Being on Elastic

Now that we have found our way to Zeytinburnu on the train right by our apartment, we seem to keep going back there.

Peter has been trying (in vain) to find a decent gym to go to. In Australia we were both gym members, and in China he belonged to the very impressive (and very popular) "Sky Gym" that looked like a giant glass ball above the street. Here the only gyms we have found are not only incredibly expensive, but also spooky little underground places with no one at all using the sparse equipment at the time when we happened to visit.

So he went back to just going for walks. The other morning he got a little over-ambitious and was striding along (while I was teaching) ... and found himself at Zeytinburnu. He was so far from home that he had to catch the train back again.

So today we had no classes, and when it came to lunch time we couldn't decide where to eat. SO we got on the train and went to Zeytinburnu again.

We wandered up the wide open mall, but couldn't decide on a restaurant or bufe to stop at.

Finally we impulsively stepped into a 'pide' shop - pide is a bit like pizza, Turkish style.


I didn't have my camera, this photo (obviously taken at night) is on the little wet-wipes pack restaurants give you when you dine there.


Once inside we ordered some soup and some pide. There were only a couple of tables, but like most places there was obviously a bigger room upstairs. However when we indicated that we would like to go upstairs, the waiter shook his head and indicated a table near the door.

The food was nice enough, and as we sat there we started to look around a bit.

In the first few minutes a couple of men walked past us repeatedly from a small (non-refrigerated) van outside carrying (one by one) about six whole (but headless) sheep's carcasses past us and up the stairs. I guess health regulations and practices are a little different here! At first I thought they were pigs ... silly me - we soon realised we were in a very Muslim restaurant.

The waiter went upstairs several times carrying a tray loaded with about twenty tulip-shaped cups of çay (tea), and a steady stream of Muslim clerics in their little hats and long coats came into the restaurant one by one, each one greeted the restaurateur in his big baggy Turkish-style pants, and went on upstairs. I guess we wouldn't have fitted in up there.






The walls inside the restaurant were covered with brightly-coloured tiles, some with large Arabic words. And in the middle of the restaurant was the enormous oven where they were cooking the pide.

We were a bit disappointed with the price of our meal - I guess they decided its fair to charge extra to foreigners, because locals certainly wouldn't be paying the prices we paid. But with our limited Turkish-speaking skills we just paid and left.

Yeah, we might still go back to Zeytnburnu sometime, but not to that restaurant.