Day 3 - Sunday, August 24 - Istanbul, Topkapi

 This morning we were off to the Topkapi Palace on the Golden Horn peninsula in Istanbul. 

The palace was created for the Ottoman sultans in 1461 and is at the end of a peninsula sticking out into the Bosphorus Strait connecting the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea, then the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean.

Needless to say, the palace it huge and very exotic with many buildings and beautiful tiles on the walls.

We first stopped at the treasury which has many jewels and gold object from the Ottoman Empire, including the Topkapi Dagger which was the basis of the 1964 movie Topkapi with Peter Ustinov and Melina Mecuri which they were trying to steal. 

We also visited the harem which was guarded by Black eunichs (sic?) and housed the mother and wives of the Sultan along with his concubines and other women. They had toilet and bathing facilities that were far advanced over the European cultures at the time. We visited the huge kitchen which at one point had up to 1300 staff and would feed 15,000 people on special occasions. We were exhausted after 3 hours of visiting the palace.

After lunch at the hotel, we visited the famous spice market where we were able to try some of the sweet treats and spice teas. The eucalyptus tea was exceptionally potent - really cleared the nasal passages.

After that we had a private cruise on the Bosphorus  up to the narrowest point between Europe and Asia - much is made of Istanbul as being the dividing point between east and west. The boat made a short stop on the Asia side so we could say we had been there. While we were standing on the bank, our tour guide made some surprising comments about the head-covering of some of the women. He said it was not religious but a political statement related to the increasingly conservative political direction of the country which he was not in favor of. He suggested these people were nouveau riche and were rather, uneducated, gauche and unsophisticated.

It was a nice sightseeing trip and I was surprised not to get seasick.😊 The weather has been great with sunshine and the temperature around 80. Apparently it had been up to 110 in July!

We were surprised when we got back to the hotel that our room had not been made up. We called to have it done, mainly because we needed towels. We later discovered that a little red light was on by the door indicating "do not disturb". In playing with all the light switches we must have hit something to turn the light on. When we came back from dinner, the room was nicely refreshed. European hotels often have shower controls that are not obvious and often leave us and the bathroom soaked where we didn't intend.

We had a fun time at a local pub which had live music. The music must have been quite popular as a number of people were singing along and really getting into the music. We both had beer, onion rings and chicken with mushrooms for me and chicken curry for Carmen. It took forever to come out but it was delicious. The total for dinner was under $25. We were surprised that the waiter wanted to take our photo and we asked to have a photo with our waiters. We weren't far from the hotel but it was getting late and it is all uphill to the hotel so we used the Uber app to call a taxi. It initially didn't find a ride but said if we wanted to add a tip beforehand, someone might be more inclined to pick us up and we did get a ride. I don't have cell coverage here and we had to use the restaurant WiFi which became a problem if walked too far away.



Entrance to coronation room


Spice market

Dinner pub with our new friends



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