Today Rene and I woke up at 9:00am after being out until after 3:00am and ran around the whole city! We were exhausted by the end but whole day was so amazing it was totally worth it!
Entrance to the Hagia Sophia
First we went to the Hagia Sophia or Ayasofia (Turkish spelling). It is the perfect example of the cross between the Eastern and Western world. Actually it’s a perfect monument to represent Istanbul; this city has such an interesting blend of Asian and European cultures cultivated through all aspects of life. I mean you can sit at a French chocolate café and hear the call to prayer in the background, interesting fusion. Anyway the Hagia Sophia was a church during Byzantine times and once the empire fell to the Ottomans they turned the church into a mosque. It has little quirks about it like the prayer area doesn’t face Mecca because it was originally designed to be a church and the materials are a fusion of the original ones used to build the church and more traditional Ottoman building materials. With current restorations half of the material covering the walls and ceilings has been ripped down to show how the Islamic art was just painted over the Christian art. It’s a really cool place to see.
Getting from the lower to upper gallery is done via ramps. Rene and I thought it was cool...until the 8th or 9th ramp!
"Judgement Day" Displayed in the Upper Gallery. It was covered after this building was converted to a mosque.
Inside View
The Blue Mosque was really cool but I guess I don’t know enough about Islamic architecture to recognize subtle differences. The mosque was huge and I’m glad that I got to see it but honestly I can’t really see much of a difference between the Blue and New mosques. Haha Rene will probably kill me for saying that! Regardless it’s a beautiful mosque.
Rene outside the Blue Mosque!
The Turkish bath was INCREDIBLE we went to the Çemberlitaş bath. It’s the historic bath which was used by Ottoman elite during the 1800s. It was literally the best bath/spa experience I’ve ever had. Rene and I got the Luxury package which was 99 lira or around $60. Kinda steep for things in Turkey but for what it included (regular Turkish bath service, scrub down and hot oil massage) it is a steal! First you are taken to a luxury locker room where you change out of all of your clothes other than a black pair of bikini bottoms and a thin traditional Turkish towel. You lock your clothes and belongings in a locker and grab a pair of shower shoes to walk down to the traditional bath area. This area is a huge room covered from floor to ceiling in marble. The room is basically a sauna but with less heat than the traditional one. In the middle of the room there’s a three foot high marble counter which has 20 sides and one person lies on each side. So men and women are separated, the men’s bath looks exactly the same but it’s on the other side of the building. But everyone in the bath is topless. I thought it would be a big deal and embarrassing but it really wasn’t. It was just a bunch of normal women hanging out no one really looked at anyone else and it was a very comfortable environment.
Anyway once you lay on the counter for a while an older woman with saggy boobs wearing a black bra and undies comes to bathe you. Again, this was something I thought was going to be very weird but nope not at all. It’s so humid and there’s water everywhere, if they were clothed their outfits would just be soaked. But they pour warm water on you and then scrub your entire body with a special scrubber which gets all the dead skin off of you. It’s kinda gross you can actually see the dead skin rubbing off of your body in little black rolls. I promise I shower regularly and exfoliate well! It just goes to show how much dirt we all carry around, too bad I can’t afford a Turkish bath every day! Anyway the massage you for a while after the scrub down and then take you to an enclave off the main dome area to shampoo your hair and massage your scalp. After that you go to cool down in a room temperature pool/ Jacuzzi. This is the end of the traditional Turkish bath, that service would have been 65 lira but I wanted the whole 9 yards! So I waited in a warm room to be taken to my hot oil massage. It was amazing. There are no words. Like it was so relaxing I fell asleep towards the end! Even here there is no real privacy which just felt normal. You are lying on a table with your own masseuse in a room with ten or twelve tables. Being here and having it be normal to be not so paranoid about being naked or obsessed with privacy makes it seem unnatural to be so modest and private for massages at home. Anyway after all that I took a quick warm shower to wash the oil off and blow dried my hair and Rene and I headed back. Both of us were so relaxed we almost fell asleep on the bus! Overall a great day, I’m so glad I got to do all these things with Rene!
View from the outside of the bath. For obvious reasons you can't take pictures inside. You can see two identical domes, one is for men and the other is for women.
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