Back to Constantinople

It's my last day in Turkey. Istanbul is such a huge multi-faceted city
that I've only managed to scratch the surface. In Bursa I'd planned on
catching a traditional shadow puppet show on Saturday night but got my
timing wrong. Their puppet museum looks impressive from outside but
seems to only open for sporadic performances. I walked all the way
back to Cekirge and watched Turkish cable. On Sunday I left early for
Istanbul. I'm staying in a hostel across the road from where I was
last week. It has a similar rooftop bar, but a pretty unpleasant
atmosphere. I walked around town, through the Hippodrome where they
used to race chariots, and where there's an odd assortment of
obelisks. I ran into some people I met last week and so we went to
dinner and tried to find a live Dervish performance (men in white
robes and conical red felt hats who spin incessantly in order to
commune with God - aka, the whirling dervishes). We found one in a
backpacker restaurant but I don't think the dancer was communing much
with God - it looked pretty weak. We then spent the evening on the
rooftop of the better hostel with beer, raki (like ouzo), and insipid
Turkish wine, where the DJ was Australian and there were some more
familiar faces. A few of us are en route to Israel so the Middle East
conflict inevitably entered into conversation, and there was a young
Californian political science major on hand to talk at length about
it. I'm sure it would do my head in if I tried to form a definite
opinion, so I'm flying to Israel/Palestine/Whatever tomorrow with an
open mind. Yesterday morning I ran into an English girl I'd met the
night before, and we were both on our way to the Grand Bazaar. I'd
decided I should give the bazaar a second chance and try to buy
something... It was a better experience this time around. The sellers
were cheery and we both got to engage in some bargaining. Later I
walked across the Galata Bridge and all the way north to Taksim
Square, the centre of modern Istanbul. There's a big pedestrian
thoroughfare that leads there and huge numbers of people meandering in
all directions. It turned out to be a very long walk... I stopped by
the Spice Market on the way home and bought some turkish delight for
the road. Lovely stuff. I spent last night reading with my feet up.
Today I set out for two major sights I had thus far missed: Topkapi
Palace and Aya Sofia. Topkapi looks like an amazing complex but I'll
never see it because it happens to be closed on Tuesdays. So I settled
for the neighbouring museums, the Museum of Archaeology and the Museum
of the Ancient Orient. Both had very similar collections to my
untrained eyes: an impressive range of sarcophagi and a long frieze
depicting the battle between the Anatolian Amazon Women and the Greek
invaders. But I felt guilty for being uninterested in most of it. Aya
Sofia is a former Roman church, subsequently a mosque, and currently a
museum. It's a beautiful ancient building, and it's strange to see the
tiled mosaics of Virgin and Child beside tiles of Islamic calligraphy
(the Christian iconography had previously been plastered over).
Neverthless, I've suffered severe Gallery Rage, wanting to slap every
idiot who takes a flash photo, or obstructs my view, or talks loud
enough for me to hear. It was a mistake to go to several museums in
quick succession...