Istanbul

Yeah, still on the move... Last weekend we hopped to Istanbul to visit Nico for the weekend. We had a fantastic weather and great company. We did the usual Istanbul tour of churches, mosqs, palaces, cisterns, bazaars, kebabs and pubs.

Karye Church

Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosq surrounded by Marmara sea and the Golden Horn

Topkapi Palace and the Basilica Cistern

Niko and Didem at one of the food'n drinks place we visited in the French street of Beyoglu

More pics here.

Istanbul

Taking advantage of two Israeli Holidays this week I flew to visit an old friend in Istanbul. This time I spent most of my time in the modern part of the city, namely the Beyoglu quarter. We toured restaurants, bars, clubs by night and I visited the old city while he was at work.


Two main discoveries this trip:
- Every door, every apartment in Beyoglu hides a bar, every stairway hides a nice terrace. One lifetime is probably not enough to visit them all, but some are trying.
- Saint Sauveur in Chora, a very old small church with amazing paintings and mosaics, mostly coming from the apocryphal gospels, probably the most beautiful I've ever seen.

More pictures here

Turkish taxi drivers, Europe and France

I spent quite some time inside taxis in Istanbul last week and I had the occasion to talk with their drivers as the trafic is pretty bad there. We generally talked to each other in english, and as soon as they knew I was french the conversation about Europe immediately started.

As you know they want to apply to enter Europe and the main country unhappy about it seems to be France. So knowing that they explained all the good reasons why they thought we should be open to them, they didn't have to convince me as I already was, but the argumentation was interresting. They were as well thinking that next month's vote in France is about their entrance in Europe. You'll tell me that many french also think so, but I educated them explaining it was about the constitution and that we might actually be stupid enough to say NO.

Here are their arguments:

• we're muslim yes, but we're not arabs, we are very close to the european culture and we have a laic state for a while, we deserve to be in europe.
  
• we are working hard to improve our economy and human rights daily, you accept countries that don't do any effort.
• we have a very healthy economy and our growth rate is very fast, the turkish market is going to be one of the biggest in the area very soon.
  
• you are ready to accept Romania and Bulgaria that are much more poor than us, they don't do nearly as much effort as we do and because they're christians you're going to say yes to them.
• how can France pretend to be a laic country and say no to us just because we are muslims.

These were the core ones around which they were building a pretty solid argument, and from the things I have seen there in 4 days they are pretty right. Anyway it was interresting to see that the average Istanbul taxi driver was able to express that coherent ideas with so few english words, so much more than the average french (let's hope less than 50%) that doesn't understand what this is about even after being told in his own language.

Grand Bazar

We spent quite a bit of time in Istanbul "Grand Bazar" as it seemed to be Clotilde favourite activity there. I must admit that spending time bargaining on nice stuff while drinking tea or coffee is pretty fun, even if I wasn't that much into silverware :).

Sainte Sophie

Back from Istanbul, the best picture I have to show is the one from Sainte Sophie church-mosq. I had a great long weekend with Clement and his evergrowing family ;).

Weekend in Istanbul

I'm leaving tomorrow for Istanbul, I gonna pack sometime tonight or probably tomorrow morning at the last second as usual. Anyway what can I forget ? I saw that I gonna get some rain and around 15 degres, brrrrr ! It was 33 today in Haifa ! I'm bringing my ski clothes ;).

I'll be back next week on wednesday, I hope the earth will still be there, french still complain about working for Pentecôte, Israeli eating matza for Pessah and that by then Tristan will have stopped playing with electric plugs (I know he reads me!).

Cyal8r all - a+