Istanbul, Turkey

My friend Laurie, and I took a trip over President's Weekend to Istanbul, Turkey. We has such a blast and it was so great to see another middle eastern country and get a better feel for the culture. While Israel is mostly Jewish, Turkey is 98% Muslim. We heard the call to prayer several times a day. Our hotel was about a block away from the Blue Mosque. You can see it in the picture with Laurie and I standing in front of it. We also visited the Aya Sophia. It was a church built in 584 AD, that was later conquered and converted to a mosque. More recently, it has been converted to a musuem. I just couldn't get over how old it was! Going to Italy, you see so many churches and you think, 'wow, these are old' but a church built in 584, now that's really old! You can see it in the picture below. Laurie and I also spent some time browsing the Grand Bazaar and the Egyptian Spice Market Bazaar. One of the typical booths is shown in the picture below. It actually snowed almost the whole time we were there, which I thought was great fun! Although it was super cold! We walked around the Topaki Palace before freezing to death. It was super interesting because the museum part of the palace had some relics from Old Testament times but in the writings about the relics it was spoken from a muslim point of view. For example, Abraham had a son, Ishmael, with his wife's servant Hagar, from which muslim line is born. In the bible, Jews and later, Christians, decended from Abraham's son, Isaac from his wife Sarah. In the musuem however, they state that Hagar was Abraham's wife and...it's hard to explain, but everything was written with a 'muslim twist'. Really interesting.

Anyways, it was a great trip and I am so glad that we got to go.