Wintry Istanbul |
20th March We decided to break our return to
Turkey with a long weekend in Istanbul with our friends Melanie and Derek. The weather wasn’t ideal – we ended up
wandering around the beautiful Topkapi Palace in torrential, freezing rain –
but we managed to pack a lot into two days and visited some beautiful mosques.
The highlight for me was definitely the food. On the first day Melanie and I did a very good cookery course where we prepared a four course authentic Turkish meal. The cookery school doubles as a restaurant, so Cliff and Derek were able to come along afterwards and enjoy the products of our afternoon’s work. The next day we joined the locals on the banks of the Bosphorous and had a delicious lunch of freshly caught mackerel, barbecued and stuffed in a baguette. On our final evening we found a restaurant near our hotel in Sultanahmet that served traditional Ottoman recipes – an excellent end to our short break!
The stunning Suleymaniye mosque |
Karniyarik (stuffed aubergines) ready for the oven |
Melanie attacks the Lavash - a tasty 'balloon bread' |
We arrived back in Finike on 23rd March to find ourselves surrounded by snow topped mountains. We had hoped it would be a bit warmer than Istanbul, but Spring was late arriving so it would be another couple of weeks before the t shirts and shorts came out. Meanwhile there was a long list of jobs to be done before we could start sailing again.
The yard at Finike with snow topped mountains behind it |
Spring finally arrived in Finike |
Sandpiper looking naked without her mast |
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