Still waiting for our appointment at the deed office. Now it’s likely to be on Friday as tomorrow, Thursday, is Republic Day.
There is what appears to be a grey battleship moored outside, and lots of shouting and martial singing on loudspeakers. Hopefully this is for Republic Day, not an invasion.
We killed a few more mosquitos: two overnight when the buzzing became unbearable and we woke at around 4 in the morning to hunt them down. Two more this afternoon, both fat with blood. The GF, who doesn’t deal well with disturbed sleep and is the primary target of the mosquitos, is understandably quite fed up. I am too, and my eyes are drawn to every smudge on the ceiling and walls.
I took an antibiotic for the first time in decades last night, for a minor ailment. It does feel like being scrubbed on the inside with a toilet brush, so I am eating plenty of yoghurt. Luckily I’m in the right country for it.
This was after our dinner excursion last night. We walked to Besiktas and wisely ignored the Google Maps directions to find a mostly-pleasant stroll there. It was completely different at night from how we’d seen it during the day when it was a fairly ordinary commercial area, rather like Bangsar in KL or any of the lower F-number markazes in Islamabad. At night it was packed and buzzing, full of restauarants and cafes, a vegetable and a fish market, and the delightfully named Greatness Therapy Pub. The GF remarked that it felt like the buzzing centre of town in a small town, and that is exactly what it felt like, though I find it hard to define what it means exactly.
Our object was non-Turkish food so we went to an Uighur restaurant for handpulled noodles. Quite pleasant, though a little too much of the sweet-and-sour variety to be something I really enjoyed, and they had no real meat-free options for the GF. Still, a pleasant change. We were then going to stop at a profiterole place for dessert but the outside table turned out to be taken by someone else and I insisted we walk on. I regretted it rather as I think the GF was quite keen to have a profiterole, but in the moment it was a combination of several vague impulses: my hatred for waiting for restaurants where it seems unnecessary, and a resolve I had made earlier in the day that during the rest of the pandemic we should not eat indoors. Still, I should not have insisted.
The singing on the loudspeaker is very much of the full-throated early 20th century patriotic tenor, so it must be for Republic Day.