Istanbul, Turkey, Days 7 – 9

Day Seven

In the morning after breakfast it was off to Hagia Sofia (blog post HERE), and that was it for the day.
Lunch and dinner were enjoyed in restaurants we had already eaten in. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
To round off the day we shared a bottle of Vinolus (kalecik Karasi) 2010 wine back at our hotel. It was the second decent bottle of wine we purchased the previous day during our visit to Sensus Cheese & Wine Boutique in Galata.

Day Eight

We spent our last full day in Istanbul visiting the Topkapi Palace (blogpost HERE). Lunch and dinner were decent meals. Lots of salad, stuffed vine leaves, chicken shish kebab, aubergine, and loads of green and black olives. I seem to be addicted to olives. It was definietly good to be eating a Mediterranean diet again.

Day Nine

Laura had a great start to the day. She was the last one left in the rooftop breakfast room at our hotel, and just as she finishing her breakfast a lizard appeared. Nothing too amazing about that I suppose, there are lizards everywhere. But what made her day was that this lizard seemed quite tame. So tame, Laura fed it. For want of anything else to serve the little green fella for its breakfast, Laura chose boiled egg. She said she gave him what she thought was a tiny piece of egg, but in retrospect was actually a big piece. Well, big compared to the size of the lizard. The egg piece was much bigger than the lizards head. Hungry fella did manage to eat it though, after much munching and tossing his head this way and that, presumably to help break it up into smaller bite sized pieces.
Lizards like eggs. They’re not too keen on bread or dried apricots though. That is to say, this lizard wasn’t. When Laura offered him some bread and apricot, he declined leaving the uneaten second course of his breakfast on the floor. And with that the cute green fella scurried off out the door. And Laura rushed back downstairs to our room to tell me about her breakfast buddy. She cursed that she didn’t have a camera with her.

After the excitement of feeding a lizard, we realised that nothing much was going to be able to top that. So we spent the rest of the day doing exactly that, nothing much. Just killing time. We had an 8.30pm bus from Istanbul to Bodrum to catch, so we did not want to do anything to tire us out. We left our bags at the hotel after checking out, and wandered up to the Sultan Restaurant/cafe for a beer and to people watch. It seems we were quite good at people watching, and drinking, because we successfully managed to make five hours vanish, just like that. You can read ‘just like that’ in a Tommy Cooper voice if you want. I know I heard his voice as I wrote it. ;d
Whiling away the hours we also enjoyed a bit of chit-chat with a fellow traveller. And before we knew it it was time for us to bid farewell to Istanbul, a city that we’d both enjoyed very much and would love to visit again one day.

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