Back In The (Former) USSR!

Well, first things first. Let me tell you about our Christmas before I get to telling you about our trip to London and Istanbul. Even though we live in a Muslim country and they don’t celebrate Christmas, they have a strong left-over Soviet influence. This affects a lot of things including the desire to have a decorated tree at this time of year. The week before Christmas they have a holiday where they sacrifice a sheep in honor of when Allah gave Abraham a lamb to kill instead of his son, Isaac. Sound familiar? We’ve been eating that sheep even since we came back. Yum! Anyway, they don’t have Christmas trees, but they do have Yeni Il (New Years) trees! They even have a Shaxta Baba and a Qar Qiz! Shaxta Baba means grandfather frost and Qar Qiz is snow girl. They are basically Santa and his granddaughter, but they don’t give gifts. They just come and stand by a Yeni Il tree and have their pictures taken. I digress. We were able to buy a little tree and lights at our bazaar and my lovely sister Jennifer and her family sent us fun ornaments, so our little room felt very Christmassy!

On Christmas Eve we went to Baku to have dinner and go to church with some of our good friends here in Azerbaijan. We went to a good Mexican restaurant (there was even a band singing classic rock dressed in Christmas costumes… it was just us and a group of British oil men…). After dinner we walked around Baku singing Christmas carols and getting stared at. Then we went to a midnight mass in English at the Catholic Church. It was the only church with a service and it ended up being really nice. It didn’t really feel like Christmas, but it was nice to be with a group of people celebrating.

On Christmas all the other people from AZ5 came into Baku for our In Service Training (IST). It was good to have everyone together again and the training went really well. We had two days full of meetings, trainings, inspiration and fun! We spent Jesse’s birthday with friends at IST and went for Thai food for dinner. Now onto….

LONDON

Day one:
Oh, what a fantastic holiday! It was so nice to be in a place where we are easily understood and where we could walk down the street and not feel like we were in a fish bowl! I think we did everything we wanted to, and ate lots of good foods we had been missing.

The first thing we did on Sunday the 30th was get gingerbread and eggnog lattes at Starbucks! They were just spectacular! Then we went to St. Paul’s Cathedral where we attended a mattins service. It was absolutely beautiful. Everything was sung by the choir and we were sitting under Wren’s magnificent dome. It was a great way to begin our London vacation.

After church we took a Double Decker bus down to the Tower of London and took a tour with a beefeater, saw the jewels then walked across the Tower Bridge. We had fish and chips for lunch with a good beer for Jesse and cranberry juice for me (I had been craving it for months!). We walked along the Thames past the Globe and went to the Tate Modern. There was some interesting stuff there, but it was crowded and not really what we’re interested in, so we just took a quick look in all the galleries. Then we walked home past London Eye, Big Ben, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street. We ended up eating dinner at Wagamama, which is one of the best restaurant ideas I’ve ever seen. It has really good Asian type noodles and stuff. It’s set up in a really interesting, inventive way. And it’s really yummy!

Day two:
We had a really nice New Year’s Eve. First thing in the morning we bought tickets to see "Cabaret" that night, then headed down to Buckingham Palace to see the Changing of the Guard. We got the best seats that Rick Steves recommended to us and waited. We were about an hour early and definitely got some quality people watching in. The actual Changing of the Guard was a little less entertaining, since it was a slightly played down version of what usually happens. There were about 8 horses that rode by, without the fanfare and band. It was still cool.

We walked past the Ritz and down Bond Street to Oxford Street. We saw some amazing stores, decorated beautifully for the holidays. We obviously couldn’t afford anything on our Peace Corps incomes, but we did make our way to the sales at H&M. I got a shirt for 1 pound and a pretty coat for 10! Jesse also got a rad shirt for 1 pound. I love H&M!

After shopping we went to an Afternoon High Tea at Brown’s Hotel. It was fun to get all dressed up, go to a fancy hotel on a fancy street and eat some fancy sandwiches! We totally didn’t feel like PCVs! It was a really nice, relaxing way to spend a cold London afternoon and I think I had the best scones of my life!

When we were stuffed with tea and such, we went to "Cabaret." I had seen this a couple times in the states, but this production was far better than I’d ever seen. It was a lot more risqué, with full nudity at multiple times, but this just really led to more powerful imagery at the end when the Holocaust is alluded to. It was beautiful, and I think you all know how I feel about musicals!

We walked out of the theatre into 700,000 people celebrating 2008. It was about 10 and we were planning on going back to St. Paul’s for a New Years celebration with a brass band, but it turned out to be impossible to get there. All the tube stops around Leicester, Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square were closed and we ended up walking all the way from the north end of Leicester to Victoria Station. We almost celebrated New Year’s on the subway, but made it to our hotel at about 11:45. We got Burger King and watched the clock on King’s Cross Station turn over the New Year. It was fun to be with the 700,000 people, but also nice not to be stuck in the mess of people trying to leave the city on the subways after midnight. It worked out perfectly if you ask me.

Day Three:
We started the year by visiting Westminster Abbey. What a beautiful museum! We were really lucky, because it was almost deserted. We got to spend as much time as we wanted looking at all the memorials and altars. It ended up being both of our favorite places we visited in London. We lit a candle and said a prayer for Eugene and St. Mary’s Church. It was really nice to be in Anglican churches again, both St. Paul’s and Westminster.

When we left the museum we walked up Whitehall and got a place up front for the New Years Day Parade. There were a ton of marching bands from the States, but my favorite was this little band of kids and their director. They were so into what they were doing, it was awesome.
After lunch at an Italian restaurant, we went to see "I Am Legend" at a movie theatre on Leicester Square. It was really expensive and really scary, but it was really fun to go to a movie in a theatre.

We then went down and rode the London Eye Ferris wheel. It was dark and rainy, so the city was sparkling as we rode the half-hour ride. It goes so high and has amazing views of Parliament, Big Ben, St. Paul’s and the rest of the city. It was Jesse favorite thing we did and he took some really great pictures during the ride.

Day Four:
The day of museums. We got up early and went down to the British Museum. They had China’s Terracotta Army on display, but we had to go really early to try and get tickets for the exhibit. There was already a really long line and they said they would only have about 500 tickets for the day. We waited and everything worked out perfectly. The permanent collection galleries opened at 10 and we got tickets to the Terracotta Army for 10:50. So we spent almost an hour looking at all the antiquities in the museum. The Rosetta Stone and Parthenon statues were the most interesting, along with the sarcophaguses and ancient Egyptian and Assyrian (that’s basically where we live) statues.

The Terracotta Army exhibit was really interesting. My Granny saw this in China during her travels, so it was really special for me to see it. She gave us a horse figurine from there that I always loved (I wonder where that went…). It was interspersing that the first emperor of China created this massive city of terracotta people because of a desire to become immortal when he died, but even more interesting than that is he began this project when he was only 19 years old! They showed how they built the men and even showed what they would have looked like in their full colorful splendor.

After the British Museum we ate at Wagamama again and went to the National Gallery to follow Rick Steves’ tour of the museum. He definitely hit all the good works! We saw Michelangelos, Botticelli’s "Venus and Mars," Raphael’s "Pope Julius II," Leonardo’s "The Virgin on the Rocks," Titian’s "Bacchus and Ariadne," Tintoretto’s "The Origin of the Milky Way," a Rembrandt self-portrait, Caravaggio’s "The Supper at Emmaus," and of course the Impressionists, our favorites. We saw Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Monet’s lily pond and Japanese bridge, Seurat’s bathers, and Cezanne’s landscapes.

Then we popped into the National Portrait Gallery and took a quick look around at the more modern portraits and some of the temporary exhibits. They also had a photographic portrait contest that was advertized all over the tube, so we wanted to check out the book for that.
That night we went at sat in the front row of "Avenue Q." It was a really fun show and I thought it was neat to be in the front row, because we could see all the work the actors had to do changing between all the puppets. Sometimes an actor would have a conversation between two puppets for whom they provided both voices. It was funny and defiantly not appropriate for the children in the audience, probably expecting Sesame Street!

After the show we went to an all you can eat sushi restaurant. Jesse had been planning this for months, researching the best sushi restaurants for value and quality. He chose a very good one! We had just ordered when the hostess sat two people next to us at the bar… and they turned out to be our friend Whitney who’s a volunteer in our group and her sister! Crazy! We knew she was in London, but hadn’t gotten in touch with her! It was fun to meet her sister and compare crazy reverse culture shock stories from being in London. Plus, the sushi was great and we definitely got our money’s worth!

Day Five:
It was starting to snow as we flew out of England and when we landed in Istanbul, there were a few inches of snow blanketing the city. We checked into our hotel which was absolutely beautiful! It had heated floors in the bathroom, a bathtub (! We both took our first bathes in over 6 months), MTV, BBC, CNN, NBC, and an incredible view of the sea and a 16th century mosque. Come on, when you’re in Peace Corps, even TV channels are amazing, don’t judge us!

Day Six:
Our hotel had a free breakfast, but it didn’t really compare to the one in London (ham, baked beans, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, toast, marmalade, sausage… yum!). We were back to bread, salty cheese, cucumber and tomato, just like Azerbaijan, so we just opted for cold cereal.
We went out onto the snowy cobblestone streets to find the Sultanahmet, which contains the Hippodrome, Aya Sofya, Topkapi Sarayi and the Blue Mosque. It was only 5 minutes away (so, if anyone ever goes to Istanbul, contact my step-mom and she can book this amazing hotel for you! Thanks, Deena!), and the walk through the Hippodrome was fascinating. There is an Egyptian Obelisk of Theodosius carved in 1450 BC that Constantine brought to Istanbul in 390 AD.

We first went to the Topkapi Sarayi, that is the Topkapi Palace or just the place where all the sultans lived. It was started in 1453 and lived in by sultans until the 19th century. We went straight to the Harem to have a look around. It was massive and interesting to see how the sultan, his family and his concubines lived. It turns out that the western idea of what a harem is isn’t quite accurate. It wasn’t a den of sex and drugs as far as we could tell. It was really just the private apartments of the sultan and the other 400 people he had to have around him. We also saw some royal jewels, carpets but completely missed seeing the Prophet room where they keep Moses’ staff and a hair from Mohammed’s beard! Oops!

We then walked down to the Aya Sofya in Turkish, Sancta Sophia in Latin, Haghia Sofia in Greek and The Church of Divine Wisdom in English. This was amazing. It was built by Emperor Justinian in 537 AD. It was considered the greatest church in Christendom until 1453 when Mehmet the Conqueror turned it into a mosque. There are many beautiful mosaics in the church that have been covered and uncovered multiple times. They were created in the 9th century and mostly portray Christ, Mary and saints. It was really impressive to be in a church so important to Christian history and built so soon after Christ’s life.

After eating a mediocre Azeri-ish lunch we went to the Grand Bazaar. We had a lot of fun shopping around in the bazaar. We were trying to find tiles, hookahs, lanterns and jewelry. We talked to a lot of shop keepers and ended up buying three beautiful tiles we will frame when we get home, two hookahs, one for us and one for our host father, and coveting a beautiful lantern that was too expensive. Jesse took a photograph of it that we will also frame and be glad to at least have that! Many of the keepers were impressed when we could speak Azeri, which is very similar to Turkish and were surprised when we said we lived in Mingechevir, because westerners never live outside of Baku.

When we were done shopping we bought some baklava for later and went to the Blue Mosque. It was very beautiful with amazing tiles covering the walls. It was also interesting to go into a functioning mosque. It was built in the 17th century.

We had Domino’s pizza delivered to our fantastic hotel and thus ended our vacation. When we got back to Azerbaijan, it was covered in ice and snow, but we finally made it back to Mingechevir on Sunday in time to have a snowball fight with our host brother (Farid and I totally beat Jesse). The snow still hasn’t melted, but at least it’s better than the miserable heat in the summer! We had a fantastic trip, but it’s always nice to be back somewhere familiar…

P.S. - We are going to upload a web album with more pictures from our trip ASAP, so keep checking back.