The man at the reception desk leads us to breakfast. We are taken out of the hotels front door, around the corner, back inside the same building, and down some stairs. Not entirely sure how we were meant to find that on our own. Oh well. We eat our last Turkish Breakfast, I will miss the olives, cheese, and cucumber, but Willy is a bit over it and is looking forward to getting back to something a little more Western.
We pack up our bags and make the sixty meter walk to our other hotel. Our room is so nice. I think that might be our nicest hotel in Turkey, if not Europe. It's not super flash but it's clean and tidy which hasn't been a given in some of them. Pammukale was very nice too.
Our day is spent exploring streets we missed in round one. We see the Spice Bazaar, get dragged into another carpet shop (argh), wander through the Basilica Cistern, stand outside the palace, and lose ourselves briefly in an English bookstore.
The Basilica Cistern is really cool. I was concerned that it might have been really crowded as there was a line out the front that got pushed in pretty quick and a tour group was entering at literally the same time as us. I shouldn't have worried, it's huge down there and with the exception of a few bottle necks, you lose most of the crowd in the dark. There are rows and rows of huge marble columns, it's fascinating to walk around. The bottom of the room is filled with water, I don't think it's very deep, maybe a foot or so, but it's teeming with fish. Some of the fish are the size of a small dog, they are grey, and they have huge mouths. Not particularly attractive fishies. The sound inside of the Cistern is pretty trippy too. Between the water, marble, concrete, and sheer size of the space, it creates a fascinating reverberation unlike anything I have heard before. Once we see the two Medusa heads (major bottle neck there) we make our way back to the daylight.
Just outside the Cistern Willy spots a cookbook that I regretted not buying in Pammukale. It's about a third of the price of the one we originally looked at. Sold! I am going to make ALL of the scrummy food when we get home. We eat ice cream as we wander through the streets. We miss Canakkales temperatures, Istanbul is hot today.
The streets are teeming with older European tourists, a cruise ship landed this morning. It makes me mad how rude some of them are to the locals. When people try to sell me crap or make us sit down in their restaurant I always say no thank you. I have walked down streets where I almost can't keep up with the number of no thank yous. The rude tourists make me try twice as hard to be nice.
We find ourselves standing outside of the Palace. Briefly we discuss whether or not we should go inside, but at 30TL each, a massive line, and with half of the exhibits reading as closed, we decide not to. However we do spend some time wandering through the gift shop and garden.
On the way back to our hotel Willy spots a kitten. It's very small and obviously unwell. The strays make me so sad, and there's nothing you can do for them. The next thing to upset me is close to our hotel. On our way out that morning we had seen cattle being held in a small concrete yard... I should have known what I would see on our return trip... Willy says that he thinks they were alive. The one I saw before I looked away definitely wasn't.
We have a nice dinner opposite the mosque, outside a building that they had previously used as a school. Afterwards we head back to our hotel to pack our bags and try to get some sleep - the alarms are set for 3am. Yuck.
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