people at the ATMs below and no one seemed to mind it too much.  Of course the people at the ATM weren't happy, but no one seemed to think it was a big deal to have that uncovered.  When we were driving to the hotel, I realized how terrifying the streets of Istanbul are.  We were on a three lane highway and there were at least five lanes of traffic, and it's not like they had big traffic lanes to begin with.  Every few minutes, I thought that we were going to get hit or hit someone.  To add to that shock, the bus driver was on his cell phone for the majority of the time.  Once we got off the highway, the bus was navigating down these tiny roads with stone walls on either side.  That bus driver could take the bus places that I would be concerned about taking my car, and I drive a Honda Civic.  

After checking into the hotel, we met in the lobby to go to our first adventure in Istanbul, the Blue Mosque.  After that day, whenever we would go home at the end of the night, the Blue Mosque was our guiding landmark.  From there, it is only a few minutes walk back to our hotel, which was so nice.  In order to enter the Blue Mosque, girls have to be wearing a scarf over their heads and be wearing modest clothing.  By modest clothing, I mean that you have to have your knees and elbows covered, as well as everything in between, and loose pants.  If you did not fulfill these requirements, then they would give you these pieces of cloth to wrap around your body to make you more modest.  Everyone was also required to take their shoes off to enter the Mosque.  Once we were in the mosque, we were all astonished.  It was so beautiful inside.  Every inch was covered in hand made ceramics that were mostly blue and white, with some red accents.  In mosques, they have very low hanging lights, which seemed weird to me at first. We were told that it was because when people pray, sometimes they like to be able to read the Qur'an, so they make the lights so that it is easier for them.  Also, an interesting fact about the Blue Mosque, it is the only mosque, other than in Mecca, that has six minarets.  When it was being built, that's the number that the one in Mecca had so, in order to keep things peaceful, the sultan at the time paid for another one to be built in Mecca.  Overall, I think that it was a great first example of a mosque for me to see.  After the mosque, we went to find a good restaurant and then a bar to hang out at for the night.  We found a cute little hookah bar in the city and chilled there for a few hours.  There was a group of guys there playing traditional Turkish music and dancing.  It was a really nice way to get to know the Turkish culture.

The next day started with a tour of Hagia Sofia, which is a really interesting place.  It is about twice as old as the Blue Mosque, which means that it was first built in 360 AD.  It was so weird to stand in a building that was so full of history.  For the first part of it's history, it was an early church.  During this time, there were beautiful and amazingly intricate mosaics on the walls.  The individual pieces were only an inch or so long, so it looked like a painting, but the building was from before they had the tools to do paintings that would stand the test of time.  When the area was taken over by Muslims, they turned this church into a mosque.  To remove the church like aspects, they covered the mosaics with plaster and covered the walls with beautiful script quoting parts of the Qur'an.  After a long time as a mosque, some sultan decided that the building had too much historical significance to be used anymore as a house of worship, so he turned it into the museum that it is today.  They removed the plaster from the art and opened it up for anyone to see, as long as the pay the entrance fee.  The coolest parts were the area where the alters were located.  There is a huge mosaic of the Virgin Mary near the ceiling of the building and then, on the floor directly below it, there is the Muslim alter facing Mecca.  I thought that it was very interesting that these two things just happened to be located in the exact same place in the building.  Also, there were a lot of quatrefoil shapes used in the various decorations in the building, which is something that I always find interesting, since it's Phi Mu's symbol.  The other amazing thing to see there was the old graffiti that they had in the stone.  Back in the day, the vikings came to visit church and one guy carved his name into the stone, along with some other stuff that is now impossible to read.  The carvings have been traced back to the 9th century, which is just hard for me to imagine.  It makes me wonder if there's any way that that guy could have know that centuries would pass and someday his graffiti would someday be part of an exhibit in a museum.  

From there, we walked a few minutes and got to the Topkapi Palace.  This palace was the home of the Ottoman sultans for about 400 years.  For the majority of the trip, we didn't have to pay any entrance fees or anything like that, but here there was an optional tour we could take, but we had to pay for it.  At first, I had a little bit of a debate with myself about it, but then I realized that there probably wouldn't be many chances for me to see an Ottoman Sultan's harem in my life, so I decided to go for it.  It was fascinating.  In this area, there were hundred of women, once there were around one thousand two hundred, living without ever being able to leave.  Every day or so, the sultan would come and pick out who he wanted for the day and the rest would just have to stay there with the other women and sultan's kids.  The other really cool area of this palace was the area with the stuff from the Prophet [Mohammed].  There was a whole building devoted to religious artifacts, not only from the Muslim faith.  They had things like the staff of Moses, as well as a piece of the Prophet's beard.  It seems weird to me that people collect these things, and I don't know if I actually have any reason to believe that any of them are legitimate, but whatever.  As long as it's making some people somewhere happy and they don't get too crazy about it, who cares?  After that, we had the rest of the day to explore the area.  I wandered with some people and found food and then went back to the hotel for a little relaxation.  That evening, my friend and I wandered around the city and it was an interesting experience to say the least.  We were planning to go see the Grand Bazaar right before it closed for the day, but we missed it by about half an hour, so we were just wandering around.  One of the guys working at a local restaurant decided that he was interested in my friend, so he invited us to sit down and have some free tea.  Being college kids, we said sure, free anything is always good.  We figured that they would probably want us to buy some food, but it was close enough to dinner time that we didn't mind.  Turns out that we were wrong, they guy wasn't trying to get us to buy stuff, he just wanted to ask her out.  He kept giving us free tea and then chocolate until we agreed to think about coming back that night to go out and get a drink with him and his friend, but once we told him we'd think about it, he got really creepy really fast.  We decided that we would hide out in a kind of underground store when the restaurant closed, so he couldn't find us.  It was a nice little store, but this time it was my turn to get hit on.  The store owner, who was probably close to forty years old, decided that I was his "special sweetheart" and told us to make ourselves at home in his store.  He brought us more free tea [free tea's always a good thing, right?] and told us to sit down and relax, he wouldn't pressure us to buy anything.  We probably chilled out in that store for an hour or longer, but finally the guy was just too much for me to handle much longer.  He told us that he'd be closing up the store at eleven that night and that we should come by, so we could get drinks together.  Needless to say, we didn't come back.  We found a cute little restaurant and finally got dinner.  While we were there, every time he came over to talk to us, the old man who seemed to own the place would put his arm around me.  Never before in my life had been around so many touchy-feely strangers.  It was kind of weird to me, which is really saying something considering that I don't have a need for personal space most of the time.  I could not imagine how people who have issues with people touching would handle coming to visit Istanbul.  After dinner, we started wandering back to our hotel.  On the way, some super drunk guy came over to hit on my friend and tried to get us to go drink with him too.  After that, it was just too much for us.  We didn't think we could handle any more random guys hitting on us, so we gave up for the night and just went back to the room.  

The next morning, we started off a little earlier because we wanted to be one of the first tour groups to the Basilica Cistern.  This was a huge underground building that was created to store fresh water.  Although Istanbul is surrounded by water, none of it is freshwater, so they have to ship in water to drink.  In the area, there are a lot of them, I'm not sure the exact number, but most of them aren't open to the public and the Basilica Cistern is the most interesting one.  Not only is it cool to be in a place like that, but in the back corner, there are two Medusa heads made of stone, of course.  No one really knows when or how they got there, which makes them so much more interesting.  There was also one pillar which is covered in Nazar, or Evil Eyes, for protection or good luck.  From there, it was off to every girl's dream, the Grand Bazaar.  This is a huge indoor shopping market with hundreds of vendors.  This is going to sound silly, but it reminded me of Aladdin.  You know the opening scene where the merchant guy is trying to sell the most ridiculous things?  That's what each stand was like.  It was fabulous.  They would get girls' attention by calling out cheesy pick up lines at them and then start selling them things.  As a selling strategy, it was really interesting to watch.  For most girls, it worked the first few times that they heard it.  After hours of that, we moved onto the Spice Bazaar, a miniture version of the Grand Bazaar filled with all kinds of spices, as the name suggests.  Since none of us really cook much here, we didn't stay there too long.  Anyway, we had an important mission to complete that day.  We were going to Asia.  In case you didn't know, Istanbul is the city built on two continents.  All it takes to get to the Asia side is getting a token for the ferry, which costs less than $2, so there's no way that I would miss out on that.  When we got there, we realized that the Asia side was the completely boring.  There's a reason that we weren't going over there with any of the planned stuff.  There was nothing over there that we really wanted to see, so we didn't spend much time in Asia, just enough to say we've been there.  After that, we went back to the hotel to meet up for our walk to Taksim.  We walked through basically the ghetto of Istanbul to get there.  What I would have never known about this huge city is that there is a huge problem with poverty there.  Eva, our guide, told us to watch out in this area we were walking in.  In the city, there are something like 40% [if I remember correctly] of the population of Istanbul who live without running water or electricity in their homes.  This was so sad for me to see.  In the US, we complain about people having to live without having a new cell phone and put them on welfare, yet there are people living in cities of developed countries where they can't even afford to have running water or electricity.  Things like that really put things into perspective.  I, like all Americans, am truly blessed to be able to have the lifestyle that I lead.  People should really think about that kind of stuff before they start complaining about stupid stuff that don't really matter.  There are people in much worse situations, think about that before you cry over something stupid like minor money issues.  And I know that I shouldn't be saying something like that as an economics major, but it's true.  After walking through that area, we got back to a tourist area.  We went up to the top the the Galata Tower.  From the top of this tower, we could see the whole city.  I didn't get any pictures from up there for two main reasons.  First, it was raining and night, so the pictures wouldn't have come out well if I had tried.  Secondly and more importantly, I was kind of freaked out by the height.  Well, not the height so much as the small wet marble walkway with the very short, not stable looking guardrail and people trying to pass me.  As much as I have gotten over my fear of heights, I'm not over it completely yet as I realized from up there.  Without a doubt, I know that dad would have not been able to stand out there for more than a few minutes.  After that, we went and found a cute local bar and just chilled out there for a little while and then went back to the hotel for the night.

The next day was our final day in Istanbul.  We didn't have anything planned, so I wandered the city one last time.  I got some fresh doner for lunch and then found a cute little store to spend my last few Turkish Lira before heading back to Prague.  Since it's not exactly a common currency, it's almost impossible to exchange it here, and I needed one last souvenir and some postcards.  The one thing that I wasn't expecting, was that I had actually started missing Prague while I was gone.  It's really become like home to me, which is good for now, but is going to be hard when I get home.