A lazy day in Izmir

We have some snacks in the room and hit the hay because we are

 totally exhausted from the day.  The next day is a lazy day where we sleep in, do laundry and John gets some real writing done.  Oscar and I head down to the lobby to see about the breakfast buffet which is utterly huge for 15 TL.  Which is about $3.  If 5 star hotels in 

America wanted to charge me only $3 for their breakfasts, I’d eat there too.  Of course, Oscar couldn’t find anything that he wanted to eat in this huge breakfast buffet.  He ended up eating several bites from two different cartons of yogurt, eating around the fruit in it.  I  

 usually try hard to indulge this child’s ridiculous eating problems, but I’m over it today and tell him that he won’t have anything else to eat until lunch.  There will be no snacking or anything else.  He does make it to lunch when we head into town to try to mail 

home all of our our findings.  We take a taxi because we’re not idiots twice to the main post office and get their two biggest boxes on the display to mail 8 kilograms of things home.  The poor guy at the post office was trying hard to save us some money by combining them, but there was

 a lot of fragile stuff in there, so we said to sent it as is.  He gave us some money off and didn’t charge us for the boxes, which I find amazing in a government employee.  I tell John that NO ONE in the US Postal Service would ever just give you the boxes for free or take money off your postage.  Never.  I can’t even imagine that happening, plus they wouldn’t be able to

speak the amount of Turkish that this man spoke English to get this done for us.  The people have been so incredibly nice here, I can’t believe it.  I’ll admit that we were scared to come to Turkey.  We had back up plans for if more problems happened here, the paper 

today says that the war is escalating at the border with Syria and we are glad that we’re leaving soon, but even Oscar said, “there’s a war here?” in general amazement.  We have a great time here 

though and seen some amazing things.  We walk along the harbor front that has made this town a strategic point for millennia, this used to be Smyrna in Ancient Greece.  There’s an Agora 2100 meters away, but we don’t care to walk that far.  There’s a

clock tower and old elevator that are important, but we just don’t care.  We find a restaurant called Big Chefs and have the best meal of the trip right here.  Oscar inhaled his spaghetti and scoop of vanilla ice cream while John and I dug into the best salad, Cretan cheese plate,

meatballs on hummus and beef on mashed potatoes. It’s sunny and beautiful and the day is a perfect way to rest and regroup before a lot more travel with things crammed in.  I tell John that after 3 loads of laundry, our clothes have not been this clean since we left 

home.  Even though I can’t figure out how to dry the clothes quickly in this Electrolux dryer, the combo makes everything super clean.  We’re ready for Ephesus now.   I'm just including the pictures of Oscar getting to try

to make Turkish ceramics on our next tour day because he was so cute trying it and another example of how nice the Turkish people are to us. Especially Oscar.  He leaves the potter's wheel so excited that he knocks John's Turkish coffee all over John and himself, so one more load of laundry tonight...