Getting somewhat better at the dolmuş system. The word itself means stuffed and refers to the tradition of the little shared taxi/minibuses being stuffed full of passengers. From the word dolma, meaning stuffed vegetables (compare with the Greek dolmades, stuffed vine leaves). Mostly midday they’re not all that stuffed. The trick is figuring out the routes, some of which seem more predictable than others. When one stops you can say your destination and the driver will confirm. Helps to choose a fairly well known shop or restaurant which could be your actual destination or just very near it. We’ve also begun to suspect that the routes may vary slightly to accommodate the needs of passengers - if you mention a particular location the driver might take a minor detour to pass it. Just speculation but routes do seem to vary a bit, unpredictably (to us at least).
Stop at one of the mobile providers. Looking to pick up an inexpensive second mobile. Currently using a Canadian phone with a UK sim. UK sim pretty cheap to use most places but all outside sims astonishingly expensive in Turkiye and TRNC - calls at £1 a minute, which is not unusual for foreign sims and presumably derived from some complicated revenge system. Possible to use WhatsApp for many but not all calls. Simplest would be to acquire a second phone, usable elsewhere with other sims anyway.
Phone shop pretty close to Three Bears Russian deli, provider of excellent chicken and pork cured sausages. Also various types of smoked fish, which we haven’t yet tried. And, if one were to go earlier than we ever seem to manage to, good rye bread. Recipes all Russian but ingredients and production local. J diverted en route to deli by discovery of a small DIY shop, crowded with innumerable desirable items, many of them with price tag in US dollars - much more unusual here than pounds or euros. Price at the till translated into Turkish lira. Provides some protection against the falling lira resulting in the shop selling goods for less than they paid to acquire them. Twenty some years ago in Marmaris, Turkiye we visited a supermarket that had digital price labels on the shelves. Were very impressed by what we took to be high tech stocking system. Then realised that the currency was so unstable that was the only way to keep up. It was literally possible to choose an item and find that the price had gone up by the time you reached the checkout. Some prices here quite good, though, and J acquires a can of WD 40 equivalent pretty inexpensively.