On the third day

The busiest day yet. First we learned to use the excellent tram system which kept us out of the awful weekend traffic, and brought us to the Church of St Saviour in Chora (Kariye Camii). Chora once meant the monastery was outside Constantine's city wall, but when Theodosius built his walls in the 5th century, Chora was inside and close to the walls.  The existing church was built and rebuilt in the 11th, 12th, and 14th centuries.

The narthex and the exonarthex are decorated with mosaics  that date to 1315 to 1321.  Christ Pantocrator in the lunette in the exonarthex over the door into the narthex.

The narthex has a lovely cycle of mosaics relating the life of Mary using stories popular in the 14th century from the Apocryphal Gospel of St. James. Here Mary is cuddled by her devoted parents Joachim and Anne.

A female donor in some way related to the Comnenus dynasty, emperors of Byzantium in its final centuries.  I think she is lovely and reminds me of Gustav Klimt's paintings of women as symbols. We learned last summer on our Klimt tour that his work was influenced by a trip he took to Ravenna to see the Byzantine mosaics.

The naos has lost nearly all its decoration. This part of the church was built in the 11th century
and promptly partially collapsed. The corner piers were added in the 12th century
when the church was rebuilt.

The parecclesion was added as a funeral and tomb chapel and is decorated with
frescoes of death and destruction and of resurrection. 

Nearby the Chora Church is the Edirne Gate in the 5th century walls. On  the 29th of May 1453,
Mehmet II entered  through this gate, ending the 1000 year Byzantine rule of Constantinople.

Mehmet the Conqueror succeeded in capturing the city after  nearly 800 years
of  trying to establish an Islamic capital in Constantinople.

The new era brought new buildings. The Mihrimah Sultan Camii  was built in the 1560s
 for Princess Mihrimah, daughter of Süleyman the Magnificent, by Sinan the greatest mosque builder.The mosque sits at the top of the 6th of Istanbul's Seven Hills. (Every legendary city has to have seven hills.)

The huge interior is flooded with light through the huge windows penetrating every side.

I love the decorative use of colourful stone.

We followed the remains of the wall down to the Golden Horn. 

An ordinary residential neighbourhood where a sunny Saturday afternoon meant
sitting on front stoops watching children play

A sign outside the mosque said it had been damaged in the 1999 earthquake so
 we assumed some of the homes were also shattered then.

Some had access to interesting building materials for a unique wall. 

Gardens flourished

And a tombstone shone bright with gold lettering.

And the view across the Golden Horn was stunning. We walked down to the ferry landing for a boat ride
back to the Galata Bridge and back to our hotel.

What I did in Istanbul on the second day

Today we went to Topkapi Palace. The day was sunny, and the crowds were massive.

The Divan where the Councils of State met. And the divans they must have sat on for their deliberations.

The entrance to the Harem through the Courtyard of the Black Eunuchs

By way of the decorative path

And tile lined walls.

The Sultan's living quarters were in the Harem. Here in the Privy Chamber, a fountain
made enough noise to  prevent eavesdropping on conversations.

The Valide, the Sultan's mother, was the most powerful woman in the Harem,
 and her apartment was sumptuously decorated including the dome in her Salon.

The view toward the water would be spectacular through the grille except for the plastic sheeting
currently covering an area under renovation

The Harem is said to have hundreds of rooms and miles of corridors.

And the words of the Qur'an are always on hand

Most of Topkapi is made up of separate pavilions, or kiosks.
 This is the Sultan's Library.

An especially lovely ceiling decoration in the Library

Looking at Asia across the Bosphorus. Topkapi is located at the point of land
where the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn join at the Marmara Sea.

Looking up the Golden Horn

After leaving Topkapi, we searched for the Mosaic Museum
 and ambled through an old neighbourhood of wooden houses.

A çesme, the public water source for a neighbourhood  

Superb 6th century mosaic floor discovered during 1930s excavations of the Great Palace of Byzantium. 

The floor is housed under a canopy roof that stretches on and on.
They have been restored in recent years to protect them.

And finally, Bob's favourite Green Man, Byzantine style.

What I did in Istanbul Today

The Golden Horn

The New Mosque (1597-1663) Yeni Cami

The magnificent Byzantine Haghia Sophia (with a few Islamic additions)

The great central dome of Haghia Sophia

The apse from the west Gallery

Treasures of the Archaeological Museum: The Sarcophagus of the Mourning Women (4th c. BC) Sidon

A map of the many layers of occupation at Troy

A stele with a Human Face in Relief, Troy 3000-2500 B.C.

The chain used to close the Golden Horn in times of siege during the Byzantine period

The Tiled Kiosk (Çinili Kösk) built in 1472 by Mehmet The Conquerer

A Peacock Basin in Çinili Kösk

. . . Now I'm 64!

Last week was my birthday. I have reached the marker set by the Beatles that says 64 is old age country. I read on Wikipedia that Paul wrote the words when he was 16, but he certainly got most of it right. I guess I'm kind of glad my grandchildren aren't named Vera and Chuck; Dave would be okay. And the cottage on the Isle of Wight every summer sounds pretty alright too.

Here in England, 1963 seems to be the year The Beatles made their splash. In the States we had to wait until 1964 for them to land and change our teenage world. What was it that made them so special? I guess because they were so cute — and of course never underestimate the power of an English accent, even in this case where the accent must have been Liverpool "Scouser" perhaps the nation's least favourite accent. Somehow there seems like some mystical symmetry between the dawn of the Age of the Beatles in 1964, and my being 64. Perhaps the mystery is just that never in my wildest dreams in 1964 would I have imagined I would be living in London when I turned 64. Living not too far from Paul in St John's Wood! There are always anecdotal reports of people seeing Paul on the bus so maybe I should pay more attention when I am on the 46 which runs between Hampstead and St Johns Wood.

My birthday was excellent. Besides the i-pad, Bob bought me the last two volumes of a series of books from Mainstone Press on a favourite English artist Eric Ravilious who is having a massive revival over the past few years. He died in 1942 when his plane was lost over Iceland while he was serving as an official British War Artist. There is all this wonderful British art from the decades between the wars, that seem to be completely unknown outside Britain, and hardly known here either. We, and the rest of the country, discovered Ravilious from an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum  nearly 10 years ago marking the centenary of his birth.

We met up with Susan and Cato at the South Bank Centre for supper — burritos from my favourite food truck. Mexican food is now very popular in London. There always were a few Tex-Mex places, but now there is a burgeoning number of places with "authentic" Mexican food. The dawn of trendy Mexican food was the opening of Wahaca — conveniently Anglicised to prevent mispronunciation! — by a young English woman who won the grand prize on a TV Masterchef competition and used the money to live in Mexico and learn to cook like the locals. I just read Calvin Trillin's New Yorker piece on eating in Oaxaca while visiting his daughter and family, including advice on the best way to eat grasshoppers (pull off the front legs). I doubt if our Wahaca serves grasshopper, but I can't say for sure. The American chains like Chipotle have recently moved in too — not sure if there is a Taco Bell.

England has also borrowed the German style Christmas Fair and the South Bank is lined with booths selling gifts and gluhwein and doughnuts, but no Lebkuchen or Potato Pancakes, so what's the point really.

Cato extracting a prize from a block of ice sponsored by Swiss Air.
He won a chocolate bar.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Thanksgiving Weekend which technically doesn't exist here because, well, because there is no Thanksgiving . . . but marketing is a globalised industry so Amazon.co.uk has been sending out Black Friday e-mail offers and promises the whole week long. My English friend Marian couldn't figure out why this was a good thing because didn't "Black Pick-A-Day-of-the-Week" events identify a day of financial despair — stock markets crashing, the English pound collapsing — that sort of thing. She still looked dubious at our explanation of fiscal health, "in the black" rather than "in the red" as the root of the expression.

My Black Friday was brightened by the delivery of my back-ordered i-pad mini in its bright red cover. My very first. Friday and Saturday were consumed with my new pretty toy. Of course its real use will be in the States when I take a thousand photos of my lovely grandchildren to flash around to everyone I meet here, there, and everywhere. Saturday plans were on hold because Bob came down with a 24-hour stomach flu, but the appalling weather of wind and rain meant staying home was the best plan anyway.  Around here, Saturday nights are special again because the latest Danish crime drama is back on the air. The Killing (Series 3) began last week, and we are already under the spell of Sarah Lund's new Faroe Island sweaters. The chevron is okay, but the traditional snowflake, in an untraditional white pattern on blue background, is my favourite. The kidnap/murder/political plot is pretty good too. We're here for the first eight episodes on four Saturday nights, but we will be in the States for the final two episodes! Canceling the visit to see our grandchildren is extreme, and we have great hopes that Barnz can wire something up for us.

Sunday dawned with sun for once, and our last chance to see the British Museum's Cultural Olympiad contribution on Shakespeare's Restless World which closes today.  Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, did an excellent 20-part series for Radio 4 last spring that I listened to on a free podcast through i-tunes over the summer. I'm sure it is still there to download and listen to. Each episode is only 15 minutes. Based on his History of the World in 100 Objects, which I was not a fan of, he used 20 objects from the Museum to describe what the world of England was like during Shakespeare's writing career which spanned the reigns of Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, and James I, the first of the Scottish Stuarts.  The plays are full of topical subjects. Discussing Elizabeth's successor was a treasonous offense, but plays about long dead kings and their heirs or lack of heirs was simply historical drama. James was Scottish and terrified of witches who he thought were trying to kill him, but a play about a long dead Scottish king driven mad by witches was also historical drama. Plays about foreign people (Jews! Moors!) are set in Venice because Venice was the exotic city of the day. People lived differently there. They used forks to eat, for example. And looking forward, Shakespeare imagined what the New World would mean to the Old World in The Tempest.

Sunday was also the last day for the North American plant installation by Kew Gardens in front of the Museum. Kew has been planting a regional landscape at the British Museum every summer for a few years. Australia was first; South Africa was last summer. Despite the end of the season, there were some bright flower displays and a few yellow leaves on a kind of miniature maple to make us nostalgic for the autumn we missed in New England this year.

Returning to Hampstead, we discovered this year's Christmas Fair had gone into overdrive. Our High Street was imitating the 'Appy 'Ampstead fairs of another century with giant rides, midway games, a steam organ, and even a reindeer.

Thanksgiving Week

Monday
Sometime late last week, winter crept in. Not the winter solstice true winter which is still a month or so away, but the London day when the sunset is edging toward 4 p.m. according to the BBC weather website, and at half past three I wonder if bedtime is near at hand. Then I catch myself and remember the day is still only half over, even if the daylight is over, and the electric lights are needed to take over. I take great joy in the turn of seasons, and for me the day winter arrives is the day I turn on the TV, guilt free, to watch whatever ancient series have been disinterred from US or UK graves for a long winter's late afternoon of knitting. At the moment, I am a week or more behind on Woolly Wormhead's Annual Mystery Hat Knit-A-Long (or KAL in knitter-ese jargon). Woolly is a woman who lives in a bus, is dogged by depression, and designs hat patterns, from the gossip I pick up on Twitter and in blogs (including her own tweets and posts). Apparently knitters wait all year for the Annual Mystery Hat. For a £2 payment, I have received three sets of instructions, beginning on 1 November, for the Brim, the Body, and the Finish. I haven't opened the final set of instructions because it took me an extra week to knit the brim, and now I am in need of an extra week for the body too. But with those long afternoons stretching ahead, a mystery hat will not take too much longer.

Tuesday - Wednesday
Thanksgiving Week isn't the same when the world is still carrying on around you as if there is no holiday on the horizon. I miss that moment when the world as usual holds its breath for a moment to concentrate on the ritual of the meal. Is there enough cream for the creamed onions? Do we always have to include Brussels Sprouts? Will one bag of Pepperidge Farm be enough?

This year we are doing Thanksgiving, but doing it a day early to celebrate two birthdays. Our friend Pam and Bob share tomorrow as their birth day. Bob will be 66, and Pam will be 95. Susan says a Thanksgiving Eve celebration is perfectly alright, so that's the final word as far as I'm concerned. On a positive note, when the holiday is not everyone's holiday, you can pick up the turkey when you are ready to pop it in the oven, and there is no fear of forgetting anything since the shops are open. Of course the guests who work are not granted a holiday, so the meal needs to be planned for 8 p.m. And on another positive note, that gives you extra hours to make the pies.

Our celebration was a success. The turkey was the best ever. The cornbread stuffing was excellent with apples and chestnuts and sausage and turkey liver, but no onions or celery to be kind to Susan. Sadly, Cato was feeling under the weather so he couldn't come because we all follow the rule that it's not good to hang with 95 year olds if you might be carrying extra germs. Susan packed up and took home most of the leftovers including the turkey carcass, so Cato at least had the best of the leftovers, which some people say is the best part of Thanksgiving anyway.

Thursday
Tired!

Knitted my favourite angora booties for a baby boy born yesterday in Michigan to Susan and Cato's Best Man and his wife.

Went to see a new play in the West End with lots of buzz. A two-hander with Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall in Constellations, which was supposed to have something to do with theoretical physics and quantum mechanics. Events (and dialogue) repeat with different outcomes, but they all end with a brain tumour and a clinic in Switzerland. Also a one-act-er that lasted barely an hour. I was not impressed, but great reviews. The young playwright wins awards, so I am irrelevant.

We have seen such great theatre this autumn, my standards are impossibly high. The Judas Kiss with Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde destroying his life with his obsession for the beautiful boy Sir Alfred "Bosie" Douglas played by Freddie Fox, of the extensive Fox acting dynasty, who is also one of the most beautiful boys I have ever seen. A fact which added a layer of comprehension to Wilde's tragic demise. Also at the Hampstead Theatre, we saw 55 Days, an amazing drama leading up to the execution of Charles II with confrontations between Royalists and Oliver Cromwell's supporters on how to justify regicide. Interesting side note, the person sitting next to me in the theatre was the national treasure Alan Bennett!

We saw King Lear with Jonathan Pryce that was amazing and very bloody.  Also at the Almeida, a fascinating new play The Dark Earth and the Light Sky about the English poet Edward Thomas who was encouraged to write poetry by Robert Frost. The Frost family lived in England for 3 years, and Robert published his first two books of poetry while in England. The men became friends when Thomas reviewed the books favourably. Thomas was a difficult man, depressive, sometimes suicidal, and against his wife's wishes he volunteered for the war, and was killed in 1917 at the Battle of Arras. The play explores the difficult relationships between Thomas, his wife, his father, his close friend the Hampstead children's writer Eleanor Farjeon, and Frost. Superb intelligent theatre. The kind of evening where you come away enlightened, but wanting to know still more.

Finally, last week, in a stroke of luck I hit the website of the National Theatre at the moment when two tickets became available for the completely sold out until the end of the February run of the new hot play The Effect, by Lucy Prebble who wrote Enron which we loved, in the little Cottesloe Theatre at the National. Billie Piper and Jonjo O'Neill play participants in a drug test for an anti-depression medication. The doctor who runs the pharma trials is an advocate of drug treatment. He hires a former lover to handle this trial because he feels guilty about leaving her because she was a depressive who refused treatment with pills. The issues raised are compelling, and the play is gripping, especially since our seats were on the sofas that ring the stage, making us part of the set.

And I haven't spent a minute knitting my funny looking hat, so now I am at least two weeks behind!