Turkey 2026 - Day 4 Istanbul

They say that too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing. This is certainly true for my digestive system after eating all of that rich food yesterday. Let's just say that I was indisposed today. This turns out to be okay because today's activity is a visit to the Hurrem Sultan Hammam. Think of this as a 16th century day spa. I've never been to a spa and am not anxious to start now, so my uncooperative digestive system gives me a build-in excuse to bag this outing and work on this blog instead.

Our driver picks Chris, Mark and Beth around 2 PM and drives them back to the old town near the Hagia Sophia. The Hurrem Sultan Hammam was constructed in 1555 by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent for his wife Roxelana on the site of the ancient Roman public bath of Zeuxippus. It was unique in the Ottoman world to have the men's and women's sections constructed on the same axis as a mirror image of each other.

The first step in the process is sand papering the dead skin off of your body using a loofah mitt. The second step is to lay on a warm marble stone and be covered with bubbles. This includes both full-body bubble massage and head and neck massage. Next, they wash your hair with rose-scented shampoo and some scalp massage. Finally, there is aromatherapy massage with rosebud scented oil. Not my cup of tea, but everyone one was very happy with the experience when they got back to the hotel.

Getting back to the hotel was an ordeal. Around 4 PM, it started pouring rain. The single lane road in front of our hotel became for some period of time a river. Needless to say, traffic throughout the city ground to a halt. Our driver managed to get everyone back to the hotel, but the trip back took over twice as long as the trip over.

Needless to say, no one was keen on going out for dinner in this weather. Beth discovered that there was a room service QR code in our room. We checked with the front desk, and they told us that yes, they could get us some food, but that it would take a little longer than usual because parts of the meal were coming from nearby restaurants. They also told us that this was the way to go because services like Uber Eats were not working. We placed our orders and in about an hour, we got a call from the front desk to come down for dinner.

It was not until the next day that we were truly aware of how bad this storm was. Some areas of the city had more than 270 mm of rain (that is about 11 inches) in 24 hr - the heaviest rain event that Istanbul had had in more than 80 years! Here are a couple of pictures scarfed from Facebook to show how bad things were:

I saw a picture taken from the back of one of the trams like the one on the left with the passengers sitting and water up to their mid-calf! We were very thankful to be high on one of the many hills in Istanbul!

Turkey 2026 - Day 3 Istanbul

I hope that you enjoyed the outside pictures from yesterday, because it sounds like that will be the last sunshine we see on this trip. I'm not quite ready to break into the Camp Grenada song, but it does look right now that it will be raining for at least the next week!

Today, we are finishing up our visit to the historical sites of Istanbul in the morning, stopping at the Grand Bazaar and then crossing over the Bosphorus Straits to the Asian side of Istanbul (the locals call it the Anatolian side) for a tour of Turkish foods.

Our first stop is the Hagia Sophia:

As I said yesterday, extensive renovations to the Hagia Sophia started last year with the main goal of removing and lightening the dome and beefing up the support for the dome. It is anybody's guess how long this renovation will take. But to paraphrase Yoda, when 1400+ years old you are, look this good you will not. Inside, it is easy to see the amount of work being done:

Çinar tells us that this is actually the third church built on the same site. Groundbreaking for the first church took place in 360 AD under the leadership of Roman emperor Constantius II, the son of Constantine the Great, founder of Istanbul. This church was mostly built out of wood, which turned out to be a bad thing. In 404 AD, the Patriarch of Constantinople (as Istanbul was then know) came into conflict with the wife of the Emperor Archadius, the Empress Eudoxia, and was exiled. The Patriarch was clearly popular because this caused a riot and the church was burned to the ground during the riot. The only part of the church that remains is a single column in this picture:

but I am not sure which of the columns is the right one.

Groundbreaking for the second Hagia Sophia was 11 years later in 415 AD during the reign of Theodosius II. Again, it was mostly built with wood. This church lasted until the reign of Justinian I. In 532 AD, the local population rose up in rebellion to Justinian I in what was called the Nika Revolt. The causes of the riot are complex, but it appeared to be the culmination of a long period of ever-increasing taxation and ever-decreasing expenditures for the public good. Justinian considered fleeing the city, but his wife, the Empress Theodora said that never would she live to see a day when she was not the Empress. Realizing that he had to do it the hard way, Justinian I then ended the rioting by getting most of the city's people to go into the nearby Hippodrome, locking the doors behind them, and had his troops kill about 30,000 of them.

Justinian I, just a few weeks after the 2nd Hagia Sophia burned started construction of the 3rd church which stands today. This one was much larger and, having learned his lesson, made almost entirely of stone. It remained the largest church in the world for more than 500 years!

In 1204, the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople. Up until then, the Hagia Sophia had been an Eastern Orthodox church. The Crusaders converted into a Catholic cathedral and added artwork appropriate for such a place:

The Romans had made most of the artwork using stone mosaics, but there are no gold-colored stones so when they needed the gold color, they used pure gold. The crusaders stole all of the gold, leaving the original mosaics looking like the picture on the left. I think it is a little weird to be pillaging their own cathedral, but perhaps they needed to pay for the Crusade?!

In 1261, Constantinople was recaptured by the Byzantine Empire and Hagia Sophia went back to being an Eastern Orthodox church. It stayed that way until 1452 when the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople. At this point, it was converted into a mosque. The Muslim religion forbids any artwork containing faces, especially when praying in the direction of Mecca. The artwork above stayed because it was upstairs in the balcony and pointed in the wrong direction for anyone to see during prayer.

This conversion caused another problem. Mosques are built with one side facing Mecca, but since it was originally an Eastern Orthodox church, it was built with one side facing Jerusalem. This means that the people prayed pointed off to the side rather than directly at one of the walls as with the Sultan Ahmed Mosque.

The Hagia Sophia remained a mosque until 1935 when Ataturk converted it into a museum. But in 2020, it was converted back into a mosque, mostly as a concession to Islamist groups who view the Hagia Sophia as a holy site due to it being one of the first mosques in the world.

One other funny story about the Hagia Sophia involves the Empress Irene, who is now considered Saint Irene by the Eastern Orthodox church:

Irene (on the right) was married three times (each husband dying in suspicious ways). As one of the primary supporters of the Hagia Sophia, she got her own mosaic. Each time that she got a new husband, the old one's face was "photoshopped" out of the mosaic and a new head placed on the same body.

Just outside the Hagia Sophia are the remains of the Roman Hippodrome where the chariot races took place. This thing was huge. It was almost 1500 ft long and 425 ft wide! In its heyday, the Hippodrome could hold 100,000 people! Today, there is not much left except for three obelisks that used to sit along the center spine of the track. Here are two of them:

The larger one was originally the obelisk of Pharoh Thutmose III from the Temple of Karnak in Luxor, Egypt. Theodosius the Great had it moved to Constantinople in 390 AD. Even though it was cut into three pieces for transportation, it is incredible that they were able to move a several hundred-ton obelisk on the ships of the day. The obelisk was mounted onto a marble base shown on the right along with pictures of the chariot races that took place here.

From the Hippodrome, we take a short walk and stop at one of the remaining factories producing carpets. I had been thinking that a very small carpet might make a good wall hanging so this was an interesting stop. We get a demonstration of how silk carpets are made:

The man on the left has a vat of boiling water containing hundreds of silkworm cocoons and he is slowly drawing individual strands of silk from each cocoon into a larger strand. Those larger strands are then bundled into the thicker strands seen in the front and eventually into silk skeins. The skeins are then dyed using natural dyes like Indigo roots for blue or onion for yellow. The dyed skeins are then placed in a bucket with a solution of horse urine which stabilizes the color.

Next, the woman on the right, working from a layout at the top of the picture, double knots silk of the right color to the white warp and weft strings. Once a row is finished, the excess silk string is cut off, and the top row is pounded down with a metal comb to flatten the row before she goes on to the next row. The shop owner explains that the women work for 20 minutes and then take 20 minutes off to keep their work consistent. She can complete about 4 rows per day, so it takes many months to complete a full carpet. For really large carpets, teams of up to four women will work on parts of it, but only one of them will do the beating down of each row. Most of their weavers work from home and are mostly from the far eastern part of Türkiye where the cost of living is lower.

Next, we went down into the showroom. Besides the silk carpets, then also make wool carpets, wool on cotton carpets and silk on cotton carpets. The most amazing part is what happens when they spin the carpet around 180 degrees. The carpets have a knap so that in one orientation, the strands reflect light while in the other orientation they don't. This leads to dramatic color changes. Beth realizes that even the smallest carpet (about 2x2 feet) is too big for any spaces on our walls so we pass on buying one. This is a good thing because the one that I liked the most cost over nine thousand US dollars!

Our final stop for the morning is the Grand Bazaar:

Istanbul is truly the crossroads of the world with both water and roadways coming from Europe, Africa and Asia. That made it a natural site for the world's first shopping mall. Construction of the Bazaar began in 1455 and today contains more than 4,000 shops and attracts nearly 100,000,000 annual visitors making it the world's most-visited tourist attraction!

We stop first to try some Turkish Delight - called lokum in Turkish. These are based on a gel of starch and sugar. We are surprised to find that in addition to the fruit flavored ones that we are used to, there is another type called Ottoman Delights that have dates, raisins or figs. The shop owner tells us that Turkish Delight can be kept sealed for months. They will even put your purchase in vacuum sealed pouches that make it easier to pack in your suitcase. We buy two boxes, one traditional and one Ottoman!

Beth is looking for a lamp for Sean, so we stop in a lamp store. The salesman takes us to their main showroom down a back alley from the Bazaar. The variety is amazing:

Lamps are hanging down from the ceiling and I'm thankful that I'm able to sit down before I bang my head on one of them. The salesman explains that all of the lights are customizable. You can change the shape of the lamp, the metal, and the colors. They will wire it for US electricity. All we have to do is provide a light bulb. The salesman asks where Sean lives and when we tell him Lowell, Massachusetts, he says that he has a friend in Quincy. In fact, he says that he's visited 42 states and hopes to complete all 50 in the near future!

Mission accomplished! We head for the exit to find that the long-anticipated rain has finally begun. We wait a few minutes for our driver to get through traffic to pick us up and then we are off to the ferry pier for a quick ride over to the Anatolia side. This is very much like a subway - tap a card to get in, get on the ferry, take a 25-minute ride across the Bosphorus Strait and then get off on the other side of the ferry. Çinar tells us that doing the same trip by van would take about 90 minutes due to traffic jams on the three bridges that cross the Bosphorus. The pictures weren't very good, but we did learn that they have erected a sort of sign between two of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque's minarets that allow they to put various messages up in lights.

After getting off the ferry, we spent the next three hours or so eating. We kept telling Çinar that we couldn't possibly eat anything else and she would add another 2-3 places to stop. Here are pictures of some of the things that we ate:

Starting from the top left, we have a flat bread called pide, the plate with the round hockey-pucks and the plate with the long brown pieces of meat and the orange-colored potatoes are both forms of köfte. We don't know what the dumpling-like things are called, but they were stuffed with ground meat of some sort. Next, we have the traditional way of making Turkish coffee in copper cups over a fire. I didn't have any of that because I didn't want to be awake for the next 36 hrs! The bottom left one is a kind of kabob called an iskender. Underneath the meat is toasted bread. The bottom right one is called tantuni. This one is a bread covering shredded chicken and covered with yogurt. They were all really good, but as you can tell, these are all quite rich (fatty) foods so by the end, we were just thankful that we hadn't exploded yet!

We waddled our way back to the ferry building. Because of the rain, traffic was really bad. Çinar chose a ferry that was going to a dock in an area that had a little less traffic. She asked if we minded that she just drop us off with the driver and then head home back on the Anotolia side. She said that it would still take her 3hr to get home, but this would reduce her trip by about 45 minutes. We said that this would be find, thanked her warmly for her help and sent her on her way. It has been a good two days!

Turkey 2026 - Day 2 Istanbul

It is now October 14th (Day 3) and as usual, I'm well behind in my blogging. This is a consequence of being on two full day tours so far. Nevertheless, I hope that you find this blog interesting.

Today our itinerary is a walking tour of many of the sites in the oldest part of Istanbul followed by a lunch tour of the Bosphorus straits. We are met at our hotel by our guide for the next two days, Çinar (pronounced Chinar). She is 38 years old and tells us that she has been a professional guide for 14 years. We go outside and meet our driver and off we go. Our first stop is the Blue Mosque:

This mosque was built between 1609 and 1617 during the Ottoman Empire reign of Ahmed I. Çinar tells us that actually only the tourists call it the blue mosque. The people of Istanbul call it the Sultan Ahmed mosque. The tall spires are minarets where the assistant to the Imam (the religious leader of the mosque) calls the faithful to prayer five times per day. This is an important job because the time to pray is based on the sun position and therefore changes day to day. Of course, you also have to have a good singing voice for this job!

Supposedly, Ahmed I wanted a mosque with a minaret with a gold tower on top. But the Arabic word for gold is very similar to the word for six and the architect misunderstood and built a mosque with six minarets - more than any other mosque in the world at the time except the one in Mecca. This made Ahmed I happy despite the confusion but totally irritated the leaders of the Muslim faith in Mecca. To make amends, Ahmed I paid for a seventh minaret to be added to the mosque in Mecca!

Once inside, Çinar shows us why the mosque is called the Blue Mosque. She points to one of the huge pillars holding up the dome:

The three sections on the left of the column are original, while the rest of the sections are what they were changed to during a restoration in the late 19th century.

Mosques always have some indication of the direction of Mecca:

It is a little hard to see in this picture, but midway and slightly below the 2nd row of windows on the left, there is a small gold plaque with something that looks vaguely like an arrow pointing up. This is the direction of Mecca. During prayers, the Imam will get down on his knees in this part of the Mosque and touch his head to the ground in the direction of Mecca. Behind him, there are lines on the carpets which allow the men of the congregation to line up and pray in straight lines. How close to the Imam you are depends on social status. Women in this mosque would be upstairs on the balcony. The narrow staircase to the right is for the Imam to climb when he wants to speak with the congregation.

I really love the Islamic designs. Here are a couple more pictures from the insides of the mosque:

The location of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque is very close to the Hagia Sophia and scholars believe that Ahmed I was trying to outdo the beauty of this famous building. When we go back outside, we see that the Hagia Sophia is covered in scaffolding. Çinar tells us that restorations have just begun on the Hagia Sophia in the last year due to concerns that previous renovations made the dome too heavy for the building and the ground (which is honeycombed with underground passageways) to hold up. The renovations with reduce the weight of the dome as well as strengthen the support pillars. We'll come back to the Hagia Sophia in tomorrow's blog, but for now, our next destination is the Basilica Cistern:

Istanbul, being the border between Europe and Asia and sitting close to several major seas was relatively easy for the Roman Empire's enemies to attack. In order to protect the city's water supply, the 6th century Byzantine emperor Justinian I built the Basilica Cistern. It was called Basilica Cistern because it sat directly under a major public square called the Stoa Basilica. 

Justinian I was fervently Christian. In order to stamp out Pagen religions, Justinian supported the roof of the cistern with hundreds of columns taken from Pagen shrines through the Roman Empire. As an example, there are several columns from temples dedicated to Medusa. Here is one of them:

Medusa, at least, must be making a comeback because during one of the more recent renovations, they added Medusa sitting on her throne and oriented the lights so that on the walkway through the cistern, you see the shadow before you see Medusa - presumably giving you time to avert your gaze so that you don't get turned to stone.

There is one other unusual column in the cistern:

More than 7,000 slaves worked on construction and this column called the peacock eyed or crying column was erected during one of the many reconstructions to the many slaves who died during the construction of the cistern.

In its heyday, the Cistern was fed through an elaborate system of aqueducts and could hold 80,000 cubic meters of water. Occasionally, fish would get into the cistern. This turned out to be a feature and not a bug because the locals knew that if they found a dead fish, there was a good chance that someone had tried to poison the water supply!

This was a very "cool" experience, but it was definitely not cool down there. In fact, it was hot and extremely humid. Çinar tells us that they clean the cistern every two weeks which involves pumping all of the water out, cleaning all of the surfaces and then refilling with clean water.

Our next stop is the Topkapi Palace:

Construction started in 1459 and continued into the 19th century. The palace was the home of the Sultan and served as the administrative center of the Ottoman Empire. At the founding of modern Türkiye in 1924, Topkapi has been converted into a museum.

There is a surprising amount of space inside the Palace walls with large courtyards and trees between the various buildings. Our first stop is the Imperial Council building:

The small grilled window on the left is a place where the Sultan could listen in on deliberations. Since you never knew whether the Sultan was listening or not, everyone had to be on their best behavior!

Next, we visited the Audience Chamber. Here, the Sultan would meet with foreign dignitaries:

There, the Sultan, wearing a puffed-up outfit that made him look much larger, would lounge on the sofa platform showing off his power and giving off an air of "you are insignificant" to all who visited him.

The small water fountain in the corner is an ingenious idea. Someone discovered that if there was a source of running water nearby, it was very difficult to overhear any of the conversations - this was some 15th century noise cancellation technology!

We come to a part of the complex where the Sultan lived. His balcony has a great view:

This view is why the first Sultan built this palace in this place. From here, you can see the part of the Bosphorus Strait heading toward the Black Sea, a small piece of the Asian part of Istanbul and a smaller body of water called the Golden Horn to the left. If you are worried about invasion, this is the view that you need.

I didn't take pictures, but they had a whole building full of the Sultan's swag - jeweled daggers, crowns, rings, etc. It was clearly good to be a Sultan! Next, was a building with the type of clothes that the Sultan and his family would wear. Finally, we stopped at the library which included a fancy X-shaped table that made it easy to read the very heavy books of the Koran.

It is getting time for our lunch cruise on the Bosphorus. Our driver meets us only a small walk away from the Topkapi and takes us down to an area with only a single dock. Çinar is on the phone talking to someone and a couple of minutes later, this boat arrives:

Almost a yachtlet! This is the Den Den 9. As we board, I'm hoping that this doesn't mean that the previous 8 Den Den's met some sort of demise. The Bosphorus strait is the connection between the Aegean Sea to the right and the Black Sea to the left. Also to the left is the Golden Horn - a smaller body of water which separates the two parts of European Istanbul. The Asian part of Istanbul is on the opposite side of the Bosphorus Strait.

This is the major sea route in the area and there are a lot of huge ships like this one passing through:

This is likely carrying grain toward the Aegean Sea and Mediterranean Sea. I look to see whether any of these ships are either Russian or Ukrainian and don't see any, but this is definitely the direction that they would be headed in. Also passing in this direction would be ships from Bulgaria and Romania.

Beth comments that she doesn't see any lane markers indicating the direction of travel for any of the many ships that we see. Çinar tells us that this is because they have the equivalent of an air traffic control system for watercraft. Boats have to file flight plans saying where they are going and how they are getting there. Any change in plan requires letting the controllers know and getting their approval to change course.

Looking back, we get good views of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and the Sultan's viewing deck:

We also get a nice view of a number of mosques and palaces that we built on the southern side of the Golden Horn:

Çinar tells us that there are more than 1,000 mosques in Istanbul. However, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded modern Türkiye in 1923, one of his first acts was to declare Türkiye a secular country. Çinar tells us that while she identifies as a Muslim, she does not practice the religion and says that this seems to be the trend among younger people. She says that as a result, many of these mosques are left empty.

After a very nice, and much too big lunch of steak and fried fish, we turn around and head back toward the dock that we left from. The weather has been great for the whole day - a very good thing given that the weather forecasts are calling for rain beginning tomorrow and staying until we leave Istanbul at the end of the week.

We get back to the dock, wave to the two crew members of the Den Den 9 and walk back to our driver for the 30 minute drive back to the hotel. Tomorrow, we will finish up the historical part of the tour with the Hagia Sophia and the Hippodrome and will spend the afternoon on the Asian side of Istanbul for a walking food tour. Stay tuned!

Turkey 2026 - Day 1 Cupertino to Istanbul

Welcome to my blog on our 2026 vacation (do retired people have vacations?). This year, we are headed to Turkey for 16 days. Our flight to Europe follows the usual route - a brief circle around San Francisco (and a beautiful sunset) to gain altitude followed by heading rapidly to

the NNE so that we exit the United States somewhere between western Washington state and Billings, MT. From there we fly over Calgary and then into the great white north. The jet stream must be fairly far north because we pass over the northern end of Hudson Bay and northern Greenland. From there, our great circle route starts to head south. We go over Iceland, then over the North Sea between Britain and Norway (but much closer to Norway). We go over Denmark and then onto Germany (close to Berlin) and Poland. From there, we deviate slightly to the south of our southwestern route. The map on my seat monitor shows why. On my right are the cities of Budapest, Belgrade and Cluj (which I think is in Romania). On my left are Lviv and Vinnytsia which are in Ukraine. I'm comforted that we are keeping a respectful distance from the Ukrainian border, the clouds hiding the pointless conflict going on there. After that, we are on to Bulgaria (passing to the east of Sofia and west of Varna). As we reach the coast of the Black Sea, we can finally see the ground (it has been almost entirely cloudy up until this point). We see that nearly every hill is covered with huge windmills. It is good to see that at least this part of the world is ignoring our current President's obsession against windmills! We approach Istanbul over the Black Sea, so we don't see much of the city. It is incredible that you can hop on a plane in San Francisco and in 12 or so hours, be in a completely different part of the world. Tailwinds must have been favorable because we arrive in Istanbul about 1 hr ahead of schedule. Istanbul airport is huge! It seems like we taxi for weeks and then when we get to the gate, we have an almost equally long walk to passport control and baggage claim. Our co-travelers and friends Chris and Mark from Toronto arrived about 2 hours earlier and have already had a cup of coffee, enjoyed a little sunshine and most importantly, found our driver for our ride into the city by the time that we arrive.

Some thoughts from our flight. We made a rule some years ago that we will fly business class on flights longer than 10 hr because my legs can't stay wedged behind the person in front of me for that long. But a side benefit is that you get fancier meals. We noticed that Turkish Airlines has minaret shaped salt and pepper shakers; gold top for pepper, white top for salt.  It is the first trip we've been on that has carts that come down the aisle to provide choices for appetizers and later for dessert!

 

While Turkey is a secular country, they are also majority Muslim. When our seat entertainment screen was set to Map View (as mine almost always is), every few minutes, a screen came up which indicates when the next of the five Muslem prayer periods (Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha) as well as sunrise starts and the approximate direction of Mecca relative to the orientation of the airplane. For practicing Muslims, this is important information because the time when each prayer period starts changes with both latitude and longitude. While Mecca is more or less oriented in the same direction that our plane is going, we were thinking that it would have been much more difficult if we were going in the opposite direction because you would have had to turn completely around in your seat in order to pray in the correct direction. Fortunately, we think that there is an accommodation for practicing Muslims if they find themselves in a place that makes it hard to pray toward Mecca.

We find the Turkish language difficult to parse. Türkiye converted from Arabic lettering to English characters, but with diacritical marks (like umlauts and cedillas) added to account for differences in pronunciation, in the early 1900's. This makes it look quite similar to English. However, while you can often somewhat understand other European languages by looking for similarities to English words, there are no words in Turkish that look anything like English. They could literally be random characters, and it would not be any less intelligible. The spoken language is just as difficult to understand. The language seems quite soft. There are not a lot of hard consonants which makes it hard to identify distinct words. It reminds me a little of Korean.

I have pancakes for breakfast on the plane - Turkish pancakes are smaller and a little thicker than we're used to and they are sitting on top of cream (like the filling of an eclair) and warm strawberry jam. Good, but more than a few calories!

It takes about an hour to get from the airport to our boutique-style hotel in the new city which is quite close to the old city where most of the UNESCO sites are located. There are a lot of roads which seem to wander back and forth - perhaps Istanbul, like Boston had their street system designed by cows or goats!

The hotel is in the bougie section of Istanbul. First clue - there is a Prada next door. With this in mind, we ask the hotel clerk where we can get a light meal with authentic Turkish food and specify that we are not looking for high-end dining. Fortunately, he recommends a place only a couple hundred meters down the street. In our jet-lagged state, we walk right past it but managed to Google map our way back to the correct location.

The waiter speaks just enough English that we are able to place an order for three meze (sort of like tapas in the US) - an eggplant/yogurt mix, a red pepper, walnut and spice and hummus along with some bread. We also ordered an order of eggplant stuffed with ground meat of some sort and a kabab made out of another sort of ground meat mix. It was all great. The price was around 4,000 Turkish lira that works out to about US $80 - a little pricy, but we are staying in the high rent district! Our short walk back to the hotel is enough to convince us that it is time for bed so that we are ready for a walking tour of most of Istanbul's UNESCO World Heritage sites and a 3 hr cruise on the Bosporus (the water way connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and on to the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas). Stay tuned!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Travel day (Venice to Cupertino)

February 25

After three great weeks in Italy, it is time to go home. We initially had the wrong departure time for our connecting flight to London. Now that we have the right time, we realize that we have time for breakfast before we head to our boat! Despite the fact that we have bright sun and temperatures in the 50's, I'm wearing my snow boots because they don't fit in my suitcase. C'est la vie - sorry switched into French for a second. I guess it should be Così è la vita!

We arrive at the dock in plenty of time to catch our ride to the airport. This time we are looking for a yellow boat that says Alilaguna, a different boat company from the one that operates the vaporetto. There are a number of other people with suitcases here so we're sure we're in the right place. When the boat arrives, we are wondering where they will put our suitcases, but they have a place on the deck for them, so we don't have to haul them down below deck for the 45-minute ride to the Marco Polo airport. It is a beautiful day in Venice so the ride to the airport is smooth except for when we cross the wakes of other boats, but I can imagine that this ride would not be so fun in stormy weather.

The dock at the airport is just like a subway or train station with multiple docks to service the many boats coming not just from Venice and the nearby islands, but also from the mainland:

We pick up our bags, scan our Alilaguna tickets and head toward the very long hallway that will take us to the airport proper:

This reminds me of one last pin story. A few days ago in Cortina, an older Italian man came up to me and asked about all of my pins. I told him that this was our 15th Olympics and that pins are a way for me to meet people from all over the world. He reached into his pocket and handed me this pin and asks to shake my hand:

He didn't really want to trade, but he took one of my pins and I walked away. Two days later, the same guy comes up to me, looks at my vest and says that he doesn't see the pin that he gave me. He said that the pin was special to him because he works at the airport and he wanted me to have it. He was relieved when I told him that if I had left it on vest, someone would have wanted to trade for it, so I set it aside. Now that we have seen the airport, we understand. It really is a nice airport, and he has a right to be proud of it.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. Having to take my boots off to go through security was a pain. It was doubly a pain when we had to go through security again in London. We had a chance to grab a sandwich in London before we boarded our 11.5 hr flight to San Francisco. Our Boeing 777 has mostly 3-4-3 seating in Economy, but we were pleased to find out when we checked in that the last 3 rows are 2-4-2. We were able to get seats in the second of these rows so that my aisle seat had a lot of space in the aisle in front of me behind the last row of 3 on the side seating. This meant that I could stretch my right leg out as much as I wanted and that Beth could lean against the bulkhead instead of being in a middle seat. Win, win!

Going westbound always seems easier on our bodies than going eastbound. Maybe it is just easier for people to stretch a day than it is to squash one. Our flight took us over the Robie ancestral home of Castle Donington in Leicestershire, England then over Scotland, just south of Iceland, over southern Greenland (spoiler alert to Trump - it is not green down there!), Hudson Bay and Saskatoon before crossing the US border into Idaho and down into the Bay Area. We were a little worried that customs would be backed up due to the partial government shutdown, but we breezed through, caught an Uber and arrived home in time to have ice cream (in lieu of gelato) before going to bed. It has been a great trip!

Thank you for sticking with this blog until the end (I hope that there are at least a few of you!). I hope that you have enjoyed reading our adventures and maybe I even convinced a couple of you that it might be fun to go to the Olympics. Feel free to drop a comment at the bottom and tell me what you liked and didn't like. You will also find a whole series of these blogs from previous Olympics if you are really gluttons for punishment. Right now (subject to our new war), we are planning on going to Turkey in October and I plan to write a blog about that trip although it may not be in anything close to real time and I certainly plan to blog on our trip to Los Angeles for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games. I hope that you will follow along!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Venice Day 2

February 24

Last night, we spoke to the guy working the front desk at our hotel and asked him for recommendations of things to do that the tourists don't know about. He told us that we should cross the bridge directly in front of the train station, go to the right (everyone else goes left) until we come to a park, then walk along the park until we come to the Scuola di San Rocco, which houses a lot of early Renaissance paintings. When we are done there, we should cross the piazza to the Basilica San Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (Basilica of Saint Mary, Glorious of the Friars). Beth already had both places on her list after reading Rick Steve's book on Italy so after breakfast, we head off to follow this plan.

The Scuola is a confraternity, a voluntary lay organization dedicated to promoting works of Christian charity. In this case, the organization helped people during the time of plague. It was founded in 1478 by a group of wealthy Venetians and named after San Rocco, who was widely believed to have protected people from the plague and whose remains are housed in the church next door. Work on the current building began in 1515 and was completed in 1560. The organizers hired the Italian painter Tintoretto to decorate the Scuola and some of his best-known works are here. Here are some pictures from inside the Scuola:

These are huge paintings (10's of feet across) so it is no wonder that it took Tintoretto nearly 15 years to complete all of them. San Rocco was a patron saint of Venice so every year, the Doge came to the church next door to celebrate his feast day. This may explain why a number of Tintoretto paintings also ended up in the Doge palace. Maybe I have no artistic sense, but I found most of these paintings to be overly dark although it does give the artist a chance to use light to highlight the subject of the painting.

After the Scuola, we head over to the Basilica of San Maria. This is a HUGE church - 335 x 105 x 92 feet (not counting the 230-foot spire). The Doge gave land for a church and monastery for the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, but the initial church was deemed too small before it was even completed and work began on the current church in 1250 CE. It wasn't completed until 1338! As is common with many Franciscan churches, the outside is pretty plain. Inside is a whole different story:

With so much interior space, there is plenty of room for funerary monuments like the upper middle picture for the Renaissance artist Tiziano Vecellio also known as Titian, who was regarded as the most famous Venetian Renaissance artist.

After our visit, we stop into a nearby trattoria - unlike the ones on the main walkway between the train station and St. Mark's square, there are only two customers eating. Beth has a prosciutto and cheese panini, and I have a tomato and cheese pizza. Yum! On the way back, it is a little unclear which is the right way, and we walk into a dead-end. But all we have to do is back-track a little and look for a sign like this one:

There is one of these signs in almost every piazza which makes it very easy to find your way back to a major area. In this case, Ferrovia is the train station, near which our hotel is located, and we are quickly back on the right path. But I can imagine that it is much more difficult to look for a place that is not a landmark and many of the narrow streets have tall enough buildings that Google maps doesn't work well. We make our way back to the Grand canal:

and quickly get to our hotel. We have plenty of time to do something else, but first, we speak to the guy at the front desk to ask how we should get to the airport tomorrow. Marco Polo airport is on the mainland so getting there is a little complicated. He says that you can take a bus from the cruise ship port or you can take a train to the mainland and connect to a bus, but his preferred option is to take a boat, saying that it is the perfect way to leave Venice and it goes directly to the airport. Even better, the dock where the boat departs is only slightly further away than the train station. This sounds good to us, and we go up to our room and book the tickets online. Then we walk back to the train station and buy tickets on the vaporetto to go to the island of Murano.

Since we've been in Venice, we've seen many of the shops selling Murano glass, most of which are multicolored and in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Beth has found that there is a glass museum and we head off to see what we can learn about Venetian glassmaking. We attempt to board the line 4.1 vaporetto, but the deckhand tells us that we should take the 4.2 vaporetto instead. We figure out that these lines essentially follow the same route, but the 4.1 goes counterclockwise and it will take us 90 minutes to get to Murano while the 4.2 goes clockwise and it will only take us 30 minutes to get there.

As soon as we get on, a guy comes up and starts talking to us. He reminds me somewhat of an older hippy although he is probably too young to be one. It turns out that he is a semi-retired freelance photographer from Florida who has been in Cortina and the other mountain venues for the Olympics. It seems like his goal in life is to have as many adventures as possible while spending as little money as possible. For example, rather than paying big bucks to stay in Cortina, he rented a room in a hotel far down the valley and took the bus back and forth. When his train to Venice dropped him off at 1 AM, he just slept in the train station. He doesn't have a room for tonight but has no doubt that he will find one.

After a couple of stops, we go across the lagoon to Murano and make a fortuitous mistake. The first stop says Murano Colonna, and we figure that this is the only stop on Murano before the Vaporetto goes back toward St. Mark's square, so we get off. It turned out that Murano is a lot bigger than we thought and we should have gotten off at the third Murano stop to go to the museum. But a sign outside the Colonna dock points to a glass making presentation at the Murano Glass factory. Wary that this is just a way to get you to buy their products, we decide to go in. We find the photographer from Florida already sitting up front ready to photograph the whole process. The workshop is not much to look at, but the presentation is amazing. The two glassmakers first make a kind of vase:

It takes two glassmakers because what you think is the top of the vase is really the bottom and you need to stick it onto another glassblowing rod in order to finish the piece. I'm having flashbacks to my glassblowing class in college when one of the guys puts the finished piece on a table and puts a small piece of paper into it. The paper immediately ignites, reminding me that glass doesn't have to look hot to be hot! Then the guy we take to be the master starts making something else:

He rolls the piece into a tray full of what looks like colored chocolate sprinkles to coat the outside of the glass and then puts it back into the oven, takes it out, pulls on it, and puts it back into the oven a couple more times and in less than three minutes, ends up with this:

Incredible! While the glassmakers didn't speak English, there is a narrator talking a little about the history of glass. They speculate that the first glass was made by accident in either Egypt or Mesopotamia when a guy built a fire on a beach close to a chunk of salt peter. Normally beach sand (silicon oxide) melts at too high a temperature to melt under a bonfire, but the presence of the salt peter (sodium nitrate) lowered the melting point enough that a hot fire was hot enough to melt the sand. When the fire burned out, the guy found a chunk of semi-transparent stuff under the fire. The Roman empire produced glass objects after learning glassmaking from the Greeks (who, in turn, probably learned it from the Egyptians) so glass making in Venice was already well established around 500 CE, but it really took off in the early 1500's when glassmakers figured out that adding potash from the Levant to the very pure silicon oxide beach sand near Venice produced glass with much better clarity (called Cristallo) compared to competing products. Venice quickly established a monopoly on potash to protect their industry.

In 1291, the Doge decided to avoid having the glass industry burn down the city by ordering that all glass makers move to the island of Murano. Glass technology was considered a state secret at the time, so the glass makers were confined to the island. Leaving the island without permission or passing along trade secrets was punishable by death. But concentrating all of these experts in one place and exposing them to the already advanced glassmaking in the Middle East was the key to the continued development of Murano glass. And it was not all bad for the glassmakers. They didn't have to work during the summer (up to 5 months of summer vacation) and unlike other members of society, if a glassmaker's daughter married a nobleman, their children would also be nobles. Today, there are about 40 glass making companies on the island.

All good tours end in the gift shop, and this one was no exception. Beth bought a necklace that she thought that Sean would like to make up for our failure to find designer shoes at affordable prices for him. Then we begin a fairly long walk along the main canal to the glass museum. Along the way were shop after shop with wide varieties of glass products. If that was not enough to tell you where you were, we see this on a wall:

The museum was really interesting. They began with the glass products that the Roman empire developed:

Once the glassmakers learned the secret of making completely clear glass, they became famous in the 1700's for making chandeliers:

When Chinese porcelain began to arrive in Venice, the glassmakers created a type of glass called Lattimo (milk glass) which mimicked porcelain, but was a lot less expensive:

Glass beads were made for rosary beads and as jewelry (Christopher Columbus used Murano beads as trade items with the native Americans), but one offshoot of this process really amazed me. It involved pulling pieces of single colored glass into extremely long thin strings called canes. Then they take bundles of canes and melt them together to produce Millefiori glass:

The ends of these Millefiori canes can be widened to produce pendants. This technology advanced to the point where they could make essentially dot-matrix pictures:

The bottom is the actual cane (and is about 5 mm across), and the top is what happens when it is expanded during the final glassmaking step (to a grand 2 cm!). This allowed them to mass-produce different kinds of pendants.

Despite the bests efforts of the government to keep the technology secret, eventually glassmaking spread to all of Europe. In 1673, Englishman George Ravenscroft, who had lived in Venice for some years, figured out how to make lead glass that was as transparent as Cristallo, but much less fragile and it was all downhill for the Murano glass industry until 1797 when Napoleon shut down all of the factories and many of the Murano glass techniques were lost. About 100 years later, there was a revival in luxury glass that continues today. Here are some of the other pieces we really liked in the museum:

It is only a short walk to the nearest vaporetto dock, and we are lucky to catch a boat leaving just as we arrive. We find that our friend from Florida is also on this boat. It takes about 45 minutes to get back to the train station, and we head back to the hotel to watch some Olympics and blog before dinner.

Before dinner, we want to see exactly how far the dock for the airport boat is from the hotel. It is only one bridge from our hotel and takes about 10 minutes to get there. On the way back, we stop at a pizzeria for dinner. By this point, I'm pizza'd out so I go for a vegetarian lasagna and Beth has a fettuccini with a scallop pistachio sauce. The food wasn't awesome, but the interior was interesting with many old advertising signs - for example, a rental car sign from the 1920's. As usual, we skip dessert and stop for gelato on our way back to the hotel. We wish that we had a little more time to explore Venice, but it has been a long three weeks, and we are ready to go home.