Day at Sea, Glen's Birthday In Istanbul, Turkey

We spent May 21 at sea on the Mediterranean. We kept marveling at how calm the water was and what wonderful weather we were experiencing. Not just the cruise week, but the whole 3 weeks we were vacationing.

We thought the castle we saw down by the shoreline as we were cruising by was pretty cool. Also the big white man figure on the hill up by the flag was an interesting sight.

I was cold a lot of the sea day. Here I am all snuggled up in my jacket with a beach towel on top of me.

This might be a good time to point out I had gotten a huge, blistery, oozing cold sore at the corner of my mouth and it was not pretty. It was also an annoyance as it got bigger before it got better.

I had been priding myself on how well I'd sunscreened to protect against burning, but I hadn't done as well at putting sunscreen on my lips. I'm just so used to using plain Vaseline.

Along with doing our favorite shipboard activities during the day (namely trivial pursuit), we attended a mandatory disembarkation meeting for all Fun For Less travelers and Michael Wilcox gave a morning and an afternoon lecture that day.

Glen photographed a beautiful sunset in the evening.

Our step count for our day at sea was 10,069 which is 5.08 miles. Okay, so that might have been one of our lowest days, but rest assured we were using the stairs everywhere we went on the ship. We were happy for a day of rest from hiking around ruins.

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May 22 was Glen's birthday. What a way to celebrate! An almost month-long, birth-month, birthday celebration if you ask me! We woke up that day in Turkey! How often can a person celebrating a birthday say that?

One of our favorite things to see were the many mosques with the minarets. A mosque is a place of worship for the followers of Islam. Many mosques have elaborate domes, minarets and prayer halls in varying styles of architecture.

A minaret is a distinctive architectural feature of mosques, generally a tall spire usually either free-standing or taller than associated support structure. Minarets provide a visual focal point and are used for the call to prayer.

In addition to providing a visual cue to a Muslim community, the main function of a minaret is the call to prayer which is issued five times each day. In most modern mosques, the adhan (call to prayer) is called from the musallah (prayer hall) via microphone to a speaker system on the minaret.

First matter of important business on the bus that morning was wishing Glen a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!

Knowing how much Glen "loves" a fuss made over him on his birthday, I was thrilled he would even pose for this picture of the candy bar gift Nanette/Fun For Less gave him to recognize his special day.

We saw more mosques and minarets as we rode along in the bus.

Even more impressive than seeing them from a distance is seeing them up close.

Each mosque is very beautiful and unique unto itself. This is Hagia Sophia, constructed between 532 and 537 AD. It is a former Orthodox patriarchal basilica, later a mosque from 1453 until 1931 AD, and then was opened as a museum in 1935.

Famous in particular for its massive dome, it is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have changed the history of architecture.

More ruins.

The Basilica Cistern is an enormous underground cistern built in the mid 500s AD. Because of the marble columns rising from water level and seeming like countless in number, it was nicknamed The Sunken Palace by the public.

You enter the cistern going down a 55-step stairway. There are 336 columns which compose 12 rows with 28 columns in each row. The walls and floor were made with brick and were made waterproof by covering them thickly with Khorasan mortar.

The cistern is 9,800 square meters (roughly 2 1/2 acres) and has the capacity of 100,000 tons of water storage. There are fish swimming around in the water.

There are two Medusa heads used as column bases that are very unique. Medusa is one of the female monsters of the underground world who has the power to turn people who look at her into stones.

There are some myths about the Medusa heads that perhaps the reason one is on the side and one is upside down is so that people who look at them wouldn't turn into stones.

It works!! Steven took a look and didn't turn into stones.

It didn't take us long to realize we had another sales presentation/pressure-to-buy coming our way this particular day. This time it was handmade Turkish carpets.

We were ushered into a room with carpets lining the walls. A woman sitting at a carpet loom was working in the middle of the room. We were given an explanation of how she makes the carpets and what superb workmanship goes into the making of each of their handmade carpets.

This shows the pattern she was following as she was working.

Look at all of our busload of new friends sitting along the carpeted walls of the room.

The workers started wining and dining us to butter us up for the presentation and then the kill--or the buy--however you look at it.

We were served apple juice and Turkish bagels.

Here's the main man making the sales pitch, having his helpers roll out carpet after carpet as he talked.

We were urged to get down on the carpets and inspect them and feel them and basically fall in love with the perfect one that we were willing to pay thousands of dollars to own.

On our way to the Grand Bazaar.

The Grand Bazaar is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, with 61 covered streets and over 3,000 shops which attract between 250,000 and 400,000 visitors daily. 

Nearby was a huge mosque and when we heard the call to prayer, hundreds of Muslim men rushed there to wash their feet, their hands and their heads and get settled in their prayer spot.

Steven was craving a Turkish McDonald's experience.

The Topkapi Palace was the official and primary residence of the Ottoman Sultans for approximately 400 years (1465-1856 AD). 

The palace was a setting for state occasions and royal entertainments and is a major tourist attraction today, containing the most holy relics of the Muslim world such as the Prophet Muhammed's cloak and sword, Ottoman miniatures, Islamic calligraphic manuscripts and murals, as well as a display of Ottoman treasure and jewelry.

The palace is a complex made up of four main courtyards and many smaller buildings.

At the height of its existence as a royal residence, the palace was home to as many as 4,000 people, formerly covering a larger area with a long shoreline.

The complex has been expanded over the centuries with many renovations. It held mosques, a hospital, library, bakeries, and a mint.

The complex is guarded by officials of the ministry as well as armed guards of the Turkish military.

Just taking a little rest on this gigantic bench that was too high and too deep for any normal-size human to sit on comfortably.

Some of us were ready to get back to the ship, but the majority of our busload of people wanted to stop at the Spice Bazaar, which is also a popular covered shopping complex similar to the Grand Bazaar.

It has a total of 85 shops selling spices, Turkish delight and other sweets, jewelry, souvenirs and dried fruit and nuts.

  

It was our last night on the ship. Glen ordered himself a scoop of chocolate ice cream for his birthday last dessert while I ordered this beauty. 

Steven and Patricia gave Glen a very thoughtful birthday gift. We had all laughed so hard over this Princess Cruises photo when Glen was totally oblivious to his picture even being taken and his expression is so hilarious. 

Like...really...what man wouldn't notice two half-naked women swooping in to get their picture taken with him?!?!?!?!?!? Apparently this man who was too busy with his free-from-the-produce-section-elastic-band-wielding-money-card-carrying wallet to realize we were getting our picture taken.

Ahhhhh, thanks(?) Steven and Patricia for this lovely souvenir of our week-long cruise.

I guess a wife would be happy to know an ice cream cone and three bags of popcorn make her husband smile from ear to ear while two costumed, exotic women standing near him only cause a look of bewilderment to come to his face.

 

This is the Princess Cruises picture I chose to buy, with the Santorini backdrop, to help us remember the cruise part of our trip. That place was probably my favorite of the ports because it was so uniquely different from anywhere else.

Glen was sad to learn there would be no Princess Pop Choir he could join on this cruise. But he did get a chance to sing when the piano-playing entertainer in the lounge passed the microphone to him to sing a line in one of the songs.

At the end of the day, we were both noticing we had developed a red, dotty rash on our legs. UGH!! Not pretty to look at to be sure. We were hoping a good night's rest would resolve the issue.

Our step count for the day was 18,263 which is 9.22 miles.

It had indeed been a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY for my husband all day long.