Scavenger Hunt

Yesterday we went on a scavenger hunt spanning two continents - still hasn't gotten old saying that. We met at the base of the Galata tower and Professor Shields gave us a list of things we had to get pictures of. The whole time that we were doing the hunt random people would come up to us and ask us what we were looking for, and then they took the time to look at our list and explain what was where. I was amazed by how nice people were. One restauranteur took us to the top of his building to show us a view of a palace we were looking for, and a British woman went down the list and translated all the stuff in Turkish we had to find. We first got pictures of the numerous orange juice sellers that abound throughout the city. They squeeze the oranges right in front of you and it only costs a lira. We also got pictures of various fruit from the fruit sellers. Then we went over to Sultanahmet, where we had to get pictures of the Hagia Sophia and Kaiser Wilhelm fountain. A lot of the stuff we couldn't find in our guidebooks or maps so we relied on people's advice for where to find them. It took us a good 45 minutes to figure out that we had walked past the Kaiser Wilhelm fountain twice before we noticed it. We went into the Topaki palace grounds for the first time, but we couldn't get into the actual palace without paying a fee. Instead I took a picture with this happy looking young man - the palace guard:

It's kind of like the Royal Guard in England. After that, we visited Suleymaniye mosque, a few tram stops away. We then proceeded to get lost in the endless market streets of Istanbul - hungry, thirsty, and without a clue about where we were, we were very miserable. We walked around for about 45 minutes before we found out where we were - here's a picture from where we were when we were lost in the hills of Istanbul.


After we photographed the last things on the European side, we took off for the Asian side. There we stopped by the train station, Hydrapasa. We got on a train (wile it was leaving, we saw a a vendor of simit (pretzel like bread) running to get onto get onto the moving train with a table full of simit and in the process dropping half its load - we all laughed) thinking it would take us to the ferry stop - it instead deposited us inland. We were ready to despair until Kelly recognized that the parking lot we were in was the grounds for the vegetable market we had been in the previous day. We completed the day in Asia with our last task - getting a ice cream cone. We made it back to the European side with an hour to go till the end of the task. It was a grueling, exhausting day, but the stories it gave us made it worth it in the end.

I leave you with this picture that I took - a dusk panorama shot from our terrace of Sultanahmet. Click on it for a better look.