Istanbul

We flew back to Ankara and then on to Istanbul to catch our flight to Kayseri, as part of our tour to Cappadocia. Once that tour was completed we flew again to Istanbul where we met up with the the few tour members who had not joined the Capadoccia trip and moved by coach to our hotel in Istanbul: the Kent Hotel in the Beyazit area.

For the afternoon, Sharon and I walked to the Sultanahmet area and then a little further on to find the Eresin Crown Hotel, where we are to stay later after the Greek leg of the tour so as to meet up with my sister Patricia. We were 'guided', if that is the right term, by a pleasant young man who claimed to have spent some time in Australia. He insisted that we visit his shop but we put him off and went on to the hotel instead.

There we had an encounter with the receptionist who assured us that we had booked and paid for only 7 nights accommodation. We knew this to be wrong and had the receipts from our travel agent to prove it. We showed them to her. This did not seem to convince her so I threw a little tantrum. This had the effect of encouraging her to enquire further and she told us to wait a while whilst she checked with er travel agent who would check with the Turkish agency that represented ours in Istanbul. In the meantime she suggested we have a coffee or tea. As we waited and before the coffee arrived she told us that in fact we were right. We enjoyed the coffee anyway and as we were about to leave I asked her whether it could be put on our bill or whether we should pay it straight away. She demurred at the idea of putting it on our bill but checked with the head waiter. He arrived to say that the coffee was complimentary. This improved my mood considerably and we parted on the best of terms.

We decided to walk back a different way and go a glimpse of the sort of sites we hope to see more of in our later 8 day visit to Istanbul.