Condensed Turkey soup

Well I have failed to post for the last 10 days or so....fail! Its not that i have not had anything to post, because there has been something everyday; pure laziness, exhaustion, and Harry Potter are to blame. Yes i did say Harry Potter. I read the first half of the last book the Deathly Hallows before the first half came out last fall and I needed a way to read that second half before it came out this summer. Being in Turkey I have limited resources and few English books are available in random stores for a steep price. I started looking for a way i could download the book to my computer and read it off there with no luck until low and behold i found it!....on youtube!!! yes i have been listening to the book on youtube! and ...its free! :) my joy is great

So in this post i will attempt to take the highlights of the last few days i have missed and do my best to condense the most (hence the post title). Unfortunately this is the condensed version and so you few readers out there will have to miss the details and truly the good stuff. Sorry my fault. I know you are all "boo"ing and fist pumping with aggravation but it must be done.

Sometime in the last 10 days we got a group of aupairs together (a huge group of like 10 of us. Basically all the Huma found aupairs and Kelly) We met in Beshitash (English way to spell it) and went to the Ihlamur Pavillions. These were made for Sultans and their families as a kind of weekend home. They were small but extremely extravagant. The best part was getting to talk to the other aupairs and get a buttload of pictures. We went to the shopping area and inside kind of hidden away was this huge mall! but it was full of fakes and illegal thing which was so fun. I have to go back and get some purses and stuff there. We found a bootleg Dvd store and i got a few and i cannot wait to go back to see if they found the DVD i asked them to find(since they can find almost anyone ever made) Unico. My family knows about Unico. One of my faves as a kid.

The next day we went to the Suleymaniye Mosque which is not one of the main ones but it is a pretty popular mosque, right by the grand bazaar. We had to wear scarfs and a long cloth around out waist. There is a cemetery with a few sultans and important people buried in it.It was truly beautiful and the first mosque i have been into! After we did a little shopping and I got some scarves for people. Kelly got her hooka for her brother. It was a really nice one and we got it for 20TL which is a super good price. I really like that area. We plan to go back.

Friday we made our way to the Basilica Cistern. This underground Cistern was built by the Byzantine Emperor I Justinianus and is right by the Hagia Sophia. It is this giant stone room underground held by stone pillars. Apparently after people stopped using it as a cistern it went hidden for a century until this man who was learning about the Byzantine Empire found out that people were lowering buckets through their basements and bringing up water and even catching fish! Yes there was fish down there. It was beautiful and strangely very eerie, especially by the Meduas head bases. I dont have picture myself so here are some from google pictures. I am not going to lie i totally felt like i was in the mines of Mroia from LOTR!

Well there is my all the substance condensed version without the fun details.
Take care!