{"id":325,"date":"2007-10-27T05:22:27","date_gmt":"2007-10-27T01:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=325"},"modified":"2007-10-27T05:44:48","modified_gmt":"2007-10-27T01:44:48","slug":"photos-from-istanbul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/325\/","title":{"rendered":"Photos from Istanbul"},"content":{"rendered":"

Right, I’ve been back from Istanbul for ages now, but a combination of laziness and business has prevented me from posting anything.\u00a0 Lame on my part, I know.<\/p>\n

Anyway, on the first free day I had I went to visit the Hagia Sophia, originally a church, then a mosque, now a museum, which is arguably Istanbul’s most famous historical building.\u00a0 As the photos show, it was impressive inside and well worth visiting (although I should add that for all the hype about its interior, it wasn’t a patch on St. Petersburg’s St. Isaac’s cathedral, not that I am comparing like with like here).<\/p>\n

\"Hagia<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Hagia<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Hagia<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Hagia<\/a><\/p>\n

Directly opposite the Hagia Sophia was the Blue Mosque, which I only saw from the outside.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

My\u00a0hotel had a great view of the Bosphorus, which if you are into watching ships is a good place to sit and observe the day’s marine traffic.\u00a0 The bridge which links Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus is shown below.<\/p>\n

\"Bridge<\/a><\/p>\n

There were a lot of mosques in prominent locations in the city, of far more impressive and tasteful appearance than anything I saw in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

\"Cityscape,<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Mosque,<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Mosque,<\/a><\/p>\n

Below is the entrance to the Grand Bazaar, supposedly\u00a0the world’s largest covered bazaar.\u00a0 I had visited this briefly on my first day in Istanbul, intending to go back later.\u00a0 However, I got caught up in the Eid holidays which mark the end of Ramadan, and when I got to the Grand Bazaar I found it closed, as the picture below shows.\u00a0 Two thousand years of trading, and when I’m there it’s closed!<\/p>\n

\"Entrance<\/a><\/p>\n

I have included the picture of an extremely crowded Terminal 1 of Moscow’s Sheremotyevo\u00a0airport\u00a0because I think it\u00a0is representative of certain aspects of Russian travel.\u00a0 There is a huge crowd, everyone is delayed and irritable, there is nothing to do but drink, which most people are doing, an officer of some sort stands about in full uniform, and some Russians are sat with a random object on their table, in this case a trophy.<\/p>\n

\"Terminal<\/a><\/p>\n

It had snowed in Moscow, and\u00a0my flight back to Sakhalin was delayed by 5 hours.\u00a0 To pass the time, I did what most other people were doing, and bought a bottle of Absolut vodka and drank half of it in a few hours.\u00a0 I can’t remember much about getting on the plane, and I slept for 7 hours of the 9 hour flight, waking up somewhere over Khabarovsk.\u00a0 As a way of coping with Moscow airport delays and lengthy flights, I can highly recommend it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Right, I’ve been back from Istanbul for ages now, but a combination of laziness and business has prevented me from posting anything.\u00a0 Lame on my part, I know. Anyway, on the first free day I had I went to visit … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}