The Sadness of Sofiastication

(Or "Hope you had a nice trip!")

After a brief, but fun stay in Plovdiv in the last week of January, I headed off to Sofia on Wednesday the 30th. I didn't have my computer with me, but I remembered that my hotel was several blocks to the south and east of Sofia's bus station. So, at 3 PM, I left my bus and walked down the main Sofia road for one block and then headed over to the road my hotel was located on so that I wouldn't miss my hotel. And I walked south keeping an eye out for it. The weather was cold but nice; so, I didn't mind a little exercise.

Over a half hour later, I had passed the central part of Sofia and a bunch of hotels, but no sign of mine. I was starting to get tired. Eventually, I stopped at another hotel to ask if they knew where my hotel was. Initially the helpful woman at the desk didn't, but she looked it up online...and told me it was much closer to the bus station than I had realized. I must have missed it in the first block I went south on the main street.

So I turned around and headed back. Many minutes later, I caught sight of what must have been my hotel within 100 yards on the same side of the road as me since I could see places close to the bus station. A few feet ahead of me there was a car parked on the sidewalk so I had to step off the sidewalk and into the road to get around. Since there wasn't much traffic and I was getting fatigued after carrying my luggage for about an hour, I side stepped into the road without looking down. I expected to step onto a level road surface....

Instead I caught the side of a storm drain in the road (see third picture from top) and the next thing I knew I was headed toward the pavement. I heard/felt a kind of crunchy sensation from my left foot. Some nice Bulgarian close behind me saw me fall and offered to help me up, but I assured him I was fine without really knowing if I could still stand. Fortunately, I wasn't in much pain and I could in fact still support weight on my leg and walk, so no sprain or break.

I limped into my hotel and checked in. I managed to secure some aspirin or something and some ice from the front desk after explaining what had happened. And that was pretty much my journey to Sofia!

I didn't want to risk making my ankle worse since I knew I had 10-12-hour ride back to Istanbul on Friday. So, I just stayed in my hotel for the most part and rested and iced my ankle and foot down. I only left for meals, to buy my ticket back and to get some ketoprofen (I was told it was basically the same as ibuprofen by the Sofian apothecary) on Thursday, and to catch my bus back on Friday.

The top two foot photos are from my hotel room. The final one is from the following Monday after being back in Istanbul for a couple of days.

Sultanic Seat

After visiting the Sultan Ahmed mosque and Ayasofya, our last guided portion of our Turkey tour was a visit to Topkapi Palace. Topkapi is not a single, ornate European-style palace as one might imagine from its name. Rather, it is a large complex containing many buildings and mosques, which acted as a city within a city where the Sultan, his family, and his immediate retinue of several thousand servants and advisers lived. It is a short walk from Ayasofya and part of its grounds border the scenic and strategic Bosphorus strait that is the sole exit to the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and then to the Aegean.

The basic rule for photography at Topkapi is that, if it's inside, one cannot take pictures. So some of the neater things like Sultan's collection of armor, china, jewels, the Topkapi dagger (subject of the 1964 heist film Topkapi) and the large Spoonmaker diamond were off limits. Generally one can see a purported skull fragment and forearm of John the Baptist in the Topkapi Treasury with the other flashy Sultany baubles, but they were on loan elsewhere on 15 November. So if you're curious about such things, you'll have to settle for non-Greggy pictures from the web like these:


Dagger Pix

Spoonmaker Pix

Pieces of John


After the visit to the palace, we had our final group lunch at a restaurant with a beautiful view of the Bosphorus. After that, time to wander around the Grand Bazaar was scheduled, but I had too much work to do and too little interest, since I knew I was coming back to Istanbul in the near future.

Here are more pictures of my tour of Topkapi Palace.

Where's Allah? (Fun with Arabic Script)

The Arabic word for "Allah" is featured prominently in the big circles in each of the three pictures below (the long vertical line followed by 4 wavy squiggles of about half that size). Now that you know the form of such a prominent Arabic word, you can see if you can find it in longer samples of Arabic script, such as the rectangle of script below and to the left of the circle in the top and bottom pictures.

Go on, try it! It's fun!

Murch of Wisdom, Chosque of Light

Hey?! You Muslims stuck your mosque in my Justinian-era Cathedral! Yeah, well you Christians keep trying to convert my 500-year-old mosque back into a church! Wait, it's neither a church or a mosque -- it's two, two great faiths that go great together! It's a....

A museum. In 1935 good ol' Mustafa Kemal and the secular Republic of Turkey put an end to all the bickering about what Ayasofya (aka Hagia Sofia) should rightfully be and declared it a secular museum. So now you can go in and look around without removing your shoes. This enforced secularity of Ayasofya is evidently a big point. Pope John Paul II refrained from making any prayers or religious gestures during his visit and there were worries about whether Benedict would observe the protocol in his recent visit.

Also when the Ottoman conquerers moved in, they plastered over most of the Christian icons to protect them from defacement. In the last century, many of these have been rediscovered and uncovered intact.

Here are some more pictures from Ayasofya.

Don't they make my renowned mosque blue?

On Thursday 15 November, we did our last set of guided tours starting at the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (aka the Blue Mosque) in Istanbul. Supposedly French visitors were so taken with the rich blue-green color of some of the tile on the inside of this mosque that they named the color after the Turks or "turquoise".

For more pictures, click here.

Iyi Christmaslar!

(Roughly "Merry Christmas!" in Turkish.)

Wishing all my family and friends a Merry Christmas!

Faraway Family

During my stay in Istanbul, Zikri has been a kind host to me and he and his family have adopted me while I'm here. Zikri's younger daughter Gökçen and her husband Hüssein are in the first picture. Zikri's wife Aynur who has made me dozens of yummy home-cooked meals and desserts is in the middle picture. And the newest addition to Zikri's family is his 2+-year-old grandson Orhun in the bottom picture.

Thank you, Zikri, Aynur, Gökçen, Hüssein, and Orhun for your friendship, help, and hospitality!