Monday, Apr. 13.

At breakfast up on the 6th floor, we saw a funny seagull at the window. It was obviously someone had been feeding him. He was waiting on the sill, pacing back and forth, and periodically looking in. It was a riot.

We walked the short distance from our hotel to the Grand Bazaar. It's hard to describe. It's combination mall, tourist attraction, flea market and a lot of other things all rolled into one. The covered area has wonderful archways, barrel vaulted ceilings, domes and all sorts of interesting architecture. The place has tons of people and shops selling everything from expensive jewelry to cheap trinkets. Some of the shopkeepers call out to you, some don't. Those who try to engage passers-by use all sorts of techniques, but usually they know what language to speak. Quite a skill. Carpet salesmen are amazing. They are everywhere - not just in their own shops, but they walk around the bazaar an d even in the streets near their shops. Carpet shops are all over the place. We stopped at a coffee shop in the

bazaar to sit down and take a break, and three men were "flirting" with two women in the coffee shop. Anywhere else in the world, the men would be trying to pick them up. Here, they were trying to get the women to come to their shop to look at carpets. As we were leaving the coffee shop, one convinced Kim to visit his shop, just next door, to have some tea. Kim told him we had just had some, but he continued and Kim finally gave in.

We entered ABC Rugs Gallery. The guy who talked us in didn't stay. Evidently his job is getting people into the shop. Another man spoke with us, while two younger guys displayed the rugs for us. He proudly showed us a picture of Bill Clinton's visit to the shop in '99 (with all the entrances to the bazaar, I can't imagine what the secret service must've done). We got a lengthy lesson on carpet. Turks use double knots, as opposed to single used further east. Double take longer. Materials are cotton, wool and silk (in ascending order of cost and wear). One or two fabrics/carpet. We were given apple tea, despite telling them we had just had tea. We were showed a map of Turkey and told 450 different types of rugs are made, based on the village that makes the rug. A woman was brought over to demonstrate the carpet she was working on. Only

one woman can work on a rug; since each has
different strength pulling string, etc., the rug won't match if different people work on it. We were shown each carpet twice. It was displayed, then one of the guys flipped it 180 degrees so we could see that the colors looked completely different from the opposite side.

After all this time we finally got around to price. For a 4X6 foot rug, we were talking about prices
of $600 and up - not including shipping. Based on the fact that it takes a woman 15-18 months to make that rug, the price is reasonable, but not in our budget. Undoubtedly he would have come down on the price, but not to the $100 or so that we were willing to spend. Even his least expensive Kilim rugs would have been more than we wanted to spend. We told them from the outset that we weren't interested in buying and they said that was OK, but at least they wanted to show us. To their credit the salesman didn't give us a hard time, told us it was nice talking with us, wished us a good trip.

This video is interesting. Down one aisle of the bazaar we came across this auction. It was outside a gold shop, so we assumed it was for gold or silver.

We left the bazaar and wandered around the nearby area, making our way toward the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent. We stopped for lunch in a square just outside the mosque and had some authentic food. I know it's authentic when there's no English menu, and they have you come in (we sat out in the square) to look at the food to order.

This is Beyazit Tower - relatively new (1828) and unfortunately closed - we couldn't climb the 180 wooden steps. Darn!
Unfortunately the mosque is undergoing major
renovation, so only a very small portion was open. Truly sad because it is such a massive structure. Constructed in 1557, one website I checked called it Istanbul's "largest and grandest."

As was the case with all the mosques, we had to remove our shoes to enter and like most (but not all) Kim had to wear head covering. She knew this and came prepared with a scarf, and had even learned the appropriate way to wear it (I'll post a picture tomorrow).

We were in the area of Istanbul University and tomorrow I'll post some pictures from there, as well as some more from other Istanbul sites.

There were a number of significant buildings surrounding the mosque as well. Suleiman's tomb, inside a small adjacent building on the grounds, was also closed for renovation.

One of the interesting things we noticed was the design similarity of the mosques we visited to the

Catholic churches we had seen in Italy. The vaulted ceilings, the knave, stained glass, etc. I guess it really was noticeable when Kim pointed out that we were standing in a mosque courtyard that looked an awful lot like a Catholic church cloister. This being the first time we ever visited mosques, we're learning.