I’m in Turkey!

I’m taking a class this summer called Peoples of Turkey, There are 11 students from Biola in the class, plus our professor. For the first few days of the class we are joined by 6 Biola students on an SMU trip. My youngest son is also in the class. We left our home at 3:30 am on Sunday morning, leaving LAX at 7am. Other than an issue with one of our students (from Russia) not being able to get a boarding pass because Canada requires a visa from Russian citizens, our flights went off pretty much without a hitch. NO, we did NOT leave Masha back in Los Angeles (well only until she was able to get a different flight going through Germany instead and she arrived in Istanbul to join us later in the same day.)

We arrived in Istanbul on schedule, at about 9am local time. Ryan and Cameron (one of Ryan’s interns) met us at the airport and then we road the trains from the airport to a hostel not far from the Galata Tower across the Golden Horn. After checking in, we walked around Galata for a bit, soaking in the local atmosphere. We had lunch and met with a woman from the Bible Society. If I understood the presentation (I was having a little difficulty staying awake after the long “day” of travel and having just recently eaten lunch) this is the Turkey branch of that organization/ministry. She showed us some really old Bibles that they had translated-one was, I think, a Turkish Bible in the older script, and the other was an Armenian Bible, both from the early 1800s, I think.

   
  
Then we visited a couple of Christian churches near the hotel. The street we spent much of our time on was a pretty old one, likely used by Emperor Justinian (having been a thriving metropolis for year.) After visiting the churches, one, likely the most famous Christian church (still a church-the Hagia Sofia is now  museam, and once again being used as a mosque-closed to tours on Mondays), and an Armenian Orthodox church; we took the second oldest subway in the world (a tunnel through the hill in Galata) down the the water front by the north side of the Galata bridge. We went to a world famous baklava shop near the waterfront and then walked back up the hill (if I had planned this part, we would have walked DOWN the hill and taken the tunnel back UP, but hey…) We did a little shopping (most of it of the window variety) and worked our way back to our hostel just after dusk.

   
         
It’s almost time for breakfast, then I believe we’re headed to the Hagia Sofia (Ayasofya in Turkish), then I think we’ll visit the Blue Mosque, the Cisterns , and the Grand Bazaar (and whatever else we have time for before wrapping up our day Istanbul.