I wanted to put up a short post with some final thoughts on Athens and Istanbul and the whole experience. It’s now Friday and I arrived back in the UK from Istanbul last Sunday but I’ve since traveled to Australia so it’s been hard to find the time to do that! Also, sometime a bit further down the line (at this point we’re probably talking in a month’s time) I’ll go through the many pictures I took and post a selection of the best/most meaningful rather than the somewhat random selection I posted day by day.

Overall, the 8-day trip to Athens and Istanbul was fantastic. It certainly helped that I got completely spoiled by the weather in Athens, probably absorbed as much sunshine in those few days as for most of the summer in London! While the weather in Istanbul was more towards the grey, it was only on the final day that this made any difference at all.

The lowlight of the trip was the mess-up with the accommodation in Athens; I definitely could’ve done without the stress of turning up and nobody home. It worked out fine, though, and maybe even better than it would’ve been otherwise. If that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have done an overnight in Delphi and therefore not had one of the best experiences of the entire trip – climbing Mt Parnassus

I was very happy (as you might have guessed!) with the food throughout the trip. My initial intention was to do more hostel cooking, as I did in Nice, but the ready availability of delicious and low-cost food made that unnecessary, especially in Istanbul where it was almost ridiculous. The only meal I regretted as a missed opportunity was the second-last dinner in Istanbul where I just went for the starters plate. It was tasty but in my head didn’t really count as a meal.

It was my first time in hostel dorms for quite a while and I wasn’t fully prepared for it. Buying earplugs after the snoring of the first night took care of that, though, even if they weren’t needed for the rest of the trip.

I really quite enjoyed the planning of the following day’s activities the night before. The downside of this was the reliance on decent Wi-Fi, leading to more frustration (and McDonald’s for multiple hours) the first night in Athens. To avoid this in future it may be worth picking up an ultra-cheap country-specific sim card and having that data be available in the absence of WiFi. It would also help with getting around when out and about.

Something I hadn’t researched beforehand at all was city travel/museum cards available to make touristing a bit more affordable. Certainly in Istanbul that would’ve been good, I spent (relatively) a fair bit on unnecessary metro fares.

It’s clear that I am very poor at self-regulation when traveling, attempting to get *all of the things* done every day. It’s probably just as well the holiday ended when it did, I may have properly broken myself within another few days otherwise. 40k steps? No idea how I managed that.

The entire trip (Saturday-Sunday, including three flights, all accommodation and all other expenses) cost me £640. That’s very slightly more than what I thought it would be, for a few reasons:
– accommodation in Athens cost more than planned, mostly due to airbnb mess-up.
– I made a conscious decision in Istanbul to eat out quite a lot as there were a lot of things I wanted to try and the prices were so good. I don’t regret this at all.

That’s all I can think of for now. As mentioned, next time I get a chance I’ll go through and pick out what I think are the best pictures from the trip and post those. Now, given that I’ve had my eyes closing involuntarily for the past 30 minutes while writing this, I think it’s bedtime!