We are traveling again! The world of Pandemic COVID has not completely disappeared, but it is finally fading into the background, where the variants will likely become an embedded part of everyone’s lives forever. For those with access to vaccines, there is not much more of a concern than seasonable flu.
We flew from Honolulu to Los Angeles, and then to Istanbul, to start this year’s travels. We stayed at the Arcadia Blue hotel in Istanbul, as it is our favorite hotel in this city. It overlooks both the Blue Mosque (upper left), which was inexplicably not lit at night this time, and the Hagia Sophia mosque. The images on the left shown here were out of our hotel window just after dawn and sunset.
We only spent one full day in Istanbul on this trip, as it was our stop-over to Sarajevo. We walked a block to the Hagia Sophia in the morning. When we were last here in 2016, this was a museum, and there was scaffolding on all walls. It has since been transformed from a museum back into a mosque. As a mosque, there was brighter lighting, which helped with photography, but also meant there were bright chandeliers at every angle.
Though this is now an active mosque, the tourists far outnumbered the faithful (lower middle). Many people sat on the floors with their smartphones (top row), or followed tour guides (center, lower-left and lower-right). Noticeably missing were the Chinese tourists.
That afternoon we searched for a Whirling Dervish demonstration. Kadir, our host, took us under his wing, and helped us out getting to and from the hotel, and also introduced us to a man next door with unique-colored eyes, who raised hundreds of homing pigeons. We climbed several flights of narrow, rickety steps with no handrail, making me question my sanity in go on this adventure. When we finally emerged, it was worth it though, with a rooftop view of the Bosphorus in the background.
Erdpgan showed us his pigeon roosts (middle left), and fed some of the hundreds he has (lower right). He then brought out a pigeon only 4 weeks old (lower-left) and another only 2 days old (upper-right).
35 second video showing the pigeons and chicks in action.
When we were in Istanbul in 2016, we attended a performance of the Whirling Dervish. We decided to attend a similar performance by a different company on this trip. There was lots of confusion involved, since the group had changed venues during the pandemic, but Mehmet, our Turkish friend, eventually found the new location and purchased tickets. The performance was very similar to our earlier experience, albeit in a smaller room with fewer dancers.
30 second video showing the actual whirling of the dervishes.
As always, we like to watch the people when we travel. When visiting the train station to get the Dervish tickets, we saw this girl eating corn-on-the-cob (lower-right), a popular treat in Istanbul. We captured a couple images before she scampered off. Her parents spoke no English, but offered to have her sit again for us to take photographs. We later sent the parents copies of the photos, and in return they offered us to join them for tea in Turkey (all using Google Translate to communicate).
As we noted in our last Turkey blog posts, cats are everywhere. In the restaurants, they show up at the edge of the table with big needy eyes telling you silently that they are starving and need your food (despite all being obviously well fed!). They are well behaved though, and never climb on the table, nor grab for any treats that are not handed to them.
I rarely photograph my food, and even more rarely post those food photos on our blog. The meals we had in Istanbul just begged to be shown though. Above you see the kind of dishes we got at every meal in every restaurant. You certainly never leave the table hungry here!