A life of leisure

It has come to my realisation (it's taken 39 days for me to actually believe this) that this is my life for the next 6 and a half months. if the alarm goes off and i don't feel like getting up i can just turn it off, if i want to eat lunch at 10am that's OK, if i want to spend all day wandering around a museum and do nothing else then that is fine, its expected really. I'm not sure I'll be able to integrate myself back into my old life of alarm clocks, meal times at "normal times", going to work... better make the next 6 and a half months count!!!

THURSDAY

We explored three museums today, the Museum of the Ancient Orient, Archaeological museum and the museum of Islamic Art.
First up was the Museum of the Ancient Orient which was built in 1883. It displayed Anatolian pieces from Hittite empires and pre-islamic items collected from the Ottoman empire. As you can see from the two photos below the statues tended to have creepy eyes.
Next we went to the Archeological museum which was a very impressive looking building
This museum was never ending, there were three floors of displays and you can't tell from this photo but there was another building attached to the end of this one, creating an 'L' shape with yet more displays in it. it was very interesting but we had to sit down to rest a couple of times!
It appeared that one of the pre requistes to be a statue in here was that you had to have a body part missing, basically every statue was damaged in some way which is a bit sad but i suppose the nose is always going to be the first thing to go when a statue falls on its face. some were interesting because obvisouly over the years parts had been intentionally removed, faces had been carved out of some statues leaving the rest perfectfully intact, other statues had had what appeared to be bad plastic surgery with noses replaced with different types of stone making it painfully obvious what was different.
one of the the rooms i found the most interesting was a collection of head stones from Syria, Lebanon, Ephesus, Anatolia and Thessalonica. i cant remember how old there were but very very old would be a safe bet. the head stones had writing on them and translations into English were provided. The head stones said things like 'Tessa is making this for her sister using her own money' or 'John is making this for his father and brother (still alive)' these seemed like very strange things to write on head stones to me. others said that if anyone buried someone else in their grave they would have to pay a fine and would be cursed. I'm not quite sure who would collect this fine as the person demanding it is already dead.... (those head stones were written by people for themselves while they were still alive). i'm not sure that i explained all that very clearly...
Above is one of many skeletons we saw today. one of them was in a hole in the floor with glass over it, i nearly walked on it and got a big fright when i looked down to see a skeleton staring up at me!

above is the Museum of Islamic Art, it is the oldest non-religious building in Istanbul, it was built in 1472 making it 538 years old.Not all of the rooms are used so the museum was small than it looked and took us only 15 minutes to go around. it had some beautiful ceramics on display and the walls were incredible with millions of little tiles decorating them. there was also a gorgeous mosaic of a peacock and some stained glass windows making rainbow lights dance around the rooms.
We had an early dinner at a very comfortable restaurant then headed back to the hostel.