Day 10 -- Istanbul

Bo found a NY Times article about Orhan Panuk’s (a great Turkish writer who won the Nobel prize in 2006) Istanbul, in which he took the journalist to his favorite places in the city. One of the places called Vefa Bozacisi was an old (1876) establishment which made and sold a unique concoction (boza) made from fermented bulgar and other unknown ingredients.  It was quite a trek to find it in the old orthodox Muslim neighborhood of Fatih.  The place was jammed with girls around 20 with head scarves.  The drink is supposed to do wonders for your femininity.  It is so thick it must be eaten with a spoon.  Al could not eat too much, so much the better for Bo’s femininity. On the way back we walked through the university campus and also through the Grand Bazaar (more shopping). After a little rest in the hotel, we set off to meet our friends in Taksim Square and together explore the neighborhood of Cihangir. On the way, we went to Karakoy Square and to a special market with hundreds and hundreds of hardware stores. Al brought with him a picture a metric square nut that he was determined to buy in Europe. We searched all over Lviv for it to no avail so this was his best chance. We got sent from shop to shop, but finally success! Al bought his nut.   From Karakoy we walked and walked along the edge of the Bosphorus until the funicular. We met our friends and started walking through Cihangir, which used to be an old Greek neighborhood, and now it’s hip and artsy and full of antique stores and boutiques. Orhan Panuk lives there and he also recently opened a Museum of Innocence there, which we saw on the way. Cihangir is on a steep hill so we kept walking down and at the bottom, by the coast, we came across a lovely modern restaurant with a great view of the Bosphorus so we had dinner there. After dinner, we parted with our friends. Bo really wanted to see one more place in Cihangir – the old Cihangir mosque, or rather the mosque garden from which (according to Panuk) you have the best view in the city. So we climbed a million crumbling steps to the very top of the hill. The mosque is closed and in pretty bad shape, but the view from the garden is truly spectacular.