Bollards!

He was trying to beat the bollards but got stuck, quite literally!

The timing was perfect, because a few minutes later the clink clink of the tram could be heard making its way up towards Taksim and was quite literally stopped in its tracks. There was no shouting, no arm raising, no cursing (that I could hear / understand) and instead they just sat and waited for the traffic/city cops/security to arrive and release him. The bollards I had seen here and down on Tunel square, going up and down worryingly quickly - with only a hiss of the pressurised mechanism being the warning sound before they raised or disappeared. The taxi driver got caught out! Obviously a fairly common thing as he just sat there smiling while tourists like me stopped for a photo as the locals walked on by.

And so this was my last day. I had a lazy breakfast at the hotel roof-top restaurant, an hour or so out and about to spend the last of my lira before returning to the hotel to check-out and spend an hour or in the hotel spa for a Turkish bath. I then had time to walk up to Tunel Square for a final kebab lunch before getting a cab to the airport for my flight back to Warsaw.

A brilliant week. Hard work, as in very busy, but great to see people I'd trained six years ago and others from my floating days in India and Russia. Istanbul gets a double thumbs up and goes straight into my top 3 cities. Just fab.