Istanbul, Turkey ✈️ Athens, Greece
Cay
They keep re-filling, we keep drinking.
Van Kahvalti Evi
Today was our last day in Istanbul. Since our friend Alex hadn’t experienced what we thought was the best Turkish Breakfast in the city, we decided to do a proper goodbye brunch at Van Kahvalti Evi, once again in the hip Cihanigr district.
The area was full of surprisingly hip Turkish youth and made us feel like we needed to up our style game compared to what passes in San Francisco. It might’ve also been because everyone was smoking 🚬.
Our breakfast once again consisted of breads, butter in honey, cherry jam, many different cheeses, cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley, hardboiled eggs, and another helping of saucy, saucy menemen. Bryan ended up gorging due to the sheer variety of it all 😲.
After saying our farewells to our old friend Ricardo and Alex, and our new friend and local expert Nick, we took the the metro back to the airport. It’s about an hour, but it feels a lot longer when you’re standing with luggage on your back 😓.
We got into Athens around 8pm and met up with Terence, our companion for the next 5 days. We ended up looking around the city to kill some time, and Yennie stopped into a random abandoned-looking building with a lone worklight. Outside of it stood what Yennie says looked like the man from Castaway tying bundles of garlic together. Let’s just say we could smell it before we could see it. She asked for a photo; the man told her that she could take a photo of the garlic pile, but not himself. #weirdcool
Afterwards, we went out to meet Yennie’s former work colleague Nirvani at a wine bar called Sideways (yes, it was named after the movie). Incredibly, Nirvani had already ingratiated herself with the owner, who had us try a local Greek white. Everyone agreed it tasted very floral, and was fortunately very drinkable. We wandered around Athens failing to find a decent cocktail bar (which in retrospect is not too hard), drinking at a few establishments not worth mentioning, as our preferred bar, Osterman, was closed for summer ☹️. Next time? However, the evening on a high note as we eventually found some quality street souvlaki at Tylixto Greek Wrap and had a few Greek beers to top off the night.
Fix
Passable Greek lager, but who are we to say. We’re drunk.
Tylixto Aiolou, Αιόλου 19, Psirri
