Last day in Istanbul

This AM we took the tour included in our trip, to the Blue Mosque, mainly because it included the entrance fee, along with much unnecessary verbiage.

The wait to get in was long enough to almost guarantee an anti-climax, but the structure was impressive, with four massive pillars holding up tiers of hemispherical domes, stacked on each other and culminating in a large dome 170 feet high at its peak (if I recall correctly.) The decorations were quartz tile (Iznik, which is the modern name for Nicea of creed fame) up to a cornice below the first windows, then painted to the top of the dome. The geometry that allowed this structure is very interesting.

I suppose it was worth seeing, but my ambivalence regarding tourist attractions led me to skip the nearby cisterns, where there was another line. (We had seen cisterns yesterday below the rug store, so I rationalized if you had seen one you'd seen them all, much like Mosques. Hope I don't insult cistern lovers. I think your tolerance for a given thing is proportional to your knowledge and interests, and mine are minimal here, and small differences are just not as fascinating as, say, programming languages, which would bore non-geeks equally.)

Here's an overview of the inlet off the Bosphorus called the golden horn separating the Istanbul old town (previously Constantinople) from the new town:

Entrance (actually exit) of Blue Mosque:

Domes in Mosque:

Dick Sanders (the husband of an old friend of Judy's and mine) and I spent a pleasant hour and a half drinking coffee and eating calamari at a street cafe watching passers by before wandering some back allies to the tram that took us back to the funicular up to the hotel. Nice to just forget sight-seeing (and shopping) and enjoy being there.

Tomorrow we transit in a bus to Bulgeria for our second leg. Reminds me of our trip to Africa in the early 1990's when we had three totally separate experiences camping near the Ngorngoro crater, then visiting totally different wildlife camping in the Serengeti, and then a four-day climb of Killamanjaro. This kind of varied activities in a single trip really keeps things interesting.

Long ride early tomorrow, so I'll sign off.