The Vile Vikings’ upper terrace sits just beneath our patio. It’s a bit of a sun trap and shielded from the wind. Ragnild has decided to let it all hang out, and we have a constant view of her gravity-ravaged baps. To be fair she tries to hide her lower dignity with a piece of string, but she has a rather over-abundant bush which is most upsetting. I am mischievously thinking of presenting her with a jar of Veet as an early Christmas gift. Miserable Cnut continues to be a wretched little man who whines all day about everything. I thought whining was a peculiarly British habit. For the sake of good community relations, I am resisting the temptation to tell him to sod off.
Burning Rubber
We said our goodbyes to Marina the Shitting Kitten and closed the door on the holiday let for the last time. Weighed down by heavy suitcases and boxes of groceries, the under-powered hire car struggled to reach second base camp on Mount Tepe. The smell of burning rubber filled the air. Liam kept his eyes shut and I got out and ascended on foot.
Climb Every Mountain
Our IKEA delivery arrived. Incredibly, the van managed to scale the north face of Mount Tepe, the crumbling, virtually vertical, concrete access road that leads to our new home. Ascension requires an ultra-low gear, decent tyres and nerves of steel. Out of the van leapt half a dozen men who swung into action, unloading, unpacking and assembling. Five or so hours on, our IKEA room sets are ready to be dressed and accessorised. We will move in tomorrow. Fabulous!
Terminal Blockage
We bought three shit bins for the toilets. It’s the custom in Turkey to deposit soiled tissue in a bin next to the pan. Apparently, no one has thought to install large enough pipes to flush the waste away effectively. Subsequently, toilet paper poses a real risk of blockage. In any case, Turks use very little tissue, preferring to rinse their rings with the bidet-style water pipe installed in all pans. It’s a novel idea and one which could be exported globally as the toilet/bidet combo solution for the smaller water closet everywhere. However, I’m told that there is an obvious design flaw as, in the depths of winter, the jet of cold water can result in a nasty icy surprise (or an instant climax, depending on one’s proclivities).
As Liam is a bit squeamish about the whole shit bin thing I delicately raised the matter with Clement. This is one quaint Turkish tradition he refuses to indulge so we have decided to follow suit. From now on, the only solid objects dropped in our bins will be empty jars of Clarins Beauty Flash Balm and Boots No 7 face cream (for men, of course).
Terminal blockage is proving to be the least of our worries. Turkish plumbing in general has a uniquely Anatolian flavour. S-bends are shallow affairs and when the water seal evaporates, noxious fumes leach from every drain. Top tip for Turkey: invest in bleach production.
La Crème de la Crème
The evening of Clement’s supper soiree had arrived, and we waited in our still empty house until quite a few of his guests had turned up before venturing next door. We approached his house with some trepidation. Neither Liam nor I are that good in crowds of strangers and as new kids on the block, there was an added frisson to the occasion. With a cordial welcome, Clement led us like condemned lambs into the body of the kirk. There assembled were the congregation, ‘the gang’ Chrissy whispered, la crème de la crème of the ex-pat community.
We grabbed a drink and bravely resolved to mingle. I occupied an empty seat on the patio next to butch, Brigit from Brisbane, who I rashly assumed to be a lesbian, and threw myself into conversation. Our tête-à-tête tripped along nicely until I innocently but unwisely enquired “Do you have a girlfriend?” With a glacial glare she rebuked me with “I don’t know what you mean” and ignored me for the rest of the evening. Oops. This was to be the first of many social gaffes, though in my defence it was an easy mistake to make given the lack of make-up, masculine attire and boyish hair do. Well, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a bloody duck.
My next social intervention met with much greater success. I sidled next to Charlotte; a vivacious, energetic kind of girl with a bouncing cleavage that heaved in rhythm to her filthy laugh. We hit it off immediately. Charlotte and tall, debonair, silver haired husband, Alan, are ex-pat veterans having lived in Turkey for eight years. They sold up in England and built their dream house in Yalıkavak. It was obvious we shared similar values and I sense a friendship developing.
Next up was lovely social worker Nancy, Charlotte’s best friend visiting from London. Nancy is a shapely, sassy lass of Turkish extraction who speaks Turkish with a Cockney accent. Nancy has abandoned a barren and loveless marriage in search of romance and orgasms. She is having a passionate but stormy affair with a local skipper.
Liam hovered nervously in the background and spoke mostly to Chrissy. She dished the dirt on everyone in the room. Last to arrive were Susan, who marched in with a confident gait, and husband Chuck. Susan is a pretty Fulham girl in her 50s who had been clearly gorgeous in her youth. Chuck is a well built, striking older man with tattoos and warm blue eyes. Feisty and independent, Susan told me she ran away to Istanbul in her teens where she met and married a philandering academic many, many years her senior. The marriage ended in divorce. She then tried on a second older Turk for size. They too divorced. Following her dalliance with the Turkish branch of Help the Aged, Susan left for the New World, settling in LA where she owned a coffee shop and developed a curious mid-Atlantic accent.
Yankee Chuck’s chequered youth perfectly matches his seventies porn star looks. Susan and Chuck’s eyes met across the Gaggia coffee maker; they fell in love and married. Despite (or perhaps because of) his colourful past, Chuck has become a reformed character, virtually tee-total and a bit of a born again puritan. Susan, on the other hand, likes a drink. We were left with the distinct impression that, despite many pretenders to the throne, Susan is truly the queen bee in these parts.
After a few hours of polite inquisition, we decided to withdraw. We walked back to our holiday let for a final shandy on the balcony to debrief. All things considered, we survived the ordeal relatively unscathed. But, are we the ‘right sort?’ we wondered. “Well, we’re not talking Monte Carlo” Liam sighed leading to a more fundamental question to ponder. Was this disparate group of people thrown together purely by chance really our sort? And so, we surmised, the stage is set, the cast assembled, and we made it through the first act without fluffing too many lines.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
I hear the Turkish authorities have finally lifted the bar on You Tube now that the offending article about Atatürk has been removed. Good. I’m not generally in favour of banning things as it tends to drive activities underground. In any case, website bans are a blunt tool and easy to circumvent. At the same time, I hear that Gaydar, the social networking and contact site for gay people, has been added to the list of prohibited sites, presumably on spurious moral grounds. Gaydar is one of those rare British success stories, a social networking site with a global reach. The ban doesn’t affect us personally, but I am saddened by it. It will only add to the sense of loneliness, isolation and alienation that young gay people here must feel.
Because I’m Worth It
I’m slightly perturbed by the slow but steady ascent of grey mane colonising my head. I have long been used to white short and curlies sprouting from my pubis which I have always managed to control with judicious pruning. However, there is little I can do to mask this more obvious sign of my impending decrepitude other than a rejuvenating brunette rinse – because I’m worth it.
A Biblical Plague
We’ve been little troubled by mozzies thus far though I expect this not to last. However, the apartment has been infested by a plague of flies of biblical proportions. Liam and I lay in our bed like great white hunters armed with cans of ‘Raid’ taking pot shots at the swarming pestilence. By morning, the floor was carpeted with the wreckage like a scene from the Battle of Britain.
Communal Crapping
Selçuk is a handsome town, host to a fine museum and spitting distance from the wonder that is Ephesus: world heritage site nominee and arguably one of the most impressive open air museums anywhere. And, since we were in the vicinity anyway, it would have been rude not have a look around the imposing ruins. Ephesus (or Efes to give the place its Turkish name which is also happens to be the name of Turkey’s favourite ale), was one of the most sophisticated cities of antiquity, adorned with grand civic buildings, marble-clad pavements, street lighting and home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Sadly, just one lonely, forlorn re-assembled pillar remains of Artemis’ once vast shrine rising up precariously from a mosquito-infested bog. What a lunatic hadn’t destroyed by torching the place, the Christians had finished off. The rest of the city is a magnificent affair and in impressively good shape after decades of excavation and partial reconstruction. We had decided to drop in at just the right time of the year. As Turkey’s second most visited attraction (after Sultanahmet – the old city – in Istanbul), Ephesus is best avoided at the height of summer when the unforgiving sun and the rag-tag of camera-toting tourists conspire to make the place Hell on Earth.
The city was of immense significance to the early Christian Church. St Paul wrote his Epistles to the Ephesians (to damn them for their debauched ways I suppose, having never read them) and the Virgin Mary is reputed to have lived out her dotage nearby. It can be reasonably argued that Christianity, as an organised religion, was born in Ephesus. Not a lot of people know that.
We hired a guide but soon wished we hadn’t. A serious academic type, he droned on about the fine and upstanding Ephesians: civilised, cultured, always kind to their slaves. We fancied the alternative history, the salacious version, where the same fine and upstanding Ephesians visited the hungry whores via the secret tunnel connecting the great library to the brothel. After the sombre tour, we paid off the guide and re-roamed the ruins unescorted. Something not to be missed is the public latrine. The Romans were particularly fond of communal crapping, artfully combining conversation with evacuation.
Having had our fill, we returned to the car and journeyed back south but were unable to resist another detour, this time to Priene. Built on a natural escarpment high above the Meander River flood plain, Priene is the most complete Hellenistic site in Turkey. Whereas Ephesus overawes with its monumental scale, Priene seduces with its intimacy and superb aspect. We loitered a while as the sun began to set over the Ege bathing the ruins in a soft warm light.
It was time to top up the tank, so we pulled into a service station. Such establishments in Turkey are a joy, belonging to a gentler age, with staff on hand to fill your tank and sponge down your dusty windows. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago when a friendly chap with a cheesy smile and handlebar moustache would fill your car as a lit fag dangled from his gob.
Are You Being Served?
Despite our genuine fear of death or permanent disability, we left for Izmir at first light, driving by hire car due east to Milas, the next sizeable town from Bodrum. From the outskirts, Milas seems to have little to commend it; a nondescript minor provincial town of concrete awfulness. We swung north inland. Ascending into the hills (well, mountains by British standards) we passed alongside Lake Bafa, a stunning expanse of water that reminded Liam of the Italian lakes. Reaching a high plateau, we stopped off near Soke at a long row of giant discount outlet stores built in the middle of nowhere. We breakfasted in McDonald’s: a fondness for egg mcmuffins is a guilty secret of ours. Replete with 50% of our daily allowance of saturated fat, we continued onwards towards Izmir. We hit the toll motorway near Aydin which came as something of a relief. Neat, newly constructed and four lanes wide, it wouldn’t look out of place in Germany. As we descended from the plain back towards the coast, Izmir stretched out impressively before us.
Izmir’s IKEA is located in suburban Bornova, adjacent to a smart shopping centre. We had already pre-selected our major items by thumbing through the catalogue and ambling around the Edmonton branch in London, so I asked a nice young man if there was anyone available to help us. He duly obliged and presented us with our very own personal shopper to guide us around the store. We simply pointed at items indicating “one of those, two of these” and she did the rest, checking stock levels and suggesting alternatives as needed. I felt like a Harvey Nicks celeb and loved it. Liam, on the other hand, found the whole exercise rather unsettling. I’m very much a smash and grab shopper, whereas he’s more of a grazer and likes to take his time, lots of it. We had a bit of a row; our first in Asia. He eventually tolerated the experience with sullen resignation.
After we concluded our business, we took tea in the restaurant and went to accessorise in the market place. The genius of IKEA is the canny strategy of pricing so much so low as to seduce shoppers into buying things they don’t know they want and probably don’t need. Naturally, we complied like proverbial sheep. Two trolley loads later, we sauntered towards the tills. There waiting was a trolley train assembled on our behalf by half a dozen co-workers (as IKEA likes to call its shop assistants), all arranged by our efficient personal shopper. The same brigade of eager workers then packed our market place goodies and wheeled the whole lot to the home delivery desk. I was staggered. What an experience: inconceivable back home where IKEA has taken self-service to an entirely new level of indifference.
Darkness had fallen by the time we left the store, and we were in urgent need of somewhere to bed down for the night. The thought of driving through the bustling city centre during the rush hour terrified us, and so we headed out towards the airport. I thought it reasonable to assume that the international airport of Turkey’s third city would be ringed by hotels. Not a bit of it. The entire vicinity is devoid of inns. As time had marched on and we had grown weary, I suggested a diversion to nearby Selçuk, a small town south of the airport. I had a vague recollection of a decent hotel from a previous visit. We were decidedly relieved to learn that my powers of recall were still in reasonable working order and that the hotel was open for business so late in the season. The Kalehan Hotel is found on the main road into town nestling beneath the citadel. It is a bit of a treasure crammed with gorgeous Ottoman-style antiques and bric-a-brac. Though a little tatty around the edges, it was, nevertheless, a clean, reasonably priced and comfortable place to stay. The breakfast, though, was inedible.
Perking the Pansies 