Today was another day of exploring the European side of Istanbul, and testing our new lenses.  We planned to start off with a visit to the Pera Museum, which meant once again using the metro subway and ferry to get there. The subway comes every 5 minutes on Saturdays (“1 DK” and “6 DK” indicate the next train is 1 and then 6 minutes from now). We often people-watch on the ferry. This time there was a conservative Muslim man in a long robe, even though it was a hot day. When he first came on board the ferry, he had a very harsh look and a loose fitting robe.  It was hard not to let all the news photos flood through our minds…

We also did some people-watching of each other. Right-center shows me with my 2-week-old white beard — still haven’t decided how long to grow it, or how long to keep it.  Evelyn is giving me the Evil Eye in the lower right, below that…

We arrived at the museum, and found there was a 50% discount on entry. Always a nice surprise. The art shown was generally very good, including Evelyn’s new favorite, the Tortoise Trainer image bottom right in the block above. She acquired a bowl and a refrigerator magnet with that image. The descriptions of the art was in both Turkish and English, so we were able to learn the rather interesting history of the piece. (There was also the inevitable “modern art” section, where some curator got conned into displaying a painting that consisted of nothing but a black dot on white paper…) There were also several groups of children getting a museum tour and learning history on a Saturday afternoon.

We took the long way back from the museum (a polite way of saying we got lost…), which gave us plenty more  people-watching time and discovering a new neighborhood.  At one point, we came across a movie being made (upper and lower center images in above block).  We also walked across the Galata Bridge again — men (plus a lone woman) fishing, but under harsh early afternoon lighting conditions this time.

While we were photographing the occasional mosque, skyline, or construction images (the latter will compose a later blog entry),  I snapped a couple photographs, only to find a car quickly stopping in the middle of the street, with a policeman running over to tell me it was forbidden to photograph any military installations. Yikes!  He said it was NATO’s new offices, that I could go to prison for photographing it, and that I had to delete the photos immediately.  The one image on upper right managed to miss the purge… We had thought a mosque was being refurbished with a dozen workers on a Saturday afternoon, which demonstrated the Turkish work ethic.

Istanbul has a fair amount of pollution, though not on a level of Beijing or other famously polluted cities.  Walking across the Galata Bridge and looking towards the mosque on the hill (lower image in block above) gives a rather condensed quick view of the situation.  Ornate ancient mosques, surrounded by spewing smokestacks, power lines, automotive traffic, cafes and throngs of people.

When we arrived at the ferry dock, we realized that it was approaching sunset.  We tried to photograph the sunset from this location two weeks ago, but that had been an overcast dreary evening.  Today there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the weather was warm, so we decided to head over to the seawall and check out the sunset.

Unfortunately, we had not traveled with tripods today, not expecting to shoot a sunset.  However, the images do give a sense of what it was like as the sun settled below the horizon, and the colors came to the evening sky.  We were joined by hundreds of couples, most of whom sat on the seaside rocks, drank beer, smoked (almost universally…) and enjoyed a romantic sunset together.

I’ll finish this post with a few tulip photos from yesterday, when we visited a neighborhood park a couple blocks from our apartment.  We had been warned by Mehmet (our photo tour guide) that the tulips were dying early this year, so we went to the closest source for some quick images.  This time of year is normally the peak tulip flowering period, but there were large swathes of dead and dying tulips.  Here are a few images from this park.  We plan on going to one of the major tulip parks on Monday.  With luck, we’ll report again after that excursion.