A man and his store.
Jill and I went through the spice bazaar on the way to see the other sites around Istanbul.
It was a quick trip, and this isn’t the huge bazaar that Istanbul is famous for, but it is very cute.
There are lots of spices, and other things, that are hanging on the walls and put out in front of stalls.
We didn’t spend a lot of time in this one because we wanted to get a move on and get situated in regards to our plans for the next week of what we wanted to see, when we wanted to see it, and how long everything would take.
We aren’t big time planners but we like to make sure we can get done what we want to get done and not miss out on things because we don’t set our plans accordingly.
We also knew we’d be back by the spice bazaar, a few different times, because our subway stop drops us so close to it and we could easily go through it.
It was probably about 2 football fields long and wide and full of all kinds of yummy looking spices.
It also had a lot of soaps that were made with spices in them and Jill said they smelled wonderfully.
That is another thing that hit us immediately: the smell of the city is so different from Beijing.
It smells clean and fresh.
People from Istanbul may not agree, but compared to Beijing, it smelled like we were in a place much closer to nature and much more clean.
We also didn’t see nearly as much litter and there was almost no graffiti at all.
We actually didn’t really notice this until we went to Athens where there is graffiti everywhere.
It was a shocking difference considering it was only a one hour flight and the two cities are so much alike in many other ways.