istanbul is amazing. i love it here.
i don’t want to sound like i’m being paid by the turkish tourist board, but you have to visit istanbul if you can.
it’s beautiful and the weather is perfect and the people are nice and the history is amazing.
today we went to the ‘blue mosque’, and i’m ashamed to say that up until this morning i had never been to a mosque before.
it was beautiful. and elegant. and filled with light.
an amazing place.
tonight we’re supposed to go for a boat ride on the bosphorus, which is also supposed to be amazing.
as i said, i love it here.
moby
p.s-given the prominence that islam plays in the world today i think that everyone should at some point visit a mosque and learn firsthand that islam is primarily a peaceful religion. it was fascinating to see that when europe was gripped by the ‘dark ages’ the islamic world was, for the most part, quite civilized and advanced, with great universities and scholarship and astronomy and mathematics that far surpassed what was going on in europe. it’s safe to say that if you were a muslim during the ‘dark ages’ that you would have looked at europeans as unwashed savages. during this period europeans would bathe once a year whereas people in the islamic world would have bathed every time they visited a mosque.
it’s all very interesting, isn’t it?