Pigeons taking a Turkish Bath!
If you’ve never had a body scrub and Turkish Bath you have to do one. First they have you lay on a very warm hard marble surface for awhile. Then you sit by a beautiful over sized ornative tub/sink where you are scrubbed and then doused with water. (This is all done by a man in a wrapped sarong of sorts). Then you lie down on the marble surface again on towels and you are scrubbed with a foam, then covered with a towel and massaged. He finally cracked my spine where it had been tight for two months. Just in case you are wondering, I did have my bikini on. Then rinsed again and then you lay on the hot surface once more. It was all very invigorating and peaceful at the same time. The funny thing is that in the middle of it the power went out and half of it had to be completed with candles. It was pretty surreal.
A fitness park in the middle of a regular park
The workout at the gym was great. I felt much better. The day before I had found this little fitness park in the middle of a city park. It was cool. It was just a bunch of apparati that worked under your own power and body weight. I did 200 reps on each of them. I thought they were brilliant. Good old fashioned style of a work out but I certainly got a little bit of a workout with them. They were just missing options for the arms. They had a chinup bar and dips, but those are not the best for women since our relative arm strength to our body weight is such that we can only do a couple of reps.
A big ant. I have no idea why. I can’t read Turkish
So I am going to go book my train to Belgrade today. I wanted to go to Thessolakini in Greece but there is no way to get their except to fly and it is costly. And then leaving their is the same thing. Trains have been cancelled until further notice because of the dire straits that Greece is in financially. So it looks like I will be skipping Greece this time, which is fine since I have been there before. This time I am going to go to Croatia instead. Somewhere new. I could go to more places in Turkey but they are taking me in the wrong direction and are really just overrun with tourists at the moment. Also I spent too much money in Istanbul so I need to be more thrifty with my travel for a bit. So an overnight train to Belgrade and then another train to Dubrovnik.
A funky old building amongst the newer or refurbished ones. I believe the whole street used to look like this building at one point.
The Turkish bath sounds great – bet you felt invigorated after it!!!
Well certainly clean and relaxed which in turn invigorated me.
Sara: even the pigeons get special treatment! Cute.
Ya – I thought that was a cute picture. Istanbul loves its animals – domestic or otherwise.