Friday - July 4th - the intimate leg wax!

It is around 8am - Zeynep and I are in the Armada Hotel - in a room with 2 twin beds. I have to decide whether i will stay with her until the 10th (as another friend of hers arrives on the 8th who was planning on staying with her here). According to an email I was supposed to stay with a friend of hers which now is not an option. There is the free option - aynur's apartment with ufama - seabus and regular bus ride from the historic district.
Yesterday started out rather slowly as you read! there was a lot of waiting around and still no luggage! At 1:30pm Zeynep and I met Afet for girlie things. I had an eyebrow plucking with tweezers with a bit of waxing, a very very very intimate leg wax and included my lip and underarms for 65TYL = 12 tip. not bad.
We discovered this morning on another phone call to turkish airways that my luggage had not left NYC as previously informed but was on its way to Istanbul that day. I was a little miffed but grateful to have Turkish speakers to be helping with all of this! I floated through another day with same sox and underwear! After the "most intimate leg was i have ever had" we came by boat to the Armada Hotel to drop off Zeynep's luggage and to see if mine had arrived yet. Nope! so we left to go back to Uskudar to meet Zeynep's friend Sibel, back at Aynur's house for dinner. Train, Boat, Bus -
On the boat ride we were attacked by a wave!!!! Several of us were VERY wet - and laughing. Afet said that she has never seen a wave so large and anyone getting so wet! It was like a ripple effect - the people closest to the edge saw it coming, then i saw it above my head - i turned looked down to see my sneakered feet up to my ankles in water!!! I managed to get most of the front of my tank top and the bottom 1/2 of my jeans completely wet! We laughed our way home!
We ate another tasty meal - veggies and fruit and there was a stop at a pastry shop - not tempted actually.
As this dinner conversation was mostly in turkish I sat quietly until 10pm after all the sun fully disappeared around 9pm - we all went in Aynur's car to a park to walk and for Ufama's exerice - riding his tricycle madly through the playground. There we were walking along the path along the water - 10:30pm - others were there with their children hanging out, running, walking! There were lights on too and the lights of the other islands in the distance.

So it appears that when they refer to THE ISLANDS they are referring to a "small" body of islands off the Bosphorous coast and today we're going to go visit them - BY BOAT!!!

I'm struck by the fact that there is no poop on the sidewalks - that the main door to aynur's apartment building is always wide open.

I still have a super hard time understanding the intonations and i can't even guess at what the hell people are saying or talking about.