Thursday, May 9, 2002 20:36<\/p>\n
Weather: High cloud, lots of sun, cool.<\/p>\n
Location: Rooftop patio of the Hotel Antique, SW of the Blue Mosque, Istanbul.<\/p>\n
I met a Canadian and a Singaporean travelling through Turkey together, Oliver & Jean, and suggested we meet later for a drink. When we got together, they suggested going back to their hotel, where they’ve arranged permission to use the little kitchen on the roof. I bought a bottle of wine, and we’re working on a grilled fish with saffron rice and beans with garlic. Smells yummy!<\/p>\n
Today was Museum Day: the Turkish & Islamic Arts Museum this morning, and the three buildings of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum this afternoon. By the end of that, I was totally museum-ed out, and still felt like I hadn’t seen much of the city, since everything I’ve seen for the last two days has been in one district, Sultanhamet. So I walked downhill towards the Halic (Golden Horn), the strait separating the old city (where I am) from Beyoglu to the north.<\/p>\n
Here I found fewer tourists and many, many more Turks: the Eminonu district has a lot of stores and is a transport hub, with a busy ferry dock that I plan to return to tomorrow to catch a trip up the Bosphorus. The area actually felt a bit like Hong Kong, with the unrestrained capitalism and crush of people I remember from there.<\/p>\n
As for the museums, they were all good, though short on context. A good guide book might have helped, though many of the other visitors seemed to have gone one better and hired an actual guide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thursday, May 9, 2002 20:36 Weather: High cloud, lots of sun, cool. Location: Rooftop patio of the Hotel Antique, SW of the Blue Mosque, Istanbul. I met a Canadian and a Singaporean travelling through Turkey together, Oliver & Jean, and suggested we meet later for a drink. When we got together, they suggested going back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2002-mediterranean-tour","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions\/540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}