Our first Turkish coffee |
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Entrance to the Topkapi Palace |
Since we
arrived in the afternoon, we only had time to explore the Grand Bazaar, which
after Moroccan bazaars, we didn’t actually find to be that grand but it was
still fun to explore. (We never thought
we’d become Bazaar snobs!). Over the
next few days we explored a significant amount of Istanbul, which was
essentially crowd free thanks to the freezing temperatures and snow. The locals had told us on our first morning
that we were some of the luckiest people in the world to come to Istanbul in
winter when there was snow, and it didn’t take us long to realise why.
The Blue Mosque covered in fresh snow |
After
walking up from our street and rounding the corner we saw the Blue Mosque
covered in a layer of fresh snow, it was absolutely stunning. We took our time and appreciated the Aya
Sophia in the snow with thin crowds, defrosted with some delicious tea, then
enjoyed the fantastic museums (fantastic not only for their amazing collections
but also because they were heated). The
Topkapi Palace was also impressive and even more majestic in the snow with
smatterings of gold and silver glinting through the white, although it did
require a fairly extended timeout in the palace café where there was a brazier
burning – the perfect cure for frozen toes.
Unfortunately it quickly became popular amongst the other tourists,
forcing us to move on and find something warmer!
Thankfully,
in the afternoon the sun decided to show itself, so we joined the fisherman and
walked over (and under) the Galata Bridge en route to Taksim Park. The thing to do here is eat the freshly
caught fish in a grilled fish sandwich, which we of course did and really
enjoyed, although the raw onion and river fish aftertaste did linger a bit too long…
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Inside the Blue Mosque |
We entered
a few mosques, all stunningly beautiful, but all requiring our feet to get
rather cold and after three we decided we couldn’t brave taking our shoes off
again and we decided to let entering the Blue Mosque wait till the next morning. As we left the last mosque we noticed a man
selling some sort of steaming hot drink from a very
cool brass urn built into his cart, we had no idea
what it was but decided since it was hot it was worth a try. This was our first of many ‘salep’ drinks,
the perfect hot drink to combat freezing temperatures. We’re not exactly sure what it is, and each
one we tried was slightly different, but it can best be described as a thick,
white spiced milky drink with cinnamon sprinkled on top. (Later research showed that it is made from pulverized roots of certain orchids that grow in Turkey that are
washed and boiled in water or ayran, which is a yoghurt and water mixture. The roots are then dried in the sun on flat
woven Turkish carpets and ground up. In
winter, the dried ground roots are boiled with water served hot with cinnamon
or crushed nuts on top – delicious!).
Golden stucco inside the Chora Church |
On our last
day in Istanbul the snow was already melting and we decided to walk to the
Chora Church which is a short hike out of town. The church has amazing stucco’s inside, some
of them gold, that the Muslim’s plastered over when they turned the church into
a mosque. Now that the church / mosque has
been declared a museum the stucco’s have been uncovered again, mainly intact. Our walking took us out of the touristy zone
of Istanbul and it was nice to see the rest of the city with people going about
their daily lives. We rewarded all our
walking with a stop at a small sweet shop and tried a selection of extremely
good pastries, finishing off the culinary day with tasty cheap dinner of kebabs
(what else?).
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