Istanbul: Thursday

Michael reminded me that I forgot to mention that we saw Bosphorus dolphins on our way to the Princes' Islands!  It was such a fantastic treat!  Unfortunately, they were hard to photograph but here's an NPR story about them if you want to read about them.

So on Thursday, we were back in the Old City to do some sightseeing before our Turkish bath appointments.  We were trying to navigate to the Rüstem Pasha Mosque but took a wrong turn and ended up at the Süleymaniye Mosque up the hill. This was on our list anyway so we checked it out.

This is Michael's favorite mosque of our entire trip.  It's gorgeous.  Here's a crazy cool perspective looking up from the entrance.

And here we are!

Sinan, the architect for Süleymaniye and bunches of other stuff, designed his own tomb and it's just on the other side of the wall.

We saw a couple other sultan's grave yards too.  They were pretty neat!  (Kind of reminds me of Boston where they just have random, old grave yards in the middle of the city.)

As we walked down towards the Hamam (Turkish bath house), we got a closer look at the German Fountain.  This is how it looked when we passed by on Sunday.

This is how it looked when we walked closer.

Whoa!  Beautiful ceiling!  And on the same stretch, there was some sort of classic rally car exhibition going on with cars from all over the world.  Here's our, um, favorite...

Whoa!  And yeah, it was furry.  It was fun to see all the cars and the team members hanging out.  But we couldn't linger too long... we had an appointment at the Hamam!

Unfortunately, we couldn't take photos because it was beautifully restored and just gorgeous.  Both the men's and the woman's sides were super professional and it was a great experience.  You know I was worried about how naked I had to get for this thing... well, you're pretty much naked after 10 minutes... but like I said, they were super professional so it wasn't a big deal.

Both our favorite part: The Bubble Cocoon (as I'm going to call it).  You are basically lying on the warm marble and the bath lady/man soaks a linen pillow case (at least that's what it looks like) into a bucket of soapy water and makes a whole bunch of bubbles with it and drops it on you!  It's awesome.

Michael's least favorite part: Oil massage by a large Turkish man.

My least favorite part: The expensive price tag!  No, but it was definitely worth the experience.

We had dinner reservations afterwards and got the restaurants mixed up.  We could actually see the rooftop deck two rooftops down from us when we got to the rooftop of the place we walked into.  We were the only people there!  But hey, we gave it a shot and it ended up turning out really good (and cheaper than the original restaurant would have been!)

Here's Michael with a glass of the Turkish national beer (and cozy wrap) and the view at sunset wasn't too bad either.