I was is Istanbul for the first couple of days, hanging out with friends. The hotel we stayed in had some, um, interesting decor.
Let's see: striped walls, gold tassels, and giraffe-print chairs. It's like someone tried for arabesque but managed to incorporate a bit of "19th-century upscale French brothel". Thankfully no mirror on the ceiling.
We did eat at a great steakhouse where they just bring plate after plate of meat. Excellent food (it's called Nusr Et)
After a brief stopover in Mudanya four of us drove seven hours to the town of Bodrum, to stay at a resort near the city that my friend booked. We met up with some other friends who flew down.
Weather was sometimes spotty (including a day where the rain was so heavy it caused flash flooding in some streets in Bodrum) but there was still plenty of time for swimming and lounging, and enough sun that I sometimes draped a towel over my head to help prevent sunburn.
As one of my friends can only speak Turkish my Turkish-English dictionary got a real workout. I also determined that every sentence I said or heard had one of the following words in it:
yemek (eat)
aç (hungry)
soğuk (cold, as in the water in the pool (havuz) or sea (deniz))
uyumak (sleep)
yuzmak (swim)
yağmur (rain)
güneş (sun)
which pretty much summed up the week. A typical day went: yemek, yuzmak, yemek, uyumak, yemek, yuzmak, yemek, yemek, uyumak. Maybe another yemek in there somewhere depending on how aç everyone was, which with Turkish men appeared to be pretty much always.
A fun time was had by all, shame I had to leave earlier than everyone else but Eid is such a crazy time for travel that flights to Doha were booked solid the other days.
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