Welp, yay!

Hey y’all, long time of being lazy and distracted, but I’ll try to catch up over the next couple of days.  
Took the 10 hour overnight bus back into Istanbul, and while on the tram ran into a disoriented kid from Egypt who was trying to get to the same place as me.  We slowly and sweatily hurled ourselves out of the crowded tram and onto the cobbled streets leading to our hostel, me wishing I had less luggage and Mido with a giant grin on his face and repeating, “I am in Istanbul.”  I waited for him to wash and pray- there’s some leniency for Muslims traveling, but they still try to get in three prayers a day.  The usual routine of praying five times a day is supposed to keep you in contact with God at all times, never getting very far from God even if you have a distracting and busy schedule.  Painfully, one of the calls to prayer is during the abhorrent hour before sunrise, but ah well.  Mido showed me how to clean your feet, hands and forearms, and face, a certain number of times and in a certain order that I forget.  Conveniently, inside mosques there are usually sinks or troughs where groups of people can wash.  The process is supposed to help you focus your mind on the prayer you’re about to do, as well as make prayer a distinctive part of the day.  Or at least that’s what I understood.

So yep, we went to Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque, and Ayasofya, almost unashamedly hitting the three biggest tourist spots in Istanbul.  But it was awesome, despite a zillion people herding through with cameras glued to their faces.  I have to stop disliking droves of tourists.  Part of the awesomeness came from watching how excited some tourists were- I mean, zillions of people coming to see these things in Sultanahmet must mean that there’s good reason to see the things, yah?  But mainly, it was awesome because Mido translated the Arabic delicately drawn on sculptures and described the religious meaning of the museum objects.  He was also just plain full of awe and reverence, and I learned more from watching his response than from anything I would have tried to interpret about Islam if I’d been on my own.  So, yah, ended up really lucky.