All the really important things....

Istanbul has a lot of really cool stuff--major understatement!
Beginning with the city walls....it was a fortified city at one time.

And then there's the mosques...the glorious, wonderful, stupendous, awesome, utterly beautiful mosques!

The Blue Mosque
As you can tell, I loved those pink flowers!
 Never did find out what they were,
but they were everywhere.

However, there are the lesser known mosque Cats!

Doesn't everybody take photos of cats while on vacation?!

At the entrance of the Blue Mosque.

One photo is not enough, let's get a better look....

Hello, Puss!

Then again, besides the feline distractions, there is this:

Blue Mosque

I should mention here that it was 98 degrees, no breeze, with high humidity; probably warmer inside the mosque. So there I stood in this grandeur, trying to pretend that a torrential sweat was not running down my backside, remaining calm, even striking a thoughtful pose (ha!). One must maintain a sense of decorum afterall. But on the inside....I was jumping for joy, doing cartwheels, exclaiming (oh so thoughtfully, of course): "This is so cool!!!!" 

You could pretty much say I felt that way on the entire trip! 

Inside the Hagia Sofia (Aya Sofya)
For a little perspective,
those round Arabic discs are 25 feet across.
(Isn't that a couple storeys high?)

The Hagia Sofia deserves an encore because it's just that amazing!  (I'll spare you the other 100 or so photos I took of this place! Not kidding!)

Can you tell I have a thing about pillars & columns?

Later, we went to the Topkapi Palace...where the big-time Sultan lived, with his rather large entourage of servants, family, and of course, the Harem.

Speaking of Harems....

Maybe this was a little more along the lines you'd expect to see at a Palace?:

I guess I have a thing for domed ceilings, too!

At one point Mr. Pocketts and I escaped to go to the National Museum of Antiquities. (Still 98 degrees, etc.) Here's what you do when you have a few extra bits laying around:

Any one of these would have been the centerpiece of a museum back where I come from!

And when you blessedly collapse in a chair to have an icy cold Coke (98 degrees...), somebody might be watching you:

Why, hello there, you!

The Turks, or rather the Romans at the time, also made good use of a few leftover Greek bits. During Justinian's reign, ginormous cisterns were built.  And what if you had a couple pillars that, for whatever reason, didn't quite meet the specs? Well, you improvise:

Finally a good use for those pesky, old Medusa heads.

Sometimes you have to do that more than once:

After all that, it sure did feel good to get back to our hotel room and lie down in the air-conditioned bliss! We were dead tired!

While we were gone, our hotel was thinking about us.  They were kind enough to leave treats for us--every day was a Turkish Delight indeed! (sorry, couldn't resist)

or

Ok, so I took photos of my hotel candy--don't judge me! 

And as for the cat picture-taking thing....in my defense, I wasn't the only one!

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Join me next as, for some quirky reason, I decide that riding across Bulgaria in a bus sounds like a swell idea!

A Soft Introduction to an Old World

Let's see....where were we?

Ah, yes...the Bed & Chair in London....

If you are familiar with traveling to London, you know that you can spend a lot of money just to stay in a reasonably comfortable hotel, which will include a semi-reasonably good breakfast, and (hopefully) your own private bathroom.  It's an expensive city! So...you get a bed and you get the requisite chair...and you make do. Speaking in mere generalities, we have a long running joke with an Australian friend of ours who actually lives in London now, trying to capture the curious English mindset: "Why be comfortable when you can make do?"  I love England, but they do have a penchant for the whole "stiff upper lip" thing and happily putting up with adverse circumstances. It's a matter of pride, I guess--they will persevere! 


I digress... back to the chair....you can have this chair:

The Chair

Or ((she flippantly says)) you can fly to Istanbul and have THIS chair:

Ahhhh!

Difficult choice, eh? But wait a minute, here's what it looked like after I'd made myself a little more comfortable:

This is only about one third of the room....there was the TV, the desk, the walls of windows, the view, the marble and tile bath, the doorbell.....  (And, for my needlework friends, see that framed design above the bed?  That's real embroidery!) Why am I blathering on so about a room, you might ask?  Well, it was all so unexpected!  This was included in a last-minute, heavily discounted river cruise deal (which we did a little further bargaining for an even better deal--believe me, they'll work with you on that!).  We just hadn't realized this was part of the package---I'd naively been expecting a Bed & Chair! I was prepared to make do. Hmmm....maybe the English are onto something?....Who says you can't benefit from low expectations?!

The Bosphorus

View from our window.

Really, the difference was night and day!

M.T. Pocketts is no longer Abroad!

Yep, have been back for almost a week...but that doesn't mean I've been doing much of anything!  Kind of nice to take a little vacation after my vacation! haha! I took hundreds (yes, literally hundreds) of photos, of which I'm slowly making my way through.  I'll share a few of them over the next few posts. First off....

LONDON

I'm assuming most people pretty much know what scenes of London look like, right?  This was not my first trip to London (I am very, very lucky), nor will it be my last, God willing! We took a little day trip south of London intending to find Hever Castle. ... got a bit lost and literally ended up in a cow pasture!  We thought about our friends picturing us glamorously cavorting about Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square and such. Nope!--COW PASTURE!

Where now, brown cow?!

We kept following path after path, zig after zag...

Stay on the paths between the pastures!

We also stumbled across nice, little, unassuming English cottages.  For some reason, we got the feeling they weren't thrilled to see us! Hmmm....nevermind.

We finally did make it to the castle.... Aside from being saved by the Astors in the early 20th Century, the claim to fame of Hever Castle is that it is the childhood home of one Miss Anne Bolelyn. 

Here I am, standing on the moat.  Yes, there's a moat! It is a Castle afterall!

Every decent castle has to have a nice courtyard:

They told us Anne looked out these windows. Well, duh!

Apparently Edward Scissorhands had recently visited the castle, too.  I'm so sorry we missed him!

For our Midwestern friends!

Lastly, I will leave you with a photo from our hotel in London, which we christened "The Bed and Chair." It will provide a lovely segway for our next Bed and Chair....

Lovely, yes?! And so cozy, comfy, too!