Giving a Presentation... Istambul is an amazing place.
Today Ozlem and I have had a nice class with Donna about "Giving a Presentation".
We could practice how to introduce ourselves, the topic and then, how to do the development and the conclusion of the presentation.
Because we chose to talk about where we live, we could knew more about Texas, Istambul and Mendoza.
I think it's amazing to learn about another countries talking with the people that live there...
Ozlem is from Turkey.
She talked to us that if we'll go to visit her place, Istambul ,she would recomend us to visit:
"Grand Baazar"
Istanbul's Grand Bazaar (Kapali Çarsi, or Covered Market) is Turkey's largest covered market offering excellent shopping.
Istanbul's Grand Bazaar is a small town in itself, with miles of passageways, mosques, banks, police stations, restaurants
We would find beautiful Turkish carpets, glazed tiles and pottery, copper and brassware, apparel made of leather, cotton and wool, meerschaum pipes, alabaster bookends and ashtrays, and all sorts of other things
"Hagia Sophi"
The Church of the Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia in Greek) is one of the most impressive and important buildings ever constructed.
Its wide, flat dome was a daring engineering feat in the 6th century, and architects still marvel at the building's many innovations.
Called Hagia Sophia in Greek, Sancta Sophia in Latin, Ayasofya in Turkish, it was built on the site of Byzantium's acropolis by Emperor Justinian (527-65 AD) in 537 AD.
"Hagia Sophia"is an experience in space and time, and the architects' magic still works after more than fourteen centuries.
Drafty, sombre, aged, dank, lofty, glorious. In summer cool as marble, in winter cold as snow.
On a hot Istanbul afternoon, Hagia Sophia is an oasis of cool silence broken only by the spiel and patter of the multilingual guides.
Their flocks of curious Europeans, Americans, Japanese and Greeks feel what the guides by this time ignore: awe. It is the awe not of religion, for Hagia Sophia is neither church nor mosque any longer. The awe is of age, of history, and of miraculous architecture. "by Tom Brosnahan- "Travel and pleisure"(US)"Ayasofya:the perfect space"
In the dim light deep within is a glimmer of gold.
Your eyes adjust to the darkness and you recognize the apse blazing with a glorious gold mosaic of Madonna and Child.
A few more steps, and the vision is clear and beautiful.
The 30 million gold tesserae (tiny mosaic tiles) which cover the church's interior--especially the dome--are now being restored to the brilliance they boasted 1500 years ago. This means the interior is filled with scaffolding, and will be so for years to come. This may spoil photos, but not the church's grandeur. You'll still enjoy your visit here.
In the mezzanne level we would see the splendid Byzantine mosaics
Ayasofya was the greatest church in Christendom until St Peter's Basilica was built in Rome a thousand years later.
In 1453, almost a thousand years later, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, fresh from the final battle for Constantinople, stood in this doorway and ordered the great church to be cleansed, repaired, beautified, and converted to a mosque.
The Hagia Sophia Museum was included in the list of UNESCO List of World Heritage.
"Minaturk"
It's a new Maquette Park have a miniature models of old Ottoman architectural works in Turkey.
There are 105 models structures architectural .
All the maquettes are 1/25 of the original sizes.
The park is located over 52ha along the coast of the Golden Horn.
We can eat in a great restaurant "Çiçek Pasaji" in Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Avenue) is the heart of Beyoglu, the more modern district of Istanbul built during the 19th century.
When 19th-century travelers spoke of Constantinople (Istanbul) as the Paris of the East, they were thinking of the Grande Rue de Péra (Istiklal Caddesi) and its half-European, half-Asian culture.
The Çiçek Pasaji is the L-shaped courtyard of a building named Cité de Péra, one of the first European-style buildings constructed during the Ottoman Empire's late-19th-century effort to modernize.
In its 19th- and early 20th-century heyday the Cité de Péra building housed posh shops on its ground floor in the Pasaj, and offices on the floors above.
In 1968, the Pasaj became a bunch of workmen's meyhanes (tavernas) serving cheap but good food and strong drinks.
The shops were now all simple restaurants. Beer barrels were rolled out into the Pasaj, square slabs of marble placed atop them, low three-legged stools set around, and Istanbul's taxi drivers, craftsmen and minor merchants came to eat, talk, shout, sing, and sometimes drink a bit too much.
It was a jolly place, with itinerant musicians, vendors, pimps and catamites circulating freely and getting lots of business.
Then, in the late 1980s, about a century after it was built, part of the Cité de Péra collapsed. The building was closed.
But Turkey's tourism boom had arrived, so the building was restored, renovated and re-opened as a more upscale eating-and-drinking locale for a somewhat richer class of patrons. The patchwork of tarps sheltering it from the elements was replaced with a modern canopy.
A dinner at one of the restaurants in the Çiçek Pasaji is now noticeably more sedate and refined than four decades ago.
later...
