Dad and I did a little bit of tourist stuff when we returned to Istanbul. We only have a 90 day visa for Turkey so we both had to leave the country and then come back in to get our passport stamped and our visa renewed. I had already planned a trip to Sweden to visit Karyn Kiser and Dad ended up planning a bus trip to Sofia, Bulgaria in order to get his renewed.
We had an afternoon in the city to kill so we went to the Basilica Cistern and out to an early dinner of Pide (Turkish pizza).
This is the Yerebatan Sarnici or Basilica Cistern. It’s an underground waterway with 336 marble columns that are 26 feet high. It was nice a cool underground and everything was a little damp which made it slightly eerie.
The cistern was kept full all of the time in case of a long siege and the fish that are swimming in there today are supposedly descendents of the original cistern fish of the 6th century.
This is my Medusa hair. There were two Medusa column bases in the northwest corner of the cistern. They were moved there from another Roman site and were supposed to ward off evil.
For a country of people who throw trash on the ground, this was an interesting piece of artwork in the center of the tourist area in Istanbul. It’s a tree constructed of recycled water bottles. The one thing we have noticed is people really do just throw trash on the ground without thinking twice about it. I guess as part of a new environmental campaign someone collected these bottles and made a cool tree out of them.
Dad’s bus for Bulgaria left at 8:30pm and was an all night ride. The shuttle for my 5:40am flight arrived at the hotel at 3:10am. We didn’t get a whole lot of night use out of the hotel room we had, but we did take great naps in the afternoon to prep for a night of traveling.
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