Turkish Delight

Dateline: Istanbul, Day 4 – Wrapping Up

Istanbul, Turkey
25 June 2009

For our last day in Istanbul, Charlie and I split up.

While walking down to the pier the other day, I saw a sign for the Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam. Knowing that much of our current math has its roots in Arabic (our numbering system is, after all, Arabic), I was rather curious to check this museum out.

The museum was relatively new and not quite completed yet; which was unfortunate, because several of the models were kinetic, but not plugged in.

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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey

I think I was most impressed by the astroglobes, which were used to predict star locations, and water pumps, which I was interested in for their sheer ingenuity and for a project I’m working on that I’ll discus at a later date.

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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey

I met back up with Charlie at the hostel for one last trip to the Grand Bizaar to get some more Turkish Delight and hopefully a carpet for me.

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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey

With remarkable efficient, we entered the Bazaar, completed our missions, and were back at the hostel.

One snag Charlie ran in to was withdrawing money from the ATM. The aforementioned trip was expensive, 390YTL1 …which actually isn’t all that bad considereing what we were doing and the ground we were covering, and we still had to pay Ali. However, Charlie couldn’t get either of his ATM cards to work! Crap! After calling his bank and some bank and forth to the ATM, we eventually figured out that he has a maximum withdraw limit and was attempting to take out barely more than the limit.

Charlie rushed back, just in time to pay Ali and catch the bus.

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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey

And just like that, we were on to Cappadocia.

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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey

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  1. $250 USD ↩

Dateline: Istanbul, Day 2 – Touring Istanbul

Istanbul, Turkey
23 June 2009

For better or worse, I feel like Charlie may be the end of me on this trip. I’ve already been traveling pretty much non-stop for three weeks and now I’ve got an eager beaver who wants to see it all.

Today, we went to the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, the Old Bazaar, bought Turkish Delight1, walked across the Galata bridge, walked up to Galata Kulesi, and over to the Kabataş ferry which took us to Üsküdar (on the Asian side of Istanbul).

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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey


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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey

We walked around Ãœsküdar for a while before returning to what we thought was Emınönü”Ž (which would have been for a short walk back), but we ended up going to BeşıktaÅŸ, which is further north (north being the wrong direction) of KabataÅŸ. The north end of the tram only runs to KabataÅŸ, so we had to hike it the 1.5 kilometers to the tram before we could relax in air-conditioned comfort. We later learned that today has been one of the hottest day day in Istanbul this year. Great.

We took a nap before venturing into the somewhat cooler evening to find some well deserved grub. A kebab house fit the bill pretty perfectly and all was good.

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İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey

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  1. which has led to a slew of rather off-color jokes ↩