In Which There is Shopping, Steam & Sunshine

After our cultural excursions we decided that a quieter day might be in order. It began with a trip to the Saturday market, where we got a little over-enthusiastic buying wonderful fresh fruit - 5kg of oranges (having found a juicer in the kitchen cupboard) and smaller (but still large, and astonishingly cheap) quantities of cherries, strawberries, some (probably) Mulberries, nectarines and some apple-sized fruit which looked a bit like tomatoes and tasted a bit like melon. I'm not sure what they were - persimmons of some kind, perhaps..

All that shopping was so exhausting that we had to go and get lunch.  Eating pide and drinking beer, while seated under a canopy of vine leaves takes a lot of beating!

Fortified by food and beer, we moved on to the 'shopping' portion of the day - K was looking for a veil for the whole getting married thing which she is doing in the summer, and she, E and I all need shoes, also for the wedding-ing. Our experience suggests that in Turkey, weddings are all about the frills. And the shiny things. And then the frills on the frills. and glitter on the frills on the frills. And sequins everywhere. Strangely, despite this, we were unable to convince K that she wanted to buy a new dress, in place of her original choice (and even more strangely, I don't seem to have taken any pictures of the dresses!)

However, trying on veils (and shoes) was so exhausting that we decided another Hamman was needed.  we went to the town hamman this time, which was less slick than the hotel (no plunge pool) but with much better massage.

And yet again, they somehow managed to scrub off another layer or two of skin, despite our all having been exfoliated to within an inch of our lives less than a week before... I really need to learn the Turkish for "I do exfoliate, honest. And I'm sure a lot of that is sun cream."

It was D's last day, so we stayed up late chatting, and sitting out on the balcony in the quiet darkness watching the bats flit past, then K drove her to airport to return to England's rain-drenched jubilee.