Garett and I arrived last evening to Istanbul! The new airport here is enormous; it took us a half hour to walk to passport control without stopping and there were teenagers stationed throughout the building to guide us so that we didn’t get lost down a side corridor.

And once we made it to the city, we were startled by the size of everything here. Istanbul is huge and just filled with all sorts of people and a million things to see. I’m just going to post a few photos from our visit to Hagia Sophia today because I’m scared that if I let the sites and photos build up, I’ll never get myself to do the work and write about our visit.

We started with a “typical” Turkish breakfast. I don’t know if this is a typical breakfast for everyday or just special occasions. There was so much delicious food! I think there were six kinds of cheeses. Look how happy Garett is! The hazelnut butter was particularly excellent.

Then we took a walk to the Old Town. We are staying in the newer part of the city, in a hip area called Beyoglu. There’s a circumflex over the G that I can’t figure out how to type (or pronounce, for that matter). If you can see the tower in the middle of the picture below, that’s approximately where we are staying.

Here’s Garett on the Galata Bridge crossing the Golden Horn right next to the Bosphorus! It was a gloriously beautiful day. In the second picture you can see the domes and minarets of the Blue Mosque.

We wandered through the Spice Bazaar which sells a lot of spices, of course, and also Turkish Delight. We’re not huge fans of Turkish Delight–it’s a bit too sweet for us (and a bit too reminiscent of the White Witch in Narnia). The sheer variety is amazing though.

Then we visited the Hagia Sophia. It has a lengthy history–it was built in the 500s and it is still standing! It was both a church and a mosque in the past, but in the 1930s the government converted into a museum. I’ve been wanting to visit it forever and the pictures I took don’t really do it justice.

Tonight we went to a cooking class–one of my favorite traveling-abroad activities–and they had this great roof terrace! The view over Istanbul was incredible and the company was great.

We made 3 delicious dishes–Kisir, Humus, and Biber Dolmasi, the stuffed peppers below.

They even read our fortunes from the coffee grounds when we finished.

Apparently, there is a rooster in our future. Can you see him in the middle? Birds mean that you are going to receive some sort of message or news.