Monday October 2 2017 in Istanbul, part 1

Topkapi Palace.   It, along with everything else we did for most of the day, was over the Horn in the Old Town area of Istanbul. We are getting pretty good at finding the proper trains to take; however ,all the card-reading entry turnstiles have heavy clear plastic coverings over them and they can read our magnetic card, but we cannot read what the balance says it is. It does say so, and it does beep, but sometimes it's so noisy and chaotic that we just miss the beep and miss our turn and have to swipe it again (costing another ride). Plus, our two cards are not synchronized with one another, as each of us have put on different amounts at different times and Athena went extra an extra day on trips that I didn't.

  Lots of pastries and different types of baklava.  I also tried a variety of very many Turkish Delight sweets we bought.  Yummy stuff. I think I snapped these phood photos on Saturday night...and after eating sweets like these and others was when I got really sick in the night!! My tummy hurt so badly.

Topkapi Palace.  Big.  Ornate. Well-organized museum and actual quarters of Sultans and their big amount of employees or slaves it took to keep them being the Sultan or Ruler of the Ottoman Empire. We learned when touring two of the big mosques/museums that those endeavors drained treasury's, and there is certainly a lot of extravagance in the Palace as well.  Although, I did read on a plaquard somewhere that they said the housing showed how simply they lived. Huh?   I enjoyed the kitchens and the pavillions.  Roses are everywere, but it is October so there are not many blooms.  Big ANCIENT old sycamore trees. I photographed some of those.  I may be able to download a few.  Maybe.

The sad thing about the palace was that I had to find a WC pronto and made a dash for it...without telling Athena. When I returned, she wasn't there. So I kept looking. I texted.  I got no response.  She was looking. I was searching.  For an hour. Oh well. we eventually met up where we needed to return the headsets we'd rented.  We might have gone through a separate section of the Harem, but I'm sure a lot of it was under construction (as are many things) and I'm sure it would have been more rooms with more marble, more Iznik tiles, more dishes, more couches and sofas, more ... of similar things. We had seen enough and enjoyed our tour through there.

Below is a very ancient sundial.

It was encased in this glass box on top of a pedestal, so I climbed up the steps to take a picture. It's not your typical Sundial...but I use a watch, so how would I know?

All of these photos were taken on Monday morning while we were touring the Topkapi Palace.  We saw a lot of it, but not all of it.

There are many courtyard areas, lots of arches, pretty tiles, marble, marble everywhere.

and really big ancient trees. I wondered how old some of them were.  They seemed to be shells--hollowed out trunks that may have burned at one time. But they still had some growth on them.  There were sycamores, like the ones that line the street in front of the University's Auditorium here in Cedar City.

And there were rose gardens, too.  The green in the photo above is a big bed of roses. Pavillions overlooked these large gardens.

 They have rather soaring architechture, but our audio guide recording didn't tell us much about it, sadly.  But the buildings and the rooms were pretty .  Some were functional, as we also toured the kitchen areas.  They had anywhere from 500 to 1000 to 2,000 employees who worked the kitchen area on any given year.  That's a lot of kitchen help!

 Below is an empty pool area with a golden little awning that overlooked the Golden Horn so they could keep an eye out.  This pavillion area was quite decorative and up high. I looked down below and could see where they were still doing restorations and such.

Lots of decorative tiles in this room with all the windows.  I brought home one souvenir and it is a blue and white painted tile.

I was hoping we could go up into this tower to see the view, but no such luck.

Athena and I had a lunch of soup and rolls on this balcony restaurant overlooking the Bosphorus strait.

More of the palace grounds and more parts of the palace (below) that need to be re-assembled. Just big ol' slabs leaning against the back of a fountain.

This may look like an old dead tree stump (it's massive), but it still has living stuff on it.

There are so many fountains in Istanbul. Rick Steves' told me once (in his book) how many there are, but I forget.  Tens of thousands, I think.  All fed originally by aquaducts.

These next few photos are kind of cool.  When Athena was in Istanbul in 2012, they stayed in these little apartments.  They are built outside the palace, right ON the exterior of the palace walls. Originally, the old wooden structures (which have now been restored) house employees and members of the Sultan's brother's family--those not good enough to be actually inside the Palace area and be part of the royal family.  They had lots of rules during the rule of Sultans and a lot of it was quite bloody.

You can see a bit of the wall between these apartments.  Below, I just thought the other side of the street wall looked cool, too.

And, we found a library along this wall of apartments, so I stopped to take a photo. An old man came to the door and invited us in.  We went inside and he showed us a book that had the story (in pictures and some English text) of the restoration of the Pashma Apartment complex. It was interesting.

Then he showed us another book on the mosaics of the Chora chapel and put it INTO my bag. I wondered if he were giving me a gift.  He then motioned that he wanted money for it.  So I tried to give it back to him. He INSISTED we keep it and pay him. We asked "How much?"  He just shrugged, so we dug around for some smaller bills , like a 5 TL and made a hasty retreat.  We would have gladly paid for the other book...this one was not one we were particularly interested in.  But I have it now!  And he'd seemed like such a nice little man... I wonder if the library lady in the front office knew what he was up to?