Enchanted Jack

Last month the fabulous people at Displaced Nation asked me about:

My most enchanting experience this summer
My least enchanting experience, and
Tricks of the trade for dealing with the unforgiving heat.

I feel a little trilogy coming on.

Displaced Nation Trilogy – Part 1

Bodrum is the most secular and modern of Turkish towns. Normal social rules don’t apply here. It’s where people come to escape the conformity of everyday Turkish society. However, scrape the surface and you will find magic of a different kind. We were visiting our friend Jessica – a thoroughly modern Millie and a gorgeous Bodrum Belle to boot. Jessica lives just a few hundred metres behind the swanky marina with its luxury yachts and raucous watering holes. Her home is set within a traditional quarter of whitewashed buildings huddled together along narrow lanes. As we approached her door, we noticed an elderly neighbour dressed in traditional livery: floral headscarf, crocheted cardigan and capacious clashing pantaloons. She sat cross-legged in a shady spot of the garden and seemed to be plucking a fleece. Liam and I are self-confessed city boys and asked Jessica what the old lady was up to. Apparently, she was preparing the wool for hand carding, straightening and separating fibres to weave on the spinning wheel she kept in her house. The amazing woman hummed as she plucked, happy under the cool of an ancient knotted olive tree and doing what women have done in Turkey for millennia. Now you don’t get that in Blighty.

Part Two tomorrow – Disenchanted Jack

Emigrey Extras

Quite a while ago I wrote the Expat Glossary to help describe the wide variety of expats we’ve encountered on our Turkish escapade. The glossary includes the pre-eminent expats I call vetpats. These are veterans who have been living in Turkey for many years, have picked up the lingo and are better informed and more integrated than many of their peers. Today, I’m adding a couple more categories to the expat lexicon, both of which are vetpats of a unique kind. Please give a warm hand to the:

Bodrum Belles

The Belles are single ladies of a certain age with rollercoaster pasts and plucky presents. Some may once have been VOMITs but, unlike many of their sisters, they have learned from bitter experience and now live quiet and contented lives with a refreshing insight into their lot. To qualify as a Belle you must live in Bodrum Town. Anywhere else just doesn’t cut the mustard. Interestingly, we’ve yet to bump into any Bodrum Beaus. Middle-aged male singletons are thin on the ground round here. So, if you’re a solvent unattached straight man with your own teeth and working tackle, book your passage on the next emigrey express.

Emiköys

A rare breed of seasoned pioneers, Emiköys have forsaken the strife of city life and deodorant for the real köy mckoy and eek out a life less ordinary in genuine Turkish villages. They get down, dirty and dusty with the locals, contribute meaningfully to their small rural communities, keep chickens, get unnaturally close to nature and talk Turkish to the trees (well not always, but I’m sure some do).

The Expat Glossary has been duly updated. Any further suggestions gratefully received.

The Nibbler Becomes the Fisherman

My final guest post is from Roving Jay at the Bodrum Peninsula Travel Guide, your one-stop shop for what’s hot and what’s not. Jay has been a loyal pansy fan virtually from day one so I think it’s right and proper that she completes the series with a flourish.

I frequently swim around the Blog-o-Sphere, following bait from pool to pool. I like to observe the fisherman from a distance, and watch them cast their lines in an attempt to lure me in. If the bait doesn’t interest me, I’ll swim out of one pool and lurk in another. But if the lines thrown in my direction are suitably weighted and baited, I’m enticed in for a nibble, and can become hooked on the content! Jack used his worm to lure me in, and I’ve been nibbling in his Pansy Pool ever since. Even though we live in a society where Facebook and Twitter are household names, the dynamics of collaboration still have a 90/9/1 split:

90% of collaborators are Lurkers, watching but not contributing
9% are Nibblers, who contribute occasionally, and
1% are the Fisherman. Fancy a nibble?

So! Are you usually a Lurker, a Nibbler or a Fisherman? It’s not a simple question – because is really depends on which pool you’re in. In my own pool I’m a Fisherman, but in the Pansy Pool I’m usually a Nibbler. I leave the occasional comment. I like a post on Facebook. Or I share a post on Twitter. But look at me today. Fisherman Jack has left the bank unattended and there’s a huddle of pseudo Jack’s at the water’s edge casting lines of their own. And if the words we’re casting are suitably weighted and baited, you’ll continue swimming in the Pansy Pool until Fisherman Jack returns with fresh bait of his own. In the meantime, if you fancy a nibble – there’s a comment box below.

Siren Inflation

Today’s guest post is from Dina, a Bodrum Belle of class and distinction. Delicious Dina and her partner, Aussie Dave, run a successful gulet charter business here in old Bodrum Town called South Cross Blue Cruising. Dina is civilised and erudite and Dave is, well, Australian, though he does expose his more artistic side in oils. They’re rather good. I know what you’re thinking. An artistic Aussie? An oxymoron, a paradox, a contradiction in terms, it can’t be true. But it is.

The summer of 2011 in Bodrum will be remembered as the summer of excessive ambulance sirens. Almost hourly and sometimes in simultaneous, harmonic dischord, ambulance and fire truck sirens have dominated the normal Bodrum hum of cicadas*, clinking of tea glasses, scooters and verbose neighbors discussing the latest diet fads.

In addition to the government operated national hospital’s ambulances, there are a plethora of private hospitals and clinics which have purchased a cargo minivan, painted the sides with red lettered AMBULANS and attached flashing blue lights with a very loud siren. The gleam in the drivers’ eyes of these newly sprouted emergency vehicles is one of sheer thrill as they weave in and out of the congested Konacik highway traffic, delivering patients with symptoms ranging from heat stroke to broken digits as quickly as possible. However, as a citizen and as a driver, I find it weary and upsetting to hear the sirens continually, as would anyone who has either had to be in one as a patient or follow a loved one in such a vehicle. A quick check on Dr. Google reveals that there are specific rules in many countries as to when lights, sirens, or both together may be legally used. When I’ve got a hangover isn’t one of them.

*A note from Jack.

I didn’t know cicadas existed here in Turkey. These fascinating insects live underground for 17 years before emerging en-masse to breed. I found this You Tube Clip from the BBC’s Life in the Undergrowth series with the incomparable David Attenborough. It’s about Yankee cicadas but you’ll get the drift.

The Windy City

Wild and windy weather suddenly blew into Bodrum battering gulets and propelling chips off dinner plates. However, the concrete tresses of the fawning waiters stayed resolutely in place. Hurricane Katrina wouldn’t disturb their gelled masterpieces. The cooling gusts were a welcome respite from the sopping humidity of the last few weeks but now every surface of the house is draped in a fine film of dust and sand. It’s too hot to mop. We awoke yesterday morning to find our courtyard covered in leaf litter and dislodged adolescent olives still attached to broken twigs. We also found our landlord supervising a burly man with shovel hands and bad teeth. The florid stranger decimated the shrubs, hacked back the bougainvillea and shaved the ground cover. By midday our garden had been well and truly scalped, pruned to within an inch of its life. Beril and Vadim, our Turkish neighbours, are due back from their Ramazan pilgrimage to Ankara tomorrow. Vadim has been lavishing attention on our shared plot all summer. What will he make of the drastic Ground Force makeover?

Turk Season

July is Türk sezon and Bodrum is crammed with a richness of middle income people of all generations drawn from across the country taking their annual holidays before the start of Ramazan. The narrow streets are grid-locked and the air is filled with the piercing sound of cross monotone horns. We wandered out into the sticky evening to imbibe the ambiance and sink a few jars. We ambled behind the multitude of multi-generational families promenading along the marina. We headed through the bazaar, past the cheap boys with their cheap goods and snaked along Meyhane Sokak. Miraculously, we found a free place at one of the tall tables outside the semi-gay bar we’d stumbled across the previous year to enjoy the good-humoured scene around us. Alcohol consumption, particularly by women, is generally frowned upon in wider Turkish society. However, there was little evidence of this in the tequila slamming crowd. We had a ball.

Pot Bellied Brits

Bodrum has arrived and acquired a laid-back sophisticated buzz you can feel. Unlike many of her Aegean sisters, Bohemian Bodrum is chock-a-block with holidaying Turks. This is where the well-heeled come to get well-oiled. I wonder what the urbane Turkish social elite sporting Lacoste polo shirts, M&S Blue Harbour cotton pants and loafers make of the half-naked pot-bellied Brits who waddle along the smart Marina promenade in Nike trainers and extra-large synthetic shorts from JD Sports? I observed a family of tattooed honey monsters looking lost and disoriented in animated conversation. It was almost as if they’d been beamed in from Benidorm. Virtually every second word was an expletive. I have nothing against the occasional curse. I’ve been known to use the odd ripe Anglo-Saxon profanity myself from time to time. However, I swear with care. They cussed because of a limited vocabulary.

Tarty Chic

We sank a jar in a glitzy overpriced watering hole along the marina promenade and observed the rich-kids at play. The children of the Turkish urban elite are a strange breed. Many of the boys wouldn’t look out of place in Soho and the girls drape themselves in expensive tarty-chic virtually indistinguishable from the Russian ladies of the night who ply their trade discretely around them. It all conveys an emancipated image that I suspect is illusory given the deeply conservative nature of society even at the highest echelons.

Summer Winds

Bodrum is always a few degrees hotter than Yalıkavak as it’s partially protected from the prevailing north winds by a south-facing aspect and a natural amplitheatre of low hills. It’s the price we pay for our stone-built Bohemian idyll. The searing heat is mercifully moderated by the dry summer Meltemi Wind that blows down from the Balkans and sweeps across the entire Aegean basin. Providing a welcome respite from the soaking humidity, the wind lasts for days and can gust to gale force, scuppering sailors, sand blasting beach bathers and fanning forest fires. Well, fancy that.

Sizzling Bodrum

Old Bodrum Town has hit the season running. In the heat of the day people slowly amble along the promenade, gorge on gossip in the cafés, browse and graze in the posh shops or relax under cooling shade of a tall palm tree. By night the prom sizzles to the heavy beat of Turkopop and a madding crowd of the weird, the wonderful and the well-to-do. This is my rapid round up of what’s hot and what’s not along Bodrum’s celebrated promenade.