the end of turkey

from canakkale i originally wanted to take a bus to erdine, a town on the european side of turkey...but the only time a bus to erdine left canakkale was at 3 in the morning...i decided not to go, basically because i didn't want to wake up at that hour...i am not a night person...
so i took a night bus back to istanbul instead...the bus i chose was supposed to leave at 2300...when i got to the bus office at 2230 they told me there was something wrong with that bus, and that i could take the 0100 bus instead...yippee skippee...i hate having to do things in the middle of the night...but i did...i went back to the hotel and read a book until 0030, when i went back to the bus office...
the bus ride was fine...faster than expected...the bus pulled into the massive bus station in istanbul at 0630 the following morning...i was expecting 0700...just like most airports, the arrivals and departures section of the bus station are in different spots...since i didn't know this ahead of time, i was a bit worried that i was getting off the bus in an unknown section of istanbul...thankfully, it was fine...that bus station is surprisingly busy at that hour of the morning...

it was easy to catch a service bus into the middle of town, then catch the metro back to close to amanda's flat...an easy walk from there...
we spent most of saturday doing a whole lot of nothing...the weather was crap, neither of us was motivated to do much of anything...we were productive in going to the grocery store, but that's about it...i picked up a bunch of tea to bring back to ukraine with me, as well as 2kgs of chickpeas...they're probably somewhere in ukraine, but i haven't found them...i also got pudding...my last chance to have real chocolate pudding until this summer, when i return to the states for a few weeks...dinner that night was roast chicken...sooooo good...
the next day the weather was even worse...rainy and windy...yuck...but i still needed postcards, and i wanted to go to a steak restaurant amanda had mentioned previously, so we had no choice but to leave the flat...(which was probably a good thing really)...we walked, took the metro, took the tram and walked into the city...a quick search for postcards, and then we made our way to a different bus stop, one where we could catch a bus to the mall where the steak restaurant was located..

a fabulous steak dinner followed...the meal was mostly steak, there was a small side of vegetables served with the meat...this had to be one of the best steaks i've ever had...cooked just as i ordered, the flavour was awesome...the only downside to the meal was the family next to us...a couple with one young child...they let the child run all over, and several times they lost track of where the child had run to...the waitstaff in the restaurant rescued the child more than once...i know i'm not a parent, but i found the behaviour appalling...shouldn't the child learn that meal time is meal time, and they shouldn't be allowed to run all over? especially because it wasn't just the parents involved...it was the waitstaff, and us because we were sitting next over, etc...we were both annoyed...
after dinner we walked through the mall...it's one of those fancy shmancy malls with a lot of high end named stores...the turkish government taxes imported goods like i've never seen before, so goods that shouldn't be expensive end up that way...a simple, black and white cell phone ends up being almost $100!! crazy...i got a phone just like it in ukraine for $30 or so...hmmm...we stopped at a cafe and had dessert and chai...my chai and chocolate fudge cake tasted just like what i love from coffee bean...coming from me, that's really high praise...basically, when we left the mall, i was in hog heaven...fat and happy...

sadly, i had to leave turkey the next day...booooooo...i said goodbye to amanda, then slowly packed up my stuff, had a cup of tea, etc...i left her flat, took the metro to the center of town, then took a bus to the airport...everything at the airport went really well, including changing the rest of my lira back into dollars...the best part of that was the way the dollar had depreciated against the lira since i'd exchanged upon arrival, so i actually made money on the exchange...gotta love an airport where they don't have obscene rates to exchange money!!! woo hoo...