Month 3 in Review

Namaste! Greetings from Agra, India. Yesterday we celebrated our 3 month anniversary of travelling so here's a re-cap of weeks 9 through 12 

Places visited

Bulgaria - Sunny Beach

Turkey - Istanbul

India - Delhi

Poor show for month 3...blame the India visa saga.

Favourite places 

Since there's only 3 places on the list I'll just name our favourite place which is probably pretty obvious. Taksim, Istanbul. This is the 2nd place we have been where I feel I could actually live there. There's good bars with plenty of live music, good shopping (Topshop, Mango, Zara), lovely friendly cats everywhere and good, cheap food. It has all the westernised things like that but then also crazy stuff will happen like a man covered in a blanket with a painted goat following him or a man sat next to the sea cleaning guns. What me & Russell kept saying is, "you definitely couldn't call it boring", there was always something going on. I'm not sure there are many other places we could have stayed so long.

Best bits 

Taksim night life.  We were really craving some good nights out as we hadn't had a proper night out since Split in Croatia. Every night was busy in Taksim and every bar we went to was good. We even found cheap beers which are rare in Istanbul.

Bad Times 

The India visa situation was a pain, I won't go into it in detail as Russell did 3 posts about it so no need to repeat. However, like all the bad times it did bring a positive as we would have left Istanbul much sooner and possibly never have even stayed in Taksim.

Best thing we ate 

Russell's best thing is a cig kofte. Katrinka who we met in Montenegro & lives in Istanbul told us about this veggie delight. It is made from bulgar wheat ground by hand for hours and added spices served in a wrap with salad, lemon & pomegranate sauce. It took us a while to find one & when we did we thought it was ok and it was only 60p so Russell pretty much had one every day for tea. After about a week I noticed a street vendor selling them and they were soooooo much nicer, more lemony and this one had the pomegranate sauce which the previous one didn't.

I caught Russell taking a picture of the cig kofte with a big cheesy grin on his face so I told him he should include his smile, this picture was the result.

Mine was the Wet Burger. So this is a burger in a bun that is then dipped in an oily spicy tomato based sauce then put in a steamer so it makes it wetter. Russell called it a soggy burger. It was really delicious but probably something you would get at 3am after a load of beer. The taste when you first bite into it is like the bit of soggy pitta at the end of an ace kebab - well done Turkey!

Coming up in month 4

This should be all India. We are currently in Agra and will be visiting a bird sanctuary in Bharatpur then onto Kerala and Goa for some relaxation on the beach.