Today I bought every piece of jewelry in Istanbul. Jill and I took a Grayline tour today to the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofya. There were both very beautiful and I have the pictures to prove it. OUr tour guide kept telling us that we had 20 minutes to “wisit” this and 15 minutes to “wisit” that. Jill and I were giggling. Of course, it wouldn’t be a guided tour without a stop at some store with “special prices”. We went to a jewelry/rug store and they did a rug demonstration about different weaving methods, materials, etc. They gave us all hot tea and it was apple flavored, it was delcious! Who wants a box? In Turkey it is good manners to offer tea to your guests, so every shop we stopped in to look, they offered tea to us.
Most important of all, we went to the Grand Bazaar and boy, was it grand! Wikipedia Link I could be happy just exploring that the entire time I’m in Istanbul. You cannot imagine what it was like. Supposedly there are 4,000 shops inside; and it’s covered. It wasn’t like the markets in Asia that are “covered” by a tarp or a corrugated metal “roof”. You could walk around pleasantly. There are alleys or sections for each type of thing you want to buy. They have a jewelry section, a rug section, a leather section, and about a million other things. Unfortunately, we came in through the jewelry section and I literally could not walk 3 feet without looking in a window. Everything was so sparkly. They have the MOST gorgeous jewelry here, lots of unusual items. They have a lot of matte gold and oxidized silver and gold. EVERYONE should come to Istanbul and shop. You would think that each shop would have the exact same things as the other, but that wasn’t necessarily so. The men in the shops are very patient and schmooze with you but somehow they manage not to be pushy. Of course, everyone has “the best deal for you” and I walked out of there thinking I was the most beautiful person in the world, because they all told me so. I kept saying over and over how excited I was and how i’ve never seen so many goodies before in my life. Oh, how I wish I were in the market for a diamond piece of jewelry, they had so many beauties! I have to go back again. Maybe I will win the Turkish Lottery and they won’t allow me to take my money back to NY and I will have to spend it all here.. I could be so lucky!
They have the worst tv here, no Animal Planet, Sara. They have 6 English channels here and one of them doesn’t work. Two of them are news channels and one of them is dedicated to showing only the worst movies ever made. Ones that even I wouldn’t see.
Oh, and if I said everything smells like kebap yesterday.. today everything smells like cigarettes. The bazaar is sort of indoors but everyone is smoking. I had to take a shower the moment we got back to the room, which was around 5:00. After being on the go for about 9 hours today, we’d had enough.
Tomorrow we have a tour at 2:00 and we are going to the Asian side of Istanbul and going to see the Bosphorus. We are going to try to go to the Topkapi Palace in the morning after a unrushed (you like that word?) morning.
Have a wonderful day!
via I Put the Jew Back in Jewelry – Istanbul, Turkey Travel Blog.