I have poison for your mother in law a.k.a. stuff we did in turkey

Istanbul is a great tourist city because all the sights are really close to each other.  We stayed about a block away from two of the biggest--the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofia.  The Hagia Sofia is a former mosque that is now a museum.  The place is huge!  It was built before the duomo in Florence and the dome here is just as big.  It was being restored so we couldn't see much of it, but apparently it is 20 stories tall.  The Blue Mosque is at the other end of a park from the Hagia Sofia and it is a functional mosque.  It is so named because the tile covering the walls is blue.  I expected it to be a lot more blue than it actually was--like I expected the tiles to be totally blue, instead of pretty tiles that just happened to have blue in them.  Anywho.  We visited two smaller mosques which I thought were way cooler than the big ones.  The tile was amazing in both of them--and it was way bluer than that of the blue mosque.  We also went to the New Mosque of the Mother Sultan, which was cool, and the Mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent--which was closed for restoration (bummer!).  

You have to remove your shoes when you go into the mosques and it is so funny because at the bigger mosques they provide you with plastic bags in which to carry your shoes while inside.  The smaller mosques just have wooden shelves to leave your shoes and collect when you leave.  As a woman, I had to cover my head as well when I entered the mosque and, as Rick Steves said, "dress modestly".  They provided extra scarves and wraps for those that were dressed inappropriately or came unprepared.

We also visited the Topkapi Palace, which was the home of the sultan for many many years.  They had collections of jewels and swords and armor and all sorts of things.  The gardens were also totally in bloom, so there were tulips everywhere!  There was a room of religious relics as well, but most of them looked really fake.  For instance, they claimed to have Moses' staff (which looked like it was made of plastic) and a piece of the crucifix (sure....).  We paid extra to visit the Harem, which was worth it.  It was interesting because it was decorated in the baroque and rococo style because it was all the rage in Istanbul back then.  It proved an interesting contrast to the rest of the palace.  I took about 100 pictures of tile because all of it was gorgeous.  There was a lot of mother of pearl inlay on everything and great views of the city.

We also hit up some museums--Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Archaeological Museum, and others.  

We went to the Grand Bazaar, which is pretty much Pike Place Market on crack and 18 thousand times the size.  The shop keepers heckle you as you walk by so you pretty much can't stop moving or you get swallowed up!  We wandered most of it and had a turkish coffee in the middle of the bazaar.  We hit up the book market as well, which was a fun mix of old and new and english and arabic and turkish and french.  The Spice Market was another stop.  It was so cool to see piles of spices and dried fruit.  This is where one of the shopkeepers tried to get us in his store by telling us he had poison for our mother in law.  He broke our serious paris faces, we couldn't stop laughing after that.