Our rapport with Tariq our toothless caretaker has warmed up nicely following an inauspicious start of reticence and bewilderment. These days we are greeted with a broad gummy grin and a decisive handshake of digit crushing magnitude. Tariq has swapped his shapeless beige shorts and crumpled t-shirt for ankle length black baggy pantaloons and Christmas jumper, fetchingly set off by a see-through cagoule and a bobble hat during inclement weather. He is from the Hatay (the little finger of Turkey that pokes into Syria) and is more Arab than Turk. There’s virtually nothing to do on the site except keep watch so it amuses him to visit us now and again, indulge in a little good humoured arm waving banter on the patio and help himself to our Marlboro’ Lights. His only word in English is “rubbish?”
Chrissy has cautioned us against fraternising with the staff. “It wouldn’t do to give them the wrong idea” she remarked in an ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ kind of way little realising that she’s well below stairs herself.
I received a delightfully distracting ‘how’s things?’ email from Jacqueline, an old comrade of wry wit and razor sharp intellect. She is a wonderfully undemanding friend who I may only see once a year. When we meet, we simply carry on where we left off, mixing lascivious gossip with incisive social and political comment (or so we think). She and her partner Angus have been sorely laid low of late with a nasty case of gastroenteritis. Naturally, Angus’ suffering is the greatest since he is a boy. Girls have a higher pain threshold apparently. It’s something to do with childbirth. If the Vicar of Christ knew from first-hand experience just how painful it was to have babies, I’m sure he would command priests to hand out condoms during communion; he could solve the African AIDS crisis and endemic Third World over-population with a single wave of his Holiness’ crook.
I know a little of food poisoning myself. Many, many years ago when I had cheek bones you could slice cheese with, I met a randy Yank in the Brief Encounter Bar in St Martin’s Lane (now long gone, but in times long past the place to briefly encounter). In the taxi back to his gaff, the Yank got a tad peckish so we stopped off for a takeaway kebab on the Caledonian Road. I took one small bite to be sociable. He wolfed the rest. The next day I ended up in The London Hospital with projectile vomit. The rapid diet had its attractions but pooing on a paddle for Environment Health was a distressing experience. I never saw the Yank again. I think he died.
Jacqueline has taken up patch working and quilting as a hobby. She’s clearly keeping a weather eye on the future: the imminent implosion of the public sector may well necessitate a dramatic career change.
My nightly tribulations anticipating a cross knock at the door by a scandalised conscript in latex gloves conducting an internal investigation has mercifully abated. All the fuss started when a distressed Digiturk obtained a court order to shut down a couple of insignificant blogs illegally broadcasting highlights from the Turkish Süper Lig. In response, the inscrutable authorities banned hundreds of thousands of websites that share the same Google ‘address’ as the obsessive soccer bores with their wobbly handicams. Imagine the sheer farce of Calvin Klein forcing every market across the land to close because a few stalls flog phony CK knickers.
Yesterday I was off blog in a vain attempt to forget the whole sorry story and return to a near normal life of degenerate leisure. We had a late liquid lunch followed by a reinstatement of Liam’s conjugal rights hurriedly withdrawn when I was branded a petty felon. We topped off our perfect day with an evening of ‘Strictly’ courtesy of the BBC iPlayer. It was delectable to behold that unreconstructed old bigot and professional virgin with two left feet, Miss Widdecombe, finally expelled from the show. National institution? She should be in one.
I retired to my pit pissed and paranoid thinking our phone might be tapped.
We amused ourselves with a night of catch up TV by plugging the laptop into the box. It is hugely preferable to BBC Entertainment, a misnomer if ever there was one. The whole channel broadcast an endless nightly loop of old shows indispersed by obscure BBC3 flops. I like a little bit of The Weakest Link now again but not the same episode recycled a dozen times and Robin Hood is a real repeat treat. I’m overdosing on so many cutting edge medical dramas I need my stomach pumped. I know I can just watch the other side but Auntie, like chocolate, is an essential comfort. Besides, I’m waiting to see the name of an old friend roll by on the closing credits of Holby Shitty when he served his time as series editor. Since we’ve just reached the episodes originally broadcast just after The Six Day War, I’m not counting my goats.
Clement watches Sky but needs a satellite dish the size of Jodrell Bank to receive it. The service is so unreliable he’s constantly getting a little man in to fiddle with his aerial. Still, it keeps a smile on his face.
Sipping my morning cuppa lounging about the patio in sun specs and a T shirt in early December is a novel experience. The stark contrast with the frigid Siberian winds that have plunged Albion into a mini ice age is not lost on me. My mother, a spritely, feisty 81 year old Ulsterwoman still young enough to run for buses, complains bitterly through chattering dentures that she is unable to leave the house for fear of a breaking a hip. She is not the kind of woman to be imprisoned for long. As a beautiful young girl she was swept off her feet by a penniless, pretty soldier boy with a twinkle in his eye. She was plucked from a small Irish town made famous by an IRA bomb and found herself on a slow boat to Malaya. I was a home birth in an army barracks which may explain my enduring fetish for uniforms.
We took breakfast at the hotel, a predictable and unadventurous spread with cereal that looked and tasted like ‘Go Cat’. The only other guests were a troupe of Teutonic trekkers dressed in sturdy sensible shoes and beige pack-a-macs preparing for the day’s hike. I watched in silent awe as lunches were deftly packed into tuppaware with all the efficiency of a BMW production line. Vorsprung Durch Technik.
The Birds
Our final jaunt was to Miletos, located in an altogether more agreeable stretch of terrain. We meandered through the Menderes delta passing through cotton fields and jobbing agro-köys arriving at the remains in time for a late lunch. Regrettably, Liam and I were rather ruined-out, so we took tea in a rickety café to admire the imposing amphitheatre from afar leaving the muscle boys to scramble alone. Their stay was prematurely curtailed by a scourge of ravenous mosquitos. They took fright from the site frantically flailing their arms around like Tippi Hedren in ‘The Birds’.
With the weather set fair, we accompanied semigrey hedonistas Greg and Sam on a road trip to reconnoitre some of the tumble down sites north of Bodrum, establishing ourselves at a secluded hotel on gorgeous Lake Bafa. We wanted a cute log cabin with charming rustic fittings. We got a Spartan concrete bunker decorated with blood red squashed mosquitos, a lumpy hard bed and stiff, thin towels. The entire complex is shabby chic but without the chic. However, the views across the lake are spectacular and the genial proprietor, Wilhelmina the beefy, bearded lady, is welcoming and helpful. She attempted to persuade us to participate on a five hour eco-trail walk. Not unless there’s an organic bar at the end, I thought.
Our first excursion took in Euromos where there’s little to see apart from the well preserved Temple of Zeus so a five minute stopover is enough for most. Onwards we drove to Didyma in search of the Temple of Apollo. We journeyed across miles of tedious, treeless, tatty flatlands broken only by occasional heaps of building rubble and skeletal erections. This is not the best of Asia Minor and provides an unappealing gateway to the truckloads of tourists who flock to Altinkum during the summer scurries. Now I know why Thomas Cook prefer to ferry their clients after dark. We passed through dire Didim, an ugly and unfinished urban sprawl, and arrived at the temple to find it fenced in by a shanty town of scruffy establishments. Despite this encroachment and the vandalism of Christian fanaticism, earthquakes and frequent plunder, the vast shrine is an impressive pile and well worth the entrance fee.
The hilarious highlight of our visit was tripping over a pair of horny tortoises. The smaller, younger male pursued his ardour with all the steely determination of a spring-loaded waiter chasing a VOMIT, banging his head on the rear of her shell until she relented. Typically, the no nonsense, no foreplay intercourse ended as soon as it started and the old broad looked bored throughout.
After a couple of hours surveying the ruins we travelled onwards to Altinkum, the playground of choice for those on a budget. We expected little and the resort lived down to our expectations. Few seaside towns look appealing out of season (and Southend looks unappealing in any season) but the pretty beach is utterly wrecked by the paltry parade of trashy hassle bars lining the frayed promenade. I don’t mind down market resorts for those on a fixed budget. I’m partial to a full English and a tuneless, tanked-up karaoke myself from time to time. Nevertheless, Spain does it so much better. It’s small wonder that a holiday home in Altinkum is cheaper than a Bournmouth beach hut.
We returned to the woods to drink the night away, star gaze and UFO spot. The frequency of alien sightings rose as the wine bottles drained.
The screens have gone blank in Turkey and I hear there is much speculation about whether I should expect a knock at the door. I must confess, I have been slightly worried; have I unintentionally transgressed some Turkish Law or other? The explanation is both more prosaic and more ominous. It seems my blog has been caught in a blanket ban on hundreds of thousands of websites hosted by Google. When I first set up my site, Google assigned what’s called an ‘IP Address’ which I share with tens of thousands of others. At least one of these other sites has fallen foul of the authorities so the IP address itself has been blocked. So it’s one out, all out. I’ve looked at some of the other sites affected; they include many Turkish businesses and a lady in Istanbul promoting her pretty sketches. How sad.
As Churchill famously said “We’ll fight them on the beaches”. That’s the wartime prime minister by the way, not the nodding dog in the car insurance adverts.
In the fine old tradition of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ I’d like to introduce my first guest blogger – clever, courageous Karyn from Kirazli. Vetpat Karyn lives in a traditional Turkish village about 10 kms from Kuşadası. She describes her arcadian idyll as ‘surrounded by flowering fields of cherry trees, figs, vines and olives. The village is a traditional Turkish Koy of narrow twisting streets, stone and whitewashed houses and terracotta roofs. Cooled by fragrant pine scented breezes Kirazli is a world away from the hot and bustling tourist centres of the coastal strip’. Sounds like a lot of old fragrant flannel to me so Liam and I will just have to check it out and dish the dirt. Take a look at Karyn’s own blog Being Koy. It a class act. In the meantime, here’s her provocatively unkoy take on the plight of a woman alone in Turkey. Enjoy.
Karyn
I am immune to the charms of Mediterranean men, I grew up on the Costa Del Sol and after a brief bout at thirteen with the virus that is the Spanish Waiter I developed a life long immunity to all those sons of the southern lands who flash dark eyes and mutter unlikely compliments in clichéd accents.
Of course this doesn’t stop them hitting on me, any time, any place, anywhere; because Turkish men in the tourist resorts are the Martini boys of love.
Hyped up on exaggerated tales told in tea houses across the hinterland through the dark days of winter the men who flock to the resorts for work in the season are brainwashed into believing that western women are not only very rich and bang like barn doors but are blind and have no sense of smell, so even blokes who look like the back end of a goat and smell similar are in with a chance.
Of course there is a grain of hope in their dreaming, and every summer season will throw up a friend of a friend who swept a British woman off her feet in nanoseconds and landed a life of luxury and indolence in return for climbing on top and thinking of Turkey.
This all makes life difficult for me and those of my expat sisters who really aren’t interested; nobody minds a mild flirtation, sexual attraction makes the world go round, but there is a time and a place for everything and the Turkish Lothario has boundary issues.
Top marks for inappropriate timing likely to get you at the very least a broken jaw go to Salatin, a taxi driver with broken English and a manic gleam in his eye. He propositioned me on the drive to the airport when I was flying my husband’s remains home for the funeral. He really wanted a British wife; I really wanted his gonads crushed beneath my boots.
Top marks for seizing the moment go to the Manager of Burger King in Kusadasi who managed to fit a sleazy come on into the two seconds it took me to order a meal. “You want to go large?” he leered at me whilst stroking his groin suggestively. I picked up a limp French fry and peered at it; it drooped pathetically between my fingers. I looked at him; I maintained deadpan eye contact until he withered noticeably and slithered off.
Top marks for trying to cop a feel at any opportunity go to the noxious and extremely short market trader who, when my friend agreed to buy a pair of jeans, showed his delight by grabbing me and rapidly groping all he could reach. A heavy stamp with a finely engineered Kurt Geiger heel onto his bare toes sent him limping away.
It seems the only place to avoid unwelcome advances is my village. Here the older men nod respectfully at me and the young men politely step out of my way with murmured greetings. It couldn’t be any other way in the village, disrespect me and my male neighbours will be compelled to hurt you and my female neighbours, who are infinitely more imaginative, will find ways to make your life a living hell for the next fifty years!
Obviously the only thing they talk about in the tea shops here are how ripe the grapes are, not how ripe are the yabanci women. I am very grateful for that.
We sought provisions in the Thursday pazar. Split into two, edibles and non-edibles, the market is a splendid melting pot of punters, peasants, spivs, hawkers and pick pockets. Bazaars are big business and the whole enterprise is a travelling circus with stall holders moving from town to town each day. The edible section is a pot pourri for the senses – great quality fresh fruit and veg, aromatic herbs and spices, exotic dairy produce, the odd chicken in a cage and the usual selection of Turkish delight. Prices are cheap.
The non-edible bit is less agreeable: stall after stall of tatty household and electrical goods without a kite mark between them, poor quality fake designer wear, overpriced linens and the hard sell carpet traders. We are pestered with ‘Hello Jimmy’ and ‘Cheaper than Primark.’ Of course, the answer to the latter proclamation is that nothing is cheaper than Primark.
Our rapport with Tariq our toothless caretaker has warmed up nicely following an inauspicious start of reticence and bewilderment. These days we are greeted with a broad gummy grin and a decisive handshake of digit crushing magnitude. Tariq has swapped his shapeless beige shorts and crumpled t-shirt for ankle length black baggy pantaloons and Christmas jumper, fetchingly set off by a see-through cagoule and a bobble hat during inclement weather. He is from the Hatay (the little finger of Turkey that pokes into Syria) and is more Arab than Turk. There’s virtually nothing to do on the site except keep watch so it amuses him to visit us now and again, indulge in a little good humoured arm waving banter on the patio and help himself to our Marlboro’ Lights. His only word in English is “rubbish?”
The screens have gone blank in Turkey and I hear there is much speculation about whether I should expect a knock at the door. I must confess, I have been slightly worried; have I unintentionally transgressed some Turkish Law or other? The explanation is both more prosaic and more ominous. It seems my blog has been caught in a blanket ban on hundreds of thousands of websites hosted by Google. When I first set up my site, Google assigned what’s called an ‘IP Address’ which I share with tens of thousands of others. At least one of these other sites has fallen foul of the authorities so the IP address itself has been blocked. So it’s one out, all out. I’ve looked at some of the other sites affected; they include many Turkish businesses and a lady in Istanbul promoting her pretty sketches. How sad.
Perking the Pansies 