And then there was More Istanbul

Hello my name is Caz and I'm a street food junkie.

Everywhere I go there is the insatiable urge to try street food, all of it. The streetfood in Istanbul is actually not too exotic. Here we have a vendor selling oval green things from his cart. Guessing they were melons and obviously intrigued I bought one. This meant getting a full five minute show of food preparation and voila, you have a....cucumber... An odd, oval shaped one, but a cucumber none the less. A little salt and yum.

Another street food that is sold with flair is The IceCream. The process of building a Turkish IceCream involves slapping large slabs of each flavour around with a giant spoon and the ringing of a bell which hangs above the IceCream Artist's head. It turns out the icecream is not like the type we know. For one, its chewy and for two, you can turn the cone upside down and it doesnt fall out (something the Artists enjoy doing to the shrieks of the tourists). It tastes like a derivative of condensed milk. A cone this size is unfinishable (for most) and will lighten your wallet by the equivalent of R30.

Another of my travel expenses is a local music instrument (Thanks Mom for the first of my collection from Egypt) So off to a music store we went and this is what we found. In the photo, below the man and to the left are wooden tubes. I suppose they function in a similar fashion to a clarinet or maybe like a recorder with a reed mouth piece. They come in various sizes for various uses. The large ones are apparently for playing the mystical Sufi music while the smaller ones (like I bought) are the musical accompanyment to puppet shows...

At last we have photos of Constantine's Cathedral, Hagia Sophia (Sacred Wisdom) The first cathedral was built between 325 and 360Ad (these things take time) and was known as Megalo Ekklesia due to its size. But as is the way with these things, the cathedral on this spot burnt down several times. The neck stiffening, breath-taker we see today was built by Justinian. Of course, bigger and better than ever before, and oh yes, this time, out of marble please...no wood. So marbles where brought in from all over the Empire and instead of making columns from scratch, a few were 'borrowed' from places like Delphi. It took 1000 master-craftsmen and 10000 labourers on site, only 5 years to complete this neck-craning, jaw-dropper. But of course when the Ottoman took over and magnificence was transformed into a mosque, all images of people and animals had to be covered...goodbye mosaics and carved marble, hello wood and paint. Even the Sultan of the time realised, this just doesnt work. It makes the wood and paint look crude. So he built Sultanahmet to show what a Mosque really could be like....remember that dome of grand and intricate design from a previous blog? Wow! It really is a pity that Hagia Sophia is not in her original form, imagine, two unbelievable structures such as these, in their original form, facing each other across a fountained park. The Cathedral has been converted into a museum and as such it has been deemed safe to uncover some of the mosaics and marble carvings giving you an idea of what once was. Ah I suppose most religions do this to one another's histories at some stage.
And this is not even the main dome. As you can imagine from this photo it is physically impossible to get the complete idea/feeling of the place in a single photo. So i am still trying to upload those videos to give you a better impression of the place