What a Christmas!

So much has been going on since the last episode I hardly know where to start. Why don't I ever learn to keep up with this blog?

When we left off we had just spent a week or so doing the town with Evan and were on our way to Chios to renew our visas. We have to leave the country every three months for long enough to turn around and go back in again, paying €45 for the privilege. In September and again this month we've taken the opportunity to go to the Greek island of Chios, a couple of km off the Turkish coast, where we can get things like peanut butter and sherry. This one was a whirlwind trip - the boats run only Tuesday-Sunday evenings and Wednesday-Monday mornings, and we had to be in İstanbul Wednesday afternoon to meet Rachel. So we took the bus to the gorgeous port town of Çeşme Tuesday afternoon, got on the boat, arrived in Chios half an hour later, shopped, ate a pizza in our chilly room, slept, jumped out of bed, and arrived back in İzmir in time to pack and catch a taxi to the airport. Our plane landed in İstanbul about the same time as Rachel got in from New York via London, so everything worked out extremely smoothly.

Begüm's parents Hülya and İskender rearranged their lives and household for us again, putting us up for a couple of nights while we glimpsed a few of the sights. It was a little frustrating not being able to spend more than an hour or so at Aya Sofya and the Grand Bazaar, and just being able to glimpse Topkapı through the gates. I hope it whetted their appetites, anyway.

Then back to İzmir by plane in time to tuck Rachel into bed.

The next day was Christmas Eve. Even though I'm retired I still needed to do some church stuff - get the bulletins ready for three services and prepare for the evening one. I was privileged to celebrate at the 8 p.m. service at St. John's. It's a popular place to go on Christmas Eve in Izmir; we had maybe 30 people receive communion but a whole lot more were in the congregation to watch the show!

Christmas Day was a bit of a rush. We had our traditional ketchup sandwiches for breakfast, thanks to Evan who brought some bacon from Canada. Then I needed to rush off to Bornova to get ready for the service there (someday I'll take the time to tell you about the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Bornova). We actually had 35 people there - more than 3 times the previous high. After the service we were invited back to the amazing home of some of the descendants of the builder of the church for sherry and conversation - then home quickly to open presents and prepare for dinner.

I can't honestly say we've ever had a Christmas dinner like that before. We had four guests: Adolfo, a young man from Mozambique who showed up at the church a couple of months ago; Numan, a Turkish friend of his (a serious Muslim); Ayser, another friend of his, Palestinian born in the United Arab Emirates; and Andreas, a Swiss pastor making a pilgrimage around the seven churches of Revelation, whom I met at the church bazaar at the beginning of the month. Andreas recorded the event in his blog (http://www.johannesoffenbarung.ch/arbeitsjournal/Izmir_weihnachten.php) in a very clear and readable German. Scroll down quite far to see pictures of our Christmas Eve service and our dinner party.
One thing that stands out for me from the dinner was Numan excusing himself and borrowing our bedroom to do his evening prayers. I'm glad he felt free to do that, although our bedroom was an incredible disaster area and I'm not sure it was a fitting place. And then, after he was done, we popped our Christmas crackers and discovered they each contained a numbered whistle (more or less tuned) and a silly hat with music on it. Evan discovered a baton and instruction sheet containing the scores for several Christmas carols & other ditties. Good thing there were 8 of us, because that's exactly what we needed to play Joy to the World and Frosty the Snowman. Too silly. And when our guests left to make their way home on the bus and subway they were still wearing their hats and carrying their whistles.

Gotta take a break now. You've been reading long enough. I hope I'll catch up completely tomorrow.

Please note that I'm moving my photo album to Flickr - it's more flexible and more fun than Yahoo. Click on the link to the left to see it.

We'd also like to map where all our friends and family are. Click on the Frapr link to the left to add yourself to our map.

Exploring Izmir with our boy

Since Evan arrived last Wednesday we've been sharing our city with him. We haven't got all that much done, what with his mild jet lag and our extreme sloth, but we've been enjoying ourselves anyway.

Ron (who teaches English to a couple of classes of people who know it fairly well) had the brilliant idea of asking his students to tell him where they'd take our son if they wanted to show him the sights. He collected a list of 15 restaurants and a bunch of places to visit, so we've been working our way through the list (with a few of our own favourites thrown in).

Wednesday night we dragged our sleepy kid out into our dark and rainy neighbourhood to visit the Asensör restaurant, a couple of blocks away. I mentioned it way back on Sept. 7, when the weather was still hot and sunny. It has a fantastic view over the city and the harbour, and pretty good food as well. Evan managed to stay awake long enough to enjoy his first Turkish meal and the view, and then fell into bed and slept for 12 hours.

It's been a bit of a blur since then. One day - I think it was Thursday - Evan and I took a ferry across the harbour to the northwest end of town and bussed partway back to where I thought we might find the Tepekule tumulus, the remains of the earliest settlement in Izmir. Turned out I was wrong by a couple of kilometers, but that meant we had a walk along a busy highway that runs beside the seashore until we got to the Bayraklı marketplace. And there it was, a fenced-in vineyard where they've been growing grapes for at least 5000 years, maybe 7000. Not much to see just now; there are excavations going on, but not in the winter so the gate was locked and all we could see was a grassy area with some grapevines. Still, we could see why people would settle there: there's a freshwater stream flowing out of the mountains, a hill behind the settled area where the townsfolk could flee for protection in case of trouble, a wide fertile plain spreading out in front, and the sea for fish and transportation. Folk were writing there at least 5000 years ago, although there were a few dark ages when they forgot. Homer was probably born there. Even though the site was closed, it felt rather wonderful to be walking over ground that Homer had touched.

Thursday night we dragged Evan to the church choir practice, where he wowed them all by doing a violin obligatto where I'd been supposed to play the recorder. Then out for supper and beer with our parish priest, and home to let the kid fall into bed again.

Friday night the Izmir symphony gave a concert at their hall downtown - a magical performance of the Dvorak cello concerto by a German cellist, and Mahler's 1st symphony. It was our first concert since we settled here, but it won't be our last. It's a good little orchestra and they apparently get great soloists.

Saturday Ron invited Evan and me to drop in on one of the classes that had planned our itinerary. We were supposed to give them a report on what we'd seen so far, but we spent so much time just talking about families, our countries, and other stuff people need to know about each other that we didn't get to that. I think we all enjoyed it, though. Then we explored a little corner of the huge Kemeraltı market, which stretches from the sea to the Agora, the ruins of the Greco-Roman marketplace and town square. That's another thing I love about this place: the market is where it's always been, and the same families have probably been selling the same things at the same stalls for a couple of thousand years. It makes you think... Somehow wars and natural disasters can't defeat the human spirit.

Sunday night Evan helped out at our church's Christmas service of lessons and carols. Some Turkish members of the choir had never sung this music, or even any music, before, but they did a more than acceptable job. Our volunteer temporary choir leader had worked unbelievably hard getting us into shape, and I hope we didn't let him down. We had a good crowd. In Turkey Christmas is a favourite celebration and even non-Christians turn up at church events. You don't hear much Christmas music around town or see many decorations, and you certainly don't get the buy-buy-buy pressure we experience in North America, but there's plenty of Christmas spirit.

Yesterday - Monday - we took a trip out to the Teleferik, a cable car that runs up a mountain to the south of the city. There's a magnificent view of the town and harbour, and a quite acceptable restaurant. It's obviously set up to handle hordes of visitors, but yesterday was so cold we were among a dozen or so visitors. It was Ron's 60th birthday, so we had his birthday dinner up there among the pines and the chickadees.

It is %^#$*& cold just now. It was so cold last night that I wore a woolen hat to bed. We have a great fleece-stuffed comforter that usually keeps us more than warm enough, but last night I was thinking of getting up and putting on another blanket. It was far too cold to get out of our warmish bed for that, though. Today we take a sea cruise to Chios to get our visas renewed again - just the thing for a brisk winter's day. And then tomorrow we rush back here, catch the plane for Istanbul, and meet Rachel. We'll have a couple of days doing the sights there, then back here for Christmas.

I'll add pictures when I manage to get my guys to download them from their cameras - mine ran out of battery a while ago and I've only just remembered to recharge it.

Next installment: the Lewis family hits Istanbul. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, check out our church's web page (see the link in the sidebar).

An evening with the ladies

I was feeding "my" cats some elderly chicken yesterday afternoon when the woman downstairs came by. She's a pleasant young mother of two lively, bright children. We've exchanged greetings on the stairs quite often, and the kids have practised their English on me, but my Turkish hasn't been up to more than that. Yesterday we were able to chat a bit about the cats - how I love cats, and what a good thing it was for me to feed them (sevap she called it, which means an act that fulfils the Muslim's requirement to be compassionate). And then she said it was her daughter's birthday and how they'd like me to drop in in the evening to have some cake.

So I knocked on their door a little after 6 and was swept into their apartment. It was the first time I'd seen the mom without a head covering, and she looked a lot younger and prettier. We spent some time exchanging names - Leslie is a very difficult name for Turks to pronounce. Then the kids wanted me to help them learn the English alphabet. You have to have learned the alphabet in Turkish to appreciate how difficult ours is. There's nothing logical about the letter names. Why "aitch" and "ef" but "gee" and "pee"? And "vee" is surprisingly difficult; the Turkish letter "v" is pronounced somewhere between our "w" and "v" sounds. Most adult Turks can't hear the difference between the two sounds, but I was able to help the kids understand the difference.

And then they put on a video of the mom's home town in the southeast, and when the music started playing they started dancing. First the daughter, who's 12, did quite an amazing belly dance - she can ripple her tummy like the best dancers I've seen. Then mom danced and dragged me into it. Another woman friend of hers turned up and we all danced. The video showed only men dancing together, and there we were all women dancing together - and I realized that here dancing is not traditionally a man-woman thing but something groups of people do together to enjoy the music and the companionship. Turkish society has always been strongly divided into men's groups and women's groups, and traditional people still live that way. If Ron had been able to come (he was teaching) he would have messed up the whole evening!

A couple more neighbour women turned up, and the poor birthday girl just had one friend her own age! But it seems that birthday parties here are for adults, not kids. Anyway, all us ladies chattered away - or they did, and I listened, just letting it flow over me, not trying to decode and translate but just let understanding happen. And for much of the time it did. They talked about the brother of one of them, who'd just died, and about how hard it was for another to find good food in London and not be spoken to in Arabic. Mostly I just enjoyed being in the midst of a group of people who treated me as a friend, one of them. Good thing they didn't expect me to make intelligent conversation, though!

I was there for about 3 hours, and left feeling exhausted but contented. I'm so grateful to have been invited.

Just now I'm sitting near our dear son listening to the Messiah CD he brought along. Evan arrived safely this afternoon and will be here until just after Christmas. "May your eyes shine", the Turks said when I told them he was coming. And indeed my eyes are shining. We're just about to go off for dinner at the Asensör restaurant, and then he will fall into bed. Tomorrow we start showing him "our" city.

In the bleak midwinter

... frosty winds made moan? Not exactly! It's been partly sunny and in the mid-to-upper teens for some time now, and not too windy for a change. Sometimes the winds on our top-floor terrace are strong enough to whip laundry off the drying rack if we don't pin it down securely. I discovered that in early September when I heard some women discussing something below our open window. "Büyük adam!" said one. "Çok büyük adam!" said another (Big man! Very big man!). Shortly afterwards our doorbell rang, and the helpful gentleman from the second floor handed me one of Ron's shirts. It had flown off the rack and down into the courtyard, causing great consternation among the neighbours.

Anyway... the wind isn't doing that just now. It's behaving itself very nicely. And the weather is quite fine much of the time, as you can see from some of our recent pictures; this one from the ferry boat travelling across the bay, for instance.

I caused a flap last Saturday - Dec. 3! - by going to the church's Christmas bazaar with bare feet in sandals. It was warm enough, and all my socks were in the laundry. People stared at me on the bus and on the street; they were wearing winter parkas because it was supposed to be cool.

But there is a little bleakness in my mood just now, caused perhaps by the shortness of the days and the long, dark, smoky nights. People here burn a lot of coal in their living-room sobalar or heater-stoves. And a soba is not a high-efficiency combustion device; it emits a lot of smoke. When you live on the top floor you're the recipient of that smoke, and my lungs don't like it. I'm very tired, probably from struggling to breathe at night.

The bleak mood seems to be affecting more than just me. I keep hearing people - Turks and foreigners alike - complaining about the idiocies of this country. I'm finding the ethnic charm of the crowded rattletrap buses, the insane drivers, and the people dumping garbage onto the street (shitting on their grandchildren, someone called it) beginning to wear a little thin. And today the gods of electricity decided to send a team of workers to cut all the overhead power lines leading into homes on our street in preparation for activating the new underground power lines. Fine, but we spent the day without power. It's hooked up again tonight, but you can bet they'll do it again tomorrow. Our neighbour across the street, who supports his family with his electric sewing machine, was not amused and spent a considerable amount of time in the street sharing his opinion with the world in general and the workers in particular. Not that the workers stayed around long enough to hear it - they evidently had a pressing and lengthy luncheon engagement. And I'm quite sure that once the underground power is connected the old wires will be left dangling until someone figures out how to harvest them for the copper.

Never mind. I must focus on the wonders of this place and not let the stupidities get me down. And one of the wonders is that the fresh produce continues to come. It's different every month but always good. There are orange trees everywhere, it turns out - they show up nicely now that their fruit has ripened. I always thought that orange colour was artificial. And there are lemon and grapefruit trees, too.

There's an interesting fruit ripe now called ayva - quince, I think. Our dear landlady Semiha came over the other day with a jar of marmalade she made from it. Delicious, of course. It looks and tastes a bit like a pear; marmalade is definitely the best way to enjoy it. There's also a lot of new salad greens, including our favourite, rocket - a plant in the cabbage and mustard family that has a sharp tang to it and just shrieks out "vitamins, vitamins!". It grows wild all over Canada but I've never eaten it there.

I guess this place isn't all that bad after all. And in a week Evan will be here for Christmas, and not long after that Rachel arrives, and I can't wait to share the good things around here with them both.

Winter fruit

One thing you notice in the fruit stands and food stores around here - if it's in season you can have it; if it isn't, forget it. None of this asparagus from Chile or California lettuce for us. To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. That's not always a bad thing. When they're available, the cherries here are beyond belief. There's nothing to compare with a tomato from our local manav in the summer.

Mandarin oranges (mandalinas) began appearing a couple of weeks ago. They were green, but very good. Yesterday we bought another bagful. They were a beautiful orange, and they still had fresh leaves attached.

So that's what oranges taste like!

On the other hand, we tasted our first persimmon this morning. They're called cennet hurması here: dates of heaven. Well, maybe. To me it's kinda like the fruit version of okra - slimy and bland. Pity we have a kilo of them. Fortunately I've found a recipe for persimmon cake. I must go and get some baking powder soon.

The ones we got last night were tomato-sized and orange. The other day the manavcı talked me into buying a few hundred grams of some little brown ones. They taste sort of like date custard; not quite as slimy as the big orange things but still not what I'd choose to spend my days in heaven eating. I guess we're not qualified to be Turks yet.

Duhhh!

So today I had 5 minutes of my fame on the Metro Morning CBC radio show - I emailed them in response to their request that people let them know where they were when they listened to the show, and they called back to find out what we're doing here. I'd had a weekend of warning to prepare my response, but could I come up with anything interesting to say? Of course not.

What's happening there? "Well, it's sunny." Bo-ring. What I should have said was something like "We're not feeling any earthquakes today."

What surprised you about Turkey? I'd been spending the whole weekend thinking about that, and all I could think of was "The language and the food." What a sur-prise.

What should I have said? After almost 5 months in Turkey it's just about time to list the surprises:

1. Palm trees and fig trees; the pomegranate at the front of our apartment and the orange tree in the back.
2. The dirty streets.
3. The crazy driving (that's really not a surprise; what surprises me is that anyone survives. Even bigger surprise: we're still alive and have learned how to cross streets like the Turks do.)
4. The kindness and hospitality of every Turkish person we've had anything to do with. The limitless generosity of people who have become our friends.
5. The logic and relative simplicity of the language. We're about 50 years away from being fluent, but we still admire the logical spelling and grammar.
   
6. The recycling method: the poorest of the poor drag huge carts around from garbage bin to garbage bin picking out the useable stuff. We're learning, like others, to put our clean discards in separate bags outside the bin.
   
7. The street cats, feral and skittish, filthy many of them, but still charming.
8. The size of the dead cockroach I found on our back terrace (we haven't seen any inside the house, thank God!)
9. The cell phones - everywhere; everyone has them.Taxi drivers blowing horns and weaving through traffic while lighting cigarettes and talking on the phone.
   
10. The way you say goodbye on a cell phone: "Hadi bye-bye " - "Gotta go. Bye."
11. The number of people who smoke.
12. The way Turkish cigarette smoke doesn't stick to your clothes the way Canadian cigarette smoke does.
13. The murky atmosphere, thick with coal and wood smoke, as soon as the weather got cold (everyone seems to have a small wood or coal burning stove in their apartments.
14. How cold we are in our apartment; how much I wish I'd brought more sweaters.
15. The many young Turkish men who attend our church.
16. The beauty of the young Turkish women, and the old ones too.
    
17. The "covered" women, more than when we were here two years ago, and the stylishness of some of their outfits.
18. The village women who come into town to sell their produce, and the way they squat on their heels on the sidewalk for hours on end. Their extremely practical full skirt-pants that stay modest no matter what.
19. The chickens and sheep and goats roaming the poorer parts of the city.
20. The number of BMWs and Mercedes and Audis and I-don't-know-what expensive and beautiful cars coming down our modest back street.
    
21. The variety of ancestries we see in the faces of the Turkish people. The Turks came 1000 years ago from the Altai region of Siberia and must have been quite Asiatic looking. The Ottoman empire extended from India to Egypt to Hungary and people from all over came to Anatolia. You see people who could be from the Canadian First Nations ; you see people with African ancestry; you see Arabs; you see blonde-haired, blue-eyed people from the Caucasus; you see people who look Balkan. The colours are not as varied as in Toronto, but the ancestries are.
22. The stares when a Turk sees someone who looks non-Turkish. A young man at the church comes from Mozambique and is a deep blue-black colour. He thinks the Turks are racist because they all stare at him and ask him questions. We assured him that they all stare at us and ask us questions too.
    
23. The amount of time it takes to do business here. Most shops look more like offices, with a desk and chairs for visitors. If you're going to do any serious business at all (get your computer fixed, buy some wool) you have to sit down, have some tea and chat before you can get on with things.
    
24. The men playing tavla (backgammon) outside their shops.
    
25. The street sellers.
26. The small number of people who speak English.
27. The number of times we have been taken for Germans. (No surprise that a lot of people speak German.)
    
28. The amount of time I still spend being surprised.
    

That's some of what I wish I'd said in my 5 minutes of glory. Oh well.

I'm back

It's been far too long since I got around to writing here. Lots of excuses, of course:

1. Computer problems. My laptop had never been satisfactory. I bought it because I wanted something to experiment with Linux on and was assured that it would be exactly the thing, but Linux never worked well on it. Then things started breaking - a wire in the power cord, a hinge, the ethernet plugin. Finally it began showing blue screens of death in Windows at inopportune times, and then refused to start up at all. Our local computer shop was able to fix that, but by that time I was visiting Murat Akgül's computer shop friends and had a new one, an HP Compaq. It's a pleasant change having a brand name computer. Things work. But it takes time to set everything up again the way I like it - and the key caps are for the Turkish layout. I haven't decided whether to switch to the Turkish keyboard or to paint the English characters on the keys.

2. I felt grouchy about Turkey for a while after the earthquakes. I thought people overreacted. I began seeing all sorts of idiocies around the place, and I didn't want to write while I was in a bad mood. (The silliest scene: the shopping street a couple of blocks from us is having its pavement torn up and replaced with interlocking bricks. It looks really nice, but it's a big mess while the work is going on. One evening traffic was really backed up while drivers figured out how to get where they were going without falling into the metre-deep hole. One idiot decided to pass the whole line going really quite fast, dodged around the barriers blocking off the work area, missed hitting a street seller parked in the opening, and went flying through the air into the hole. His car will never be the same. Yay! And no apologies for the un-Christian attitude.)

3. During Ramazan we weren't getting all that much sleep. There was lots of visiting at all hours in this apartment building and along the street, and things didn't seem to quiet down until after midnight. Then at 3:30 a.m. the drummers came around, pounding loud enough to start the car alarms and wake the dead. We slept through it after a while, but the quality of our sleep wasn't all that great. So we got moving rather late.
Towards the end of the month the drummers came around to collect their fees - they'd been providing the service of waking us in time to have a good breakfast before fasting began again at dawn. We'd heard they would stand outside the building and keep pounding the drum until everyone paid up, so I gave them some money. They thought it was so funny that a foreigner would pay up that they stood outside our house and give us a special serenade every day for the rest of the month.

4. After Ramazan comes Şeker Bayram - sugar feast, a week of holidays so the country can recover from the deprevations of the month before. Ron didn't have any teaching to do that week, so we took off for a few days in England. It was lovely! The weather was mostly very good: cool, but just one rainy day, good for doing a lot of walking and travelling. We shopped in London one day, then rented a car and drove around Norfolk for two more days. My mother's father's mother came from there, and one of our relatives was known as the Norfolk Giant because he was 7 ft 8 ın tall. We found his tomb at a lovely Saxon church out in the country at West Somerton. It was ınteresting seeing something that has been a legend in my family for years.

Then we spent another day in London, picking up a few more things we needed and visiting Terrance, Sarah and Andrew Bell (who slept through most of our visit). They were the real reason we decided to go to England, and it was good to see them - especially Andrew, 2 months old.

We have some more pictures in my November Yahoo album. If you find you can't see them please let me know.

So life is perking along nicely. We had a pleasant evening yesterday: Begüm's mother Hülya was in İzmir on business and stayed overnight with us. Our landlords, the Akgüls, were able to come for dinner so the people who have been the kindest to us during our time in Turkey could meet each other. We enjoyed the evening a great deal. It's a delight too spend time with such good people. And then, to top it all off, our friend İlker and his fiancee dropped in.

We buy our drinking water from İlker. He delivers it on his motor scooter and carries the huge bottle up 3 flights of stairs for almost nothing. A couple of weeks ago he saw Ron walking past his shop and dragged him in. They'd bought a new computer and he needed help setting it up because all the menus were in English. One thing led to another, and for the past couple of weeks Ron has been dropping in most mornings for tea and English-Turkish lessons. İlker and his fiancee will be getting married in January and moving in across the street from us. So we had a whole bunch of good Turkish friends in our house - what a delight!

Today the people across the street have set up a lokma stand outside their house. It's a custom unique to İzmir, I think. On the anniversary of someone's death the family hires caterers to make these little doughnuts drenched in syrup and hand them out to anyone passing by. I don't think it's done anywhere else in Turkey. I suspect it's a very ancient custom, perhaps dating from Greek or Roman days; it reminds me of the Roman refrigidarium we learned about in Trinity College liturgy classes. I wonder... If possible I'll get a picture and add it to the album.

So here we are more or less up to date. Someday I will get around to writing down my reflections on Turkish appliances and plumbing - you have that to look forward to!

What do you do about earthquakes?

The earth continues to tremble from time to time. It's not very nice, but it's a fact of life. Ron and I are continuing to go about our business as usual, but it feels like we're the only ones. Last night, it turns out, most of our neighbours took off and huddled in the local park around a fire. Our landlords, the Akgüls, whose apartment is taller and built on a less solid foundation, spent the night in their car. They said their place was really rocking and they didn't want to hang around. But why has everyone come home today? Is it any safer in the daytime? Is an earthquake any less likely to strike when the sun is up?

Today the man who is sort of the building president - I guess he heads the condominium association - came to our door and said, "There are rumours that there is a much bigger earthquake coming. We're all leaving, and I think you should, too." But in this country of buildings that drop bits of themselves on your head when the earth is absolutely motionless, I don't think I want to be outside much without a hard hat when the earth is hiccuping. We're planning on staying put in our top-floor apartment in this solid little building.

We're trying to figure out why everyone is so frightened in this country of truly brave people. They really are tough, and brave to the point of heroism when required. And they've worked themselves up into a mighty state of hysteria, it seems to us.

What do you think? Should we stay in our apartment? Should we go somewhere else? Where?

The earth moves again

Another earthquake last night - 5.9. The TV this morning is full of pictures of cold people who spent the night in the parks. We said something like "Oh bleep, another one," and went to bed. Do they know something we don't know?

I'm surprised at how panicky the Turks get with earthquakes. I guess it's not just the Turks - I was talking to someone the other day who works at the large NATO base here. During Monday's earthquake there was a big tough British Special Air Services guy who was running around saying something like "The sky is falling!" and everyone wanted to run outside and go home. Their boss had to point out that the building they were in was built to withstand a nuclear attack, so get back to work.

It's really cool here now - very cool indeed in an apartment that's not heated. Our air conditioner also heats, but it uses so much power that we can't have anything else on when we're using it or it blows all the breakers. Now I'm wishing we'd brought more warm clothes.

The trees don't seem to be losing their leaves, although people tell me they do between December and February. Right now they seem to be enjoying the cool weather and turning greener. The dandelions are everywhere, and the bougainvillea is blooming like crazy. It's like a second spring.

The mandarin oranges are in season now and they're unbelievably good. They're called mandalina in Turkish, and they eat them when they're still green. We drove through some citrus groves yesterday - big oranges and grapefruits - and they look just about ready to pick. Then, they tell us, strawberry season begins about the end of December.

The drive yesterday was thanks to one of those crazy coincidences. Ron and I decided we needed to do some shopping and also needed to explore a bit, so we headed out to the nearest main street and caught the first bus. It carried us off into terra incognita, but a short walk from its terminus brought us to the continuation of our main street and we caught another bus that brought us to the southern suburb of Balçοva. We knew there was a big supermarket there so we headed off in search of it. We found one - not the one we were looking for, but a suitable one - and bought up all the stuff we needed that we can't get in our local shops. At the checkout we bumped into one of the women I'd met at church on Sunday, an Englishwoman married to a man whose family has lived here for 300 years although he has French citizenship (more about that in another blog, I think). They live in a lovely house between the water and the afore-mentioned orange groves. Lovely visit, great adventure.

If the buses are running I'm off this morning for my first haircut in Izmir. More adventures coming, I'm sure.

Earthquakes & other moving events

I'm weeks behind in this blog, thanks to a faulty ethernet port that was keeping me from connecting well to the Internet. But that's fixed, thanks to a techie friend-of-a-friend, and not too soon, either.

Today I woke up with a jolt. Actually I'd been thinking about getting up for some time (it was 8:45), but the bed was warm and comfortable and it's getting pretty cool in the apartment these days. But then the earth moved, and moved, and kept on moving, and I thought I'd rather be close to my Ron just then.

That was the first shock. It was 5.7, according to the TV. Throughout the morning we cocooned in our cozy living room and watched the reflections in the glass door of the china cabinet move and listened to the glasses jingle as more little jiggles happened. Then, just before 1 p.m., there were a couple more big ones - 5.9 and 5.6 - and things began to settle down.

The news says there was almost no damage, and the only injuries were to people who jumped off their balconies in panic. I can understand that. There's something crazy-making about the solid floor moving under your feet. And I think about Kashmir, where the aftershocks of their quake are bigger than what we're going through here.

The Kandilli Earthquake Observatory has a page listing the most recent seismic events in Turkey here, although it's not updated as often as one might like. The USGS page is more up to date.

Meanwhile, we've been having a good life here.

1. First ruins - Sardis
On the first day of Ramazan, Oct. 5, we had a free day so we rented a car and headed off into the countryside east of Izmir. We drove for about 1 1/2 hours through a former river valley (the seacost here is rising rapidly, so the river has diverted to the north), the home of the Lydian civilization that flourished about 700-500 BCE. The Lydians invented coinage to make it easier to handle the plentiful gold they were graced with. I found it interesting looking at the rocks around there, rocks that reminded me of the Kootenays with their rich red and green iron deposits, sulphur showings and quartz veins. I could almost see a sign over the mountains: "There's gold in them thar hills."

We stopped our eastward travel in the little village of Sart, the former metropolis of Sardis. The ruins of the Greco-Roman city are supposed to be fantastic, complete with amphitheatre and synagogue and all sorts of interesting things, but we got diverted to the temple of Artemis at the other end of town. It was quite wonderful and enough for one day. We poked all over the ruins and marvelled at a civilization that would throw such resources into a temple. And - to my great delight - we were adopted by a charming (and clean!) kitten who toured the site in my arms or frolicking at my heels. Fortunately she abandoned us for a German tour group just as I was about to make my plea to bring her home.

After deciding to leave the rest of the ruins for another day, we headed back west and a bit north to the city of Manisa, which has the last mosque designed by the great architect Sinan around 1580. We never did find it, but we took a long drive through a mountaintop park, looking for a shortcut to Izmir that doesn't exist. It was wonderful being high in the mountains again. I miss the high places.

One of the great pleasures that day was quite unexpected. Ron needed to stop for a little midafternoon snooze, so I wandered down the roadside looking at rocks and anthills and other wonders. Finally I came upon a pomegranate tree full of ripe fruit. I've never really enjoyed pomegranates before, but I picked one and started sucking the seeds. What wonderful, refreshing tart juice! And it was great fun having a seed-spitting contest with Ron when he woke up.

2. Ramazan
The month of Ramazan (Ramadan in the rest of the Muslim world) started Oct 5. That may have been why the other drivers were worse than usual during our expedition that day - they were suffering from caffeine and nicotine withdrawal. They certainly were grouchy.

I'm not sure how many Turks observe Ramazan, but I think the majority does in our neighbourhood. From sunrise to sunset they eat and drink nothing. They also don't smoke, and are supposed to refrain from swearing and sexual relations. An hour or so before sunrise (actually closer to 3:30 a.m.) drummers make their way through the neighbourhood beating their drums so loudly that the car alarms go off, waking people up so they can have a good breakfast before dawn. It's amazing how quickly it becomes possible to sleep through all that. When we did get up to have a look we noticed quite a few lights coming on around us. And then at sunset a gun goes off to let people know they can eat again, and all the wonderful smells that have been building up around us give way to the sound of clattering dishes. There's a beautiful bread that's baked only at this time of year (a huge flat loaf costs .25 YTL) - delicious when fresh from the oven, but as soon as it's cool it begins to go stale. People seem to focus on food at this time of year. The month will end Nov. 2 with Seker Bayram - sugar feast - when the kids come door-to-door looking for candy (and the drummers turn up looking for a handout too).

Even if they don't really fast during Ramazan, most people seem to give up drinking alcohol. We've noticed quite a number of bars shut down for this month. The one near us is using the time to refinish its furniture. Some little restaurants close, too, and the number of street sellers seems way down.

3. More ruins and a concert
Saturday the 8th we enjoyed a most wonderful experience: a concert in the ancient amphitheatre of Ephesus. We haven't done a real tour of Ephesus yet, but this was a suitable introduction to it. The amphitheatre was probably the same one where the image-makers of Ephesus threatened to riot against the apostle Paul, who was ruining their business. It could seat about 20,000 in its heyday, and even now, with the most dangerous ruins closed off, it holds about 15,000. It was close to full for this concert, Verdi's Requiem performed by the orchestra of a university here augmented by a German orchestra, with a 150-voice German choir and 4 Izmiri soloists. Beautiful performance of wonderful music, and the acoustics are so great in that place that we could hear every note. Wow!



4. A brush with officialdom
A while ago we got a notice that we should do something or other or be fined. We showed it to our landlords and they seemed really concerned. Apparently it said we should tell the local officials who we were. We hadn't realized that every Turk registers their location with the police and tells them when they move. The previous tenant of our apartment had registered in a new location, so the police wanted to know who was living here now.
The Akgüls got the forms we needed to fill out and helped us complete them, then took us to see the muhtar, the head of the district we live in. We were welcomed into his tiny office and sat while the Akgüls carried on a spirited discussion with the muhtar - a dignified older gentleman - and his assistant. This ended when the room filled with police officers, one of whom had shiny gold buttons and trim and was greeted by the muhtar with kisses on both cheeks. Turns out this was the new chief of police of Konak, the part of Izmir we live in (Izmir is kind of like Metropolitan Toronto used to be, with lots of separate municipalities forming one big city). He was visiting all the muhtars of his area, finding out what their concerns were and how things were going generally. So we were all ushered out of the little office into the park outside, and white plastic chairs appeared, and we all sat around in a circle making polite conversation. If it hadn't been Ramazan there would have been glasses of tea for everyone, but the chief said he was fasting so we didn't have refreshments.
Anyway, the general consensus of the muhtar and the chief of police was that we should register with the police at the foreigners' office downtown. So off we all went to the foreigners' office, but when it turned out that we were happy with being tourists and didn't want permanent residents' permits, they weren't interested. I guess most tourists stay in hotels and the police get copies of the hotel registrations, keeping track of foreigners that way. After that I got us registered with the British consul so at least someone will know who and where we are, in case of emergency. The earthquakes have made me glad I did thatç

There's lots more going on, but this is enough for you to have to read for now. Stay tuned. And have a look at our October pictures here.

You can tell you need to get out more when...

... the big excitement in life is a new garbage can.

Yesterday the Konak Belediyesi - the administration for this part of Izmir - replaced the garbage bins on the street. We have big bins in front of every few apartment buildings, emptied every morning into an ordinary-looking garbage truck by men who physically lift the things and dump them. Until yesterday they were great heavy metal battered stinky blue things, and the emptying was accomplished with a lot of clattering and banging and shouting and smells. Yesterday a truck came along and put out a bunch of nice shiny new green plastic bins, and took away the old ones. Today I didn't even notice garbage collection. It's soooo exciting!

The joys of Greek; or, Pictures I should have taken

I have never studied Greek - one of the effects of getting my M.Div. from Trinity College, Toronto and not Wycliffe. However I do have a B.Sc in chemistry in my history and a passing interest in physics. Net result: I know my Greek letters. So I was able to decode most of the signs in Chios, given enough time (not that I needed to; most were in English too). And since English has borrowed a lot of words from Greek, I could figure out what a lot of them meant.

But one of them gave me a start. Here was this big transport truck bearing down on me, and on its front was painted something like Χιοσ Μεταφοροσ: Chios Metaphoros. I'd never thought of a truck being a metaphor before.

Chios

We were in Chios last Friday and Saturday. (Here's a map of the area so you can get an idea of where we went). Turkish tourist visas are good for 90 days; then you have to leave the country and pay again to get a new stamp on your passport. Our visas expired on the 27th (today!), so it was fairly urgent that we get out of the country and start again.

The boat to Chios that we were booked on leaves in the morning, so the night before we went to Çeşme, the tourist town closest to this particular Greek island. It was really strange being a tourist again! It was the first time in three months that we'd been surrounded by languages other than Turkish. There weren't a lot of English speakers there, but an awful lot of Dutch and Scandinavians. It seems like there are package tours to the Greek Islands from northern Europe that give people a day in Turkey as an extra bonus feature.

I kept wanting to say, when touts leaped out at us from store doorways, "No, I'm not a tourist. I live here!" We did that a couple of times, which opened long conversations with the nuisances still aimed at getting us to buy something. That's a part of Turkey I don't like. But we had a nice chat with the restaurant busboy who used to live a block or two from our apartment. He really wanted to talk with us to work on his English, but his boss kept sending him back to work. Pity.

So in the morning we got up earlier than I wanted to, finally found the boat departure place and staggered on board, having our exit duly noted by Turkish authorities. Half an hour later we were in Greece.

It's awfully tempting to make comparisons between Greece and Turkey - or between Chios and Izmir - that don't flatter Turkey all that much. I'll try not to do that. Basically, it struck us that Greece seems to be looking outward, northward and westward, and is eager to be a part of Europe in every possible way. It shows most in the prevalence of English. Even in tourist spots in Turkey you won't find many people who speak English. Tour operators seldom have English-speaking staff. The customs and immigration officials we've met don't speak English. And if you don't have English-speakers there, where are you going to find them?

The problem is, Turkey didn't place much importance on teaching foreign languages until a few years ago. And we suspect that their teaching methods don't equip students to think independently and face new situations with confidence. So if you're going to Turkey you have to learn at least a little bit of Turkish, and make Turkish friends really fast because you're going to need them.

Anyway, we liked Chios. It was pretty, it was clean, it was fairly quiet and people could talk with us. Friday we walked around town a bit, eating lunch (our first meal of the day), checking out things like the Orthodox cathedral and a few stores (but Chios believes in the siesta principle - businesses shut down between 2 and 5 or so), and getting our bearings. In the evening we found a store that sells toasters - wonder of wonders - and got ourselves one (in Turkey "tost" is a grilled cheese sandwich, and a tost makinesi is a sandwich grill. I hadn't been able to find anyone who even understood the concept of a toaster before we left). We also found a little supermarket that supplied the other essentials we'd been missing: peanut butter, Parmesan cheese, and Scotch. No Cheez Wiz though.

Saturday we rented a car and drove around the southern half of the island. Wow! Such scenery! And interesting stuff going on, too. The main industry of the island is the production of mastic, a gum that is collected from a bush that grows all over the islands, and on the Aegean coast of Turkey too. It seems that only the bushes on Chios produce this resin. It's been a big business for them for 500 years or more - maybe for millennia. The smell of the stuff permeates the island (it's a very nice smell).

We visited some towns that were established by merchants from Genoa and fortified to protect the mastic and the people who harvested it. They're still medieval-looking, and very quiet now because most of the younger people have left. There isn't as much demand for mastic as there was in Ottoman days, when the ladies of the harem were addicted to chewing the stuff. Petroleum has taken over in most of the industrial applications, but there's still a big market in the Arabic countries apparently. There's a good web site here that tells a lot about the towns and the island.

Anyway, we got some pictures that don't even begin to catch the beauty of the place (mine are in the Yahoo photo album). Then we caught the evening ferry home, and were back in our little apartment in Izmir by bedtime. Good trip. Good to be home.

More hospitality, and other Monday notes

Well, it had to happen. Saturday afternoon we decided to go out shopping together, but I didn't want to bring my purse because I had all sorts of things piled onto & in it to take to church on Sunday. So I grabbed my wallet and nothing else - especially not my keys. I went out the door and started down the stairs, and Ron followed - without his keys, as it happened. As the door clicked shut he said, "Do you have your keys." "No," I answered. "Do you have yours." "No!"

Fortunately he had his phone, so we called the blessed Semiha. Half an hour later she was at the house with the card a locksmith needed to make a new key.

Meanwhile the neighbour across the street had seen us waiting forelornly outside the apartment. First he insisted that we take a couple of chairs and sit on them, and then he convinced us to come inside for a glass of tea. And that's where Semiha found us, sitting in the middle of an extended family from Antakya (mother, older sister and neice of our neighbour visiting for a wedding) drinking tea listening with minimal understanding to a spirited discussion on Turkey and the EU. Of course Semiha had to have tea, too, so the whole exchange took another couple of hours of her time, but it was kinda fun.

Given our limited memories, we're going to have to find a place to keep the spare key. Maybe our neighbour across the street would look after it for us. Hmmm.

Church on Sunday - I preached for the first time since leaving Creston. The gospel was one of my favourites: the landowner who paid the workers who worked an hour the same as the ones who worked a whole day. It's a good one for that congregation, which seems to be about half Turkish, many of them born Muslim.

St. John's doesn't make a special effort to convert Muslims. Its priest and most of its English-speaking congregation have a healthy respect for Islam in its healthier forms. But Atatürk's vision of the new Turkey was a secular, modern society, not tied down by Islamic tradition. As a result many young Turks have been raised essentially without religion, or with only the outward forms and not the inner meaning. They're trying to find something to fill the hole in their lives, and some of them end up in the Anglican church.

The congregation is a warm and welcoming one, and Father Ron, our priest, has developed a service that both Turkish and English people find comfortable. His Turkish is excellent, so he's able to preach part of his sermon in Turkish. The Gospel and the prayers of the people are done in both Turkish and English, and there's a booklet giving the Turkish translation of the whole service. Last week, when I presided but didn't preach, I found it quite unsettling at first to hear the congregation's responses coming back in two languages - but how good it is! Many of the non-Turkish members speak good Turkish and help welcome the new young people. And the rest of us - Ron and I, at least - are working at learning more. I'm looking forward to being able to do more in Turkish, but not just yet - my accent is too atrocious.

Hospitality

One thing we knew about Turkey before we came: the Turks are unbelievably hospitable. They equal or maybe even surpass the Kiwis in that area. Nothing we've experienced since the beginning of July has changed our opinion.
Monday night we were invited to our landlords' apartment for dinner. What a feast! We continue to thank God and our good luck that we happened to end up with the Akgüls for landlords. Semiha is an incredibly good cook, and Celal is equally good at barbecuing. Every time we get together I learn something more about cooking from Semiha, and on Monday we learned how to barbecue from Celal. Combine that with their two good-looking and interesting sons, and we found ourselves enjoying the evening immensely.

Semiha has also been dedicating her life to getting us connected to Türk Telekom's ADSL service. Yesterday she succeeded. I think she'd spend a lot of time reminding the company that was to connect us that they'd better get the job done. Yesterday they told her they'd do it at 4 p.m., so she arrived at 4 to make sure I didn't have any problems. Of course the technician didn't come until 6, so she gave me all that time from her busy life. I enjoyed drinking tea with her and getting to know her better, but I didn't want her to sacrifice so much for us. And when I thanked her she said as usual "Bir şe değil" - "It's nothing."

And then there's the way they do business here. I haven't experienced this much, but Tuesday I decided to visit a wool store I'd seen from the bus. I dropped in and selected a crochet hook and some knitting needles and picked up some balls of wool from their discount bin (50 cents for 100 gram balls!). Of course the two young guys looking after the store guessed I was a foreigner (maybe it was showing them the piece of paper I'd written the word for crochet hook on and asking them how to pronounce it) and they asked where I came from. One thing led to another and we got chatting. They pulled out a chair and told me to sit down - and then a man walked in with a nifty little tea carrier and I suddenly had a glass of tea in front of me. Soon the father of one of them arrived - he speaks English well - and our conversation got easier. We talked about the cost of living and gas prices and climate (everyone here thinks Canada is covered with ice and snow 8 months of the year) and had a great visit - as though they had nothing better to do with their time. Of course it was not only great hospitality - it was also a very good way of ensuring that I'll come back, which I will.

Knitting yarn is incredibly cheap here - probably the cheapest thing I've found so far. Even the full-price stuff is only a couple of liras. And it's big name brand, the stuff you see in European knitting magazines and would die to get hold of: Pinguin (sp?) etc. It's made in Turkey, it turns out - their textile and fibre industry is really big. I should have brought my knitting needles.

Crochet hooks are odd here. I'm used to having a flat area on the shaft that makes it easier to grip and get leverage. Not here. I've had to wrap a band-aid around the shaft of the one I use to make it possible to use. I asked Semiha about it and she showed me her grip: completely different from mine. She knits differently, too, which I expected - the European style has less waving of arms around and is faster once you get the hang of it, but I'd never seen the European crochet hook grip before.

So as you can tell, life is pretty settled now. It's nice having wireless high-speed Internet in the apartment. We can even sit out on the terrace and communicate with you now, or could if the sun weren't so bright that we can't see the screen. Life's tough!

Travels about town

Well, we did get out and visit Kadefikale the other day. There are some pictures in our September photo album, including this one, a view out over the city from the ramparts, looking north across the inner harbour to the hills.

It was a lovely sunny day, not too hot and perfect for a bit of exploring. We knew we needed the #33 bus but we weren't sure where it came closest to our home (nearly passes by it, actually) so we went down to Konak, one of the main squares of town, and found it there. Half an hour's tour through the city got us to the top of the highest hill within the town, in the middle of a really, really old area - old enough that the houses are real brick and stucco, not cement block.

We got there around 5, just in time for the evening call to prayer. There was a mosque very close at which it started, but soon a wave of sound seemed to envelop the city. For maybe 5 minutes the sound rose and fell, and so did the hair on the back of our necks. What a sound! There must have been hundreds of mosques calling the faithful to worship, every one of them starting at a different time and many of them using different chants. The words are the same, but there are many different musical modes in which they can be sung. (More about the modes here and the call to prayer here). I enjoy the call to prayer when we hear it at our apartment from the 7 or so mosques nearby, but it's overwhelming when you hear it rising from a city of 3 million souls.

That finished, we explored a bit. There are women in the grounds from a part of southern Turkey that used to belong to Syria (still does, according to Syria), demonstrating the use of their ancient looms and selling their weaving. Some of their work is really nice, and I might pick up some to bring back to Canada.

The castle has a huge (formerly) underground cistern to keep it supplied with water for a good long time, and it looks like there were two aqueducts bringing water from the surrounding mountains. We wanted to investigate what looked like their ruins, but we got swarmed by a pack of little boys saying "Hello! Money!" Bunch of brats and impossible to get rid of (I tried asking them for money and nearly got 5 korush out of the deal, but he changed his mind). We'd never encountered anything like that in Turkey before and we didn't like it. It felt like something the kids may have imported from their homes near Syria - it's certainly nothing a proud Turkish kid would do. They can be pests and brats but they'd never hound you for money.

So we left soon after, not buying anything from the weavers (unfortunately), and made our way back home via bus and Metro. Neat place and I'm glad we went there, but we won't go again soon or often.

Yesterday Ron was out pounding the pavement downtown looking for an English school that needs his talents (possibly finding one, too), so I took off on my own and visited our local weekly bazaar a few blocks away. Our landlady said it's an excellent place to find clothes and has good fruit and vegetables too.

Wow! I've never been in the middle of such crowds. The stalls occupy both sides of an ordinary residential street, and peddlars also spread their wares on patches in the middle. Shoppers squeeze their way past three blocks of this - clothing of all sorts, some of it quite nice, none of it costing more than 5 YTL. The shoppers aren't all little old ladies looking for bargains, too - you can see they're normal to well-dressed. The merchants (all men) stand on top of their tables shouting "Bir milyon" (one million old liras, 1 YTL, about $1 Canadian), "Abla bekliorun" (big sister, come and look) and waving some item of clothing. One guy advertised his wares by wearing them - he looked charming in a flowered dress.

The veggies filled an open space of some sort - a park? couldn't tell for the crowds - about another 3 square blocks. They were beautiful and so cheap: tomatoes for 50 cents/kilo, peaches to die for for the same, nothing more than 1 YTL a kilo. If it had been safe to stop and take a picture I would have, they were so photogenic. You never see such perfectly ripe produce in Canada - picked that morning, still screaming.

I should say something about Turkish currency reform and the confusion it's caused. When we were here two years ago the exchange rate was roughly 1 million lira to the dollar. Everything was priced in millions and it sometimes got confusing counting the zeroes. People took to dropping the last three zeroes and quoting low prices in hundreds, meaning hundred thousands - so a kilo of tomatoes would be "beş yüz" - 500, meaning 500,000 lira. But then the government got smart and revalued the currency so that 1,000,000 old lira = 1 YTL (Yeni Türk Lira - new Turkish lira). Simple, you'd think. But people are still used to prices in hundreds, so a kilo of tomatoes is still "beş yüz". It startled us at first - $500 a kilo for tomatoes? No, it's really 50 cents. The Turks are trying to get used to the idea of two figures after the decimal point after so long thinking in thousands, and you often see prices like 1.250 YTL = 1,250,000 old lira. Actually they use the comma for a decimal point, so it really looks like 1,250 YTL, which startles us even more.

Settling down

We've been in our Izmir apartment almost two weeks now and it feels like home. We have a telephone (0232 262 08 14) and a dial-up Internet connection (ADSL coming "any day now"). We know where to shop and how to get around town by subway, bus and dolmuş. We get drinking water delivered within half an hour of a phone call (no talking necessary - they recognize the phone number), and we've learned the hard way always to have lots of tap water on hand: the water goes off most days, and last week it was off for 36 hours straight. That was no fun. We had 8 litres on hand and it takes 6 to flush the toilet. This was during our bout with gastrointestinal distress. 'Nuff said. Now we've got 20 litres tucked away, increasing every time we get another spare bottle.

The weather turned bearable last Thursday night when the wind seemed to change and the air became cool. Now the daytime temperatures get up to the low 30s but at night it's in the teens - really nice for sleeping. We don't have to stay inside beside the klima in the afternoons and we can get out an explore a bit.

Not that we are doing all that much yet. This retirement business is rather pleasant; I enjoy being able to sleep 10 hours at night & then have an afternoon nap. Maybe someday I'll recover from my sleep deficit, but I'm in no hurry.

Last week we did a little exploring in the neighbourhood. Our house is in the upper part of the south end of town, a couple of blocks from an impressive cliff. The old Jewish community grew up here and at the base of the cliff - the rich folk lived down below near the sea, and the working-class types gathered up here. A hundred years or so ago a community philanthropist built an elevator to carry the frail and weak from the bottom to the top of the cliff. The city runs it now, but it's quite hard to find. According to the map we have it should be next door, but we couldn't see it anywhere. So on Saturday we set off in search of it with noteable success.


There's a very nice-looking restaurant around the top of the Asensőr. Someday we must try it out. The view is really pleasing, too:

Izmir looks pretty good on a sunny day. At the top of the hill on the right there's a place called Kadefikale. We hope to go there today or tomorrow. It is the remains of an ancient fortress first occupied about 3000 years ago. This is an old part of the world.

We had dinner last night with a group of teachers from the International School, including a couple of former residents of Creston and a woman from church. One of them mentioned that they'd felt an earthquake a few days ago. I checked the Turkish earthquake observatory site and discovered that the Aegean area has magnitude 3 quakes daily and Izmir every week or so. Fortunately that's not strong enough to be felt, but it does remind one that this is a seismically active part of the world. That's a reason for living in an old apartment building, I suppose: it's survived a few earthquakes already, so it must be built right.

The Second Epistle of Ron

You might have received this already by email, but in case you haven't - here's another point of view and a more coherent account of our adventures.

Two months in Turkey! Here’s how we came to be settling in to a furnished apartment in Izmir.

After our 4-week Turkish course in Istanbul we flew to Izmir for a few days to look for a place to stay and for a job. My hope is that being a native speaker of English, and having had an accredited one-month course in Calgary last March on how to teach English as a Second Language, I should be able to find a teaching job. The idea is to have a clearer focus to life here than just shopping and visiting. Our friend Begum came for part of the few days to help with language. Right now our Turkish is only just beyond the “point and grunt” stage in vegetable stores and is certainly not up to answering apartment rental ads in newspapers. So with Begum’s help we did find an apartment we like, up three flights of stairs to the top of a little apartment building a couple of blocks away from a busy street with lots of shops and buses and a subway station. She also took us to visit one of her friends - a girl she shared her apartment with last year in Nanaimo who has now returned home to Izmir. She (the friend), like virtually everyone else we have met, offerred to help us with any language or other problems but we haven’t taken her up on the offer yet.

One of the main reasons we chose Izmir is that it has an Anglican church. Leslie has been emailing its priest for several months and is going to help out there. On the Sunday morning we attended a service with no music and no lights because the palm trees surrounding the church were being trimmed so the power was turned off. Even without music it was a wonderful service, partly because some of it was in Turkish (perhaps a third of the congregation is Turkish). Everyone seemed pleased to have Leslie (and me) there and there were lots of offers of help.

Begum left a couple of days before we signed the lease, but one of the helpful people we had met at church came with us to translate. The lease-signing took forever! The translator is a young Turkish man and he and his family are Christian, a rarity in Turkey. So the very hospitable apartment owners wanted to talk to him at length about his parents and his plans to be ordained as a Anglican priest, and to us about what we are doing in Izmir, and all about their family (he has just retired from the army, she from teaching, a son going into grade 8 and another son starting university). Then we had to visit the older son in the pastry shop were he’s working for the summer, and meet the owner of the shop, and be given a box of pastries to take home, oh and by the way sign the lease.

Meanwhile I had been making the rounds of potential employers. A pleasant hour or two with Steve, a contact at a local university, including lunch and a visit with his department head - lots of friendliness but no actual job. Steve pointed me toward a few of the language schools that might be ok to work for. One of them offerred me a chance to teach a demonstration lesson a couple of days later. I did, and enjoyed it and it seemed to go well. But again no actual job.

With one of our two missions accomplished, we took an intercity bus the 4 hours or so up the coast to spend a few days at Begum’s family’s summer house in Kuchukkuyu (“Little Well”). There must be 30 or 40 bus companies operating out of Izmir. The buses we saw were without exception big, modern, clean, and on time. Part of keeping the buses clean is to have guys with brooms and hoses at the bus depots who wash the buses during their passengers’ lunch stops.

Kuchukkuyu was the usual bustle of aunties and cousins and an uncle, as well as Begum and her parents. A typical day started with a Turkish breakfast about 10 o’clock - bread, “rechel”, a kind of runny jam wonderful for dipping bread into, two kinds of cheese, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, perhaps an omelette, or grilled peppers or freshly made fritters, and for sure little glasses of tea and big chunks of watermelon. Then off to the beach to swim in the beautiful clear salty just-right-temperature Aegean. The family has been going to the same private beach for years - there’s a little concrete-floored pavillion where, in between swims, you can sit in the shade and sip your beer or play backgammon or have lunch from the kitchen or bring your own picnic. We normally stayed until dark then home to a feast prepared by the two aunties, wonderful cooks both of them. One day we had borek, a kind of meat pie with puff pastry. The puff pastry starts its day in the early morning as a bag of flour. By mid-morning it has turned into dozens of egg-sized pieces of dough to be rolled flat then dipped in butter and stretched to cover a big baking pan. Meanwhile there was a bag of onions to peel and dice, peppers to cut, ground beef to cook. The result was delicious, but it took hours, even with willing helpers.

On Saturday we took another bus to Istanbul, again modern, clean, and on time, to fly the next day to Samsun on the Black Sea coast. We had wanted to see this area and Begum’s brother suggested taking an escorted bus tour to get good deals on hotels and airfare. It was yet another wonderful experience - we spent 5 days on a smallish bus with 20 friendly Turks. Most of them didn’t speak much English, so we HAD to practice Turkish, at least for “please pass the salt”, and “when does the bus leave?”, but we also managed a little of “tell me about your kids”, and “what’s your job?” The tour was called “1001 Shades of Green”, the idea being to visit several scenic highland areas in the mountains along the coast. Each day we drove up narrow mountain roads to get to these highlands, mostly above the tree line, and they were beautiful. They weren’t wilderness though, people live EVERYWHERE. Way up at what seemed like the end of the road there would be a village surrounded by really steep cornfields and hayfields, with the hay being scythed by men and raked into piles by women. At night it was striking to see lights all the way to the top of every mountain - tiny villages with just a store, a mosque and a handful of houses, or maybe just isolated farmhouses, but all had electricity. Most days we had lunch in one of the little towns in the mountains. Many restaurants had good sized trout farms attached so fresh trout was common and inexpensive. We didn’t see much of the cities - a few museums, including the invariable Ataturk houses. All the various places he stayed, especially while he was organizing and leading the Turkish War of Independence in the 1920s, seem to have been turned into museums. He was an interesting guy - I’ll write more about him in a later email.

One day in a restaurant we were given a local delicacy that turned out to be Welsh rarebit by another name. That got us noticing Celtic-ish artwork, Irish-like dancing in our hotel one night, and a kid playing a bagpipe. I wonder if, when the Indo-Europeans were on their way west to become the Celts of France and Britain 4 or 5 thousand years ago, some of their cousins settled near the Black Sea and survived the very many subsequent invasions. More research required.

Eventually we made it back to Istanbul for a few days on Buyukada - almost no seagulls this time, so no more seagull conversations to report. But there was a triumph of sorts in human conversation. Both Leslie and I managed to have a simple conversation in Turkish with Begum’s dad, who speaks almost no English. This included enlisting his help to get bus tickets and to find some boxes to replace the suitcase that got wrecked on the way here from London. All in Turkish. Oh joy! Then after seeing Begum safely off to her plane to Canada, we caught a bus to Izmir with our small mountain of stuff. The efficient Turkish bus companies have fleets of smaller buses that collect passengers from various parts of the city and take them to the main bus depot. All that worked fine, and we didn’t need to handle our own luggage at all. We had a really high class bus with only three big seats and a wide aisle in each row to give business-class-like room. We stopped for lunch at a gas station / restaurant / store run by the bus company, though anybody can go there. They are obviously trying, and succeeding, to look like a first class organization. Good food, reasonable prices, and the cleanest washrooms imaginable with people on continuous cleaning duty. Of course there was a crew to wash the buses, but when they were done, they washed the cars in the parking lot too, apparently gratis. All very impressive, and all for about $50 Canadian for a 7 or 8 hour trip including a steward to serve tea and cookies and juice and such.

After we and our mountain arrived on the little bus from the bus depot to a major intersection near our apartment we were surprised to be met by the whole Akgul family, our landlords. They insisted on piling our stuff into their car, we all walked to the apartment, and they happily lugged most of it up the three flights of stairs. They have been very helpful about arranging for water and propane deliveries, and are going to help us get phone and internet service. We have never been so well treated.

We like the neighbourhood, with its fruit and veggie stores everywhere, and lots of little hardware stores and bakeries and a few cafes, although we seem to be the only non-Turks. Many people in stores respond to our language efforts by switching to German , which is logical - tourists have no reason to come to this part of town, so obvious foreigners are likely to be from a country with literally millions of Turks living in it.

So we are busy settling in to domesticity in our new place. It has plenty of room for guests, so if you happen to be in Turkey, do drop in.

Zefir bayram

Today's a holiday: zeyfir bayram, which celebrates the victory of the Turks over the Greeks in 1922 (1923?). Didn't know they'd had a war? Neither did we - it's one of the little events of the 20th Century that gets lost in the history books. Seems like Turkey chose the wrong side in WW I, not being too happy about fighting alongside its old enemies the Russians. So we had Gallipoli (Gelibolu here) with the ANZACs and the Turks holing up in neighbouring trenches on the north side of the Dardanelles. They got along pretty well, considering that each side lost tens of thousands of young men; at one point the Turks were firing tobacco at the ANZACs and the other side was returning fire with matches and chocolate.

This was all part of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. After the war a young, heroic general named Mustafa Kemal (he'd commanded the Turkish troops at Gelibolu) and his friends took over the country. (Mustafa later, when his new government ordered all Turks to adopt surnames like the rest of the western world, took the surname Atatürk - "father of Turkey".) The Brits and French tried to carve up Turkey between them and the Turks said No! (Never try to override a Turk who says No - you'll never win). The Europeans told Greece to go ahead and take back its ancestral territory along the Aegean, and the Greeks gave it a good try. They landed at İzmir and settled in nicely. But then they made the mistake of getting greedy - they decided to march on Ankara, in the middle of the country. Didn't work. Dumb idea. Their supply lines got overextended and they were no match for the Turks, who are pretty unbeatable fighters when it comes to defending their own homes and families. On August 30 the Greeks were eliminated in a battle within sight of here. Then the Turks went and destroyed İzmir, which was basically more Greek than Turkish at the time, which is why most of the city is relatively new.

So today was a public holiday. Not that it seemed to make a lot of difference. You can't tell a Turk not to work if he (or she) wants to or needs to. Our street, which has been being dug up since we moved in last Thursday, continued to have holes dug in it and closed in again (all by hand). Most of the stores are open. There was some sort of gathering downtown - we saw it on local TV - this morning and three jets and a dozen helicopters flew over us, but that was about all. I think there might be something in the local park this evening, though - that's where we'll go after this.

Yesterday with the help of Semiha - our landlady - we tried to get a telephone line for our apartment so we can have high-speed internet there. No luck (yet - but remember Semiha's a Turk and she's going to make it happen). We couldn't get one in our own names because we don't have a residency permit (we're planning on leaving every three months and to get our visas removed, or if Ron gets a job he at least can have a work permit and stay for a year at a tıme). So Semiha tried to get one in her own name. A little iffy, since her family already has a phone, but it's in her husband's name so it looks like she can get a phone of her own. But she needed her identity card and she'd left it at home. Thursday we'll try again. It might take a couple of weeks after that, we'll see.

We keep encountering things that we couldn't do here at all on our own. Partly it's the language barrier, but part of it is just not knowing how the system works. I'm so grateful for the Turks who have helped us so willingly & well. Without them we could never do this.

It's not easy being a stranger in a strange land. I will have a lot more compassion for immigrants in Canada when we're back.

It's hot

It is unspeakably hot. Our apartment is nicely arranged for handling heat. It extends over the entire top floor of our building (unlike the other 6 in the building, which have only half a floor each). As a result there are windows that open wide on the north, west and south sides (the east side adjoins the building next door). We get cross-drafts whenever there's a breeze, and there's usually a breeze. And our kindly landlords installed a klima, a combination air-conditioner/heater, before we moved in. We pay the electricity, of course, and we have no idea yet what the bills are going to look like. Judging from the amount of energy conservation we see going on - motion-sensitive hall lighting in hotels, lights in apartment stairwells that go out automatically after a suitable time - electricity is probably relatively expensive. Fortunately we seem to need our klima only a few hours a day, from 2 to 5 p.m. or so, when the sun is on the west windows.

We also have two terraces (the rooves of the apartments below us): a west and north-facing one that's very nice in the evenings at this time of year (it's where we eat dinner once the sun goes down), and a south-facing one that would be a good substitute for an oven at this time of year but will probably be nice in the winter. This morning I was feeling very Turkish as I scrubbed the terrace with a bucket of water and a mop. To be truly Turkish I should have used the broom like the other women do - the remarkable Turkish süperge that has no broomstick but is large enough that you don't need to bend over much to use it. Actually I'm much taller than most Turkish women and many Turkish men; they hardly have to stoop at all.

We always seem to end up going out for our exploration/shopping expeditions in the heat of the day, though. We don't really get organized until after noon. "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun" Noel Coward wrote. I wonder which group Canadians fall into....

Turks may be short, but they look remarkably healthy. Our neighbourhood is good solid working-class, and no one you see around on the streets looks overweight (except us). Part of the reason is probably that there's no such thing as a lazy Turk. I've never seen any group of people work harder and longer hours than these people. Stores are open about 7 a.m. and don't close until 8 or 9 p.m. There doesn't seem to be a mid-day siesta like some other places enjoy, either, although the streets are less crowded between 1 and 3 p.m. so they probably get a bit of a break then. If we call for a fresh big jug of water (5 gallons?) any time of day it will arrive within half an hour and be carried for us up the 3 flights of stairs to our apartment - delivered on the back of a moped or bicycle.

Another part of the reason is the diet here. Our lunch today was pide, salad and ayran, a very typical Turkish meal. Ayran is a drink made of yogurt, water or milk and salt. You see kids guzzling it like Canadian kids drink pop. (They like Coke too, but ayran is always a real alternative.) Pide is kinda like pizza only oval-shaped and cheaper. You can have just cheese on it (the white sheep's milk cheese we like so much), or cheese and vegetables, or meat and vegetables, or anything the cook can dream up. I'm quite partial to it myself. It costs 3.50 YTL for the equivalent of a medium pizza.

So the typical Turk seems to eat lots and lots of fresh vegetables, fresh bread, milk products, and olive oil - the Mediterranean diet doctors are always urging us to adopt. They also eat huge amounts of meat, mostly lamb, which is beginning to pall in my opinion at least - I'm finding it too rich and fatty. They eat very well indeed, and it shows in their great teeth and lean, healthy bodies. We hope it's going to rub off on us.

When we first arrived we were disappointed that prices weren't all that much lower than in Canada. In fact food and transportation seemed to cost the same or more. But living in this part of İzmir where the real people live we're finding costs for the basics are not all that bad. They've risen a lot in the last two years, but they're still less than Canadian prices in most cases. Wonderful peaches and pears cost 1 YTL/kilo (a YTL roughly equals a Canadian dollar - I'd say 1 dollar but I can't find a dollar sign on this keyboard). Of course they're only available at this time of year. You get great produce here but only in season, except in the big supermarkets - and then you don't get the quality. Our neighbours are all preparing for winter by drying long strings of red and green peppers on their balconies. I guess we'd better get started doing the same.

On the health front: we're both doing much better. We can manage quite long expeditions into the world without having to find a toilet in a hurry now. But the whole experience is going to produce a reflection on Turkish toilets sometime in the near future.

Home at last

Well, sort of. We spent our first night last night in our new digs in İzmir. Aside from noticing that the neighbours seem like a bunch of noisy nocturnal extraverts (like all Turks) we didn't have any problems at all.

We travelled by bus from İstanbul to İzmir on account of the incredible load of luggage that seems to have attached itself to us. One huge suitcase, two pretty big ones, two small and heavy ones, two small and fairly light ones, and three boxes. The bus loader and unloader seemed to find that highly amusing. But hey, it's a year's worth of stuff after all!

Our new landlady and her family kept an eye out for the arrival of the minibus that brought us into town from the bus terminal and were there with their car within seconds. Between her husband and two strong sons we had stuff up those three flights of stairs and into the apartment in minutes. They're a very nice bunch of people.

Today's job is to get set up and explore the neighbourhood. We have everything unpacked and in its place and like the general effect. We need some silly things like coffee mugs, dinner plates, toılet paper and the like. But I think we've got a home now.

I have to spend some time raving about Turkish transportation some more. The buses are fantastic. There must be a hundred different bus companies, some of them regional and some national. There's a whole range of prices and levels of service. I haven't seen the Mexican chickens-on-the-rooftop type of bus yet, but you get some that go from town to town with people standing or sitting wherever they can for just a few lira. Yesterday's bus was not like that. It was not cheap, but it was top of the line, perfect for an 8-hour trip.

We were picked up by a minibus at the bus company (Varan) office at the end of our friends' street. That took us to Varan's terminal at the south end of İstanbul with 15 minutes to wait for the bus. Everything got loaded into the luggage compartment without a hitch and then we found our pre-assigned seats. They were leather, widely spaced, reclining with an adjustable footrest - at least airline business class. Headphones, music of all sorts to listen to, an in-flıght movie and a steward who bustled back and forth handing out drinks, snacks, hand-wipers, picking up litter, more drinks... just like an airplane without the baggage restrictions.

Halfway through the trip we stopped at one of Varan's own rest stops. They're not just for buses - cars drop in too for a snack and a bit of shopping. Best of all: the cleanest washrooms we've seen anywhere in the world, Germany included. If a drop of water splashed onto the floor from wet hands it was wiped up within 10 seconds. The cubicles were utterly spotless, probably cleaned after each use. What a place! (especially for people still rather more interested in toilets than usual).

The trip took 8 hours - 8 hours of utter comfort. What a way to travel! And then another minibus takes you right to the neighbourhood you want.

So we're a pair of happy travellers ready to settle down and enjoy whatever life may bring in İzmir.

Last thoughts on the Karadeniz: Sumela

I nearly forgot to tell you about Sumela. It's Trabzon's most famous attraction, about 45 min. inland.

In the 3rd or 4th century a monk named Barnabas had a dream in which the Virgin Mary told him to found a monastery in a remote place she would show him. He and a friend followed their instinct and hunches until they came to this place in the mountains south of Trabzon. They said the image of the Virgin appeared to them in the rocks, and when they climbed the mountainside they found a perfect set of caves and a spring of pure water.

Monks lived there until 1923, when the Greek invasion of Turkey (starting at İzmir, getting as far as Ankara) failed and Greek Christians were no longer welcome. Recently there seem to be moves to refound the monastery, but it's not clear whether they'll succeed.

An awful lot of Turkish tourists come there but it still has a wonderful fascination and a holy feel. If you like you can walk up from the hotel and restaurant, but our bus drove us as far as possible and we had just a 10 min. walk. Some of us walked down, though; it took half an hour.

Our Yahoo album has some pictures that can't possibly come close to the real thing. Have a look anyway.

Meanwhile, we're still in Büyükada recovering from a bout of the Sultan's revenge that we probably brought upon ourselves by not refrigerating some meat soon enough. This bug makes you really appreciate the Turkish way of saying "Get well soon": "Geçmiş olsun," which literally means "May it pass quickly."

More on Trabzon and area

I guess I've been assuming you know something about Trabzon. I shouldn't - we didn't know anything about it before we decided to go there.

First, here's a link to a map of the area we covered.

Trabzon used to be called Trebizond in the English-speaking world. There's a novel, The Towers of Trebizond by Rose McCaulay that I've heard of but never read (its opening sentence sounds fantastic: '"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass..."' ). It was an important centre on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route between Europe and China. The Greeks called it Trapezius. Hadrian, the Roman emperor around 120-130 a.d., rebuilt its walls. It was the last capital of the Roman empire: after Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks around 1450 the last emperor moved there and reigned for a few years. So it's full of history.

But today it looks like an ordinary Turkish small city. Lots of ugly cement apartments and office buildings. Chaotic traffic. A quiet garden-like central square. A market that's a warren of twisty streets. Pleasant tea gardens beside the waterfront. An ancient castle on the hilltop. A museum to the time Atatürk (the founder of modern Turkey) spent there. All very normal.

There are a few signs that we're not far from central Asia. There's the Russian market, for one, a block-long tunnel of interconnected tents that houses merchants with the most incredible junk for sale, all from Russia or Georgia or Azarbaijan or places further east. Most of it is awful junk, but there's always something. I found a nice Indian-made dress for 20 YTL. All the women on the bus advised on the colour, so it's bound to be right. It feels nice to wear, anyway. I'm kicking myself that I didn't get the 30 YTL binoculars.

The countryside around Trabzon is full of hazelnut trees - fıstıc they're called here. This is the time of year they're picked and spread out to dry on any available surface. Because the construction of the new road seems to be going on in fits and starts there are lots of paved but unused portions available, and that seems to be the drying place of choice. When the nuts are dry enough a sort of vacuum cleaner comes along and removes the husks, and then they're dried some more and sold. It's a major industry.

They also grow a lot of tea from Trabzon east to the border. Turks don't like it - they prefer the stuff from Sri Lanka - but they sell a lot to Russia.

This tour was a fantastic way to see a part of the world where "tourists never go". It was cheap because the company makes some of its income from commissions the hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops give it. But they took us to decent hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops, places we would never have seen on our own even (or maybe especially) with Lonely Planet. It was a congenial bunch of people, even without speaking much of their language - and we sure know a lot more now than we did at the start of the tour!

For now we're back in Büyükada resting up for the move to İzmir. Ron may very well have a teaching job there: he taught a demo lesson while we were there the week before last and impressed the daylights out of the school. But I hope it's only a part-time one, a few days a week, because we've got a lot more of this country to see once it gets a little cooler. We hope to do Konya and Cappadocia in the fall, and we'll probably take a tour like we did this time.

Thanks for the notes and comments from those who have sent them. The rest of you - keep in touch!

Karadeniz adventure

We've been out of touch for a few days driving around the Black Sea (Karadeniz) area of Turkey in a minibus. We wanted to go there to escape the heat down at sea level, and Begüm's brother suggested we go on an organized tour instead of trying to do it on our own. That's the way the Turks do it, and it costs maybe half of what an individual could manage. So that's what we did.

Thank heavens we had Begüm to help us out. These tours are not for tourists, they're for Turks (the idea that a Turk could be a tourist seems to have escaped them). When they found out we were Canadians they wanted to charge a lot more - why, we never figured out. But Begüm is tough and wouldn't let them get away with that. So our air fare to Samsun (on the middle of the south coast of the Karadeniz) and back from Trabzon (a little further east) four nights in hotels, breakfast, dinner, five days touring on a minibus with a guide and a courier, admission to museums and historic and cultural sites, and lunches (which we paid for separately) cost altogether about 1000 YTL (new Turkish lira, about on par with the Canadian dollar) each. Way less than we'd be charged as foreigners. (Just for fun Ron tried booking a hotel by telephone himself. He was quoted 120 Euros a night, if there was a room. Begüm called the same place a little later and was quoted 75YTL, and of course there were plenty of rooms available. I don't think Turkey wants tourists.)

The tour was called 'A Thousand and One Shades of Green' (Binbir Yeşıller). Turks from İstanbul and the west of the country generally find green a most unusual and appealing colour in the landscape. The west is so very dry and hot that you seldom see a green blade of grass come August. The Karadeniz is wet and cool(er), so it's full of green. It's also very mountainous. Our tour focussed mostly on the mountain uplands (yaylalar), a part of the country that the otherwise excellent Lonely Planet guide hardly mentions.

I won't do a day-by-day description of the trip. It would take forever and you'd be even more bored than you are now. I'm uploading pictures to our Yahoo photo album as I write, so you can see some of what we saw there. I just want to share a few reflections.

For the first time since we arrived we felt like we really were in a foreign country. Partly it was because we were the only people on the bus who weren't fluent in Turkish. An awful lot of the time we stood around saying ''Hunh? What's happening?'' But as soon as the rest of the passengers noticed our confusion they rushed in to help. Few of them had much English, but Tarzan is an international language. (A dentist from İstanbul was quite fluent and very helpful, and there was a couple who were retired French teachers, also very useful. The rest had to rely on what they remembered from high school, and the state of English teaching in the schools here is desperate.)
But most of the foreign feeling was because this part of the country is completely different. The west looks and feels like Europe. Many people speak French or German there if they don't know English, so my school foreign languages are getting a workout - but they do speak something besides Turkish. And they dress like Europeans and live like Europeans. But the Karadeniz is not like that. It's foreign - as foreign to the rest of the passengers as it was to us.

The Karadeniz is a lot like the East Kootenays. The scenery is much the same - mountains, swift flowing rivers, trees, rocks, that sort of thing. And it's poor. You don't see many men of working age in the villages. They've gone to the cities for work. The women and children run the farms.

And such women! According to legend this is the home of the Amazons. I'd believe it. You see slim, strong women everywhere in the fields, scything the hay, raking it, stacking it. The kids herd the cattle and sheep. Any men you see are in the coffee houses (men only) watching futbol on TV.

The farm work has to be done by hand because the fields are nearly vertical. No one in Canada would even consider farming such land. You couldn't get a tractor onto the farms, let alone try to make it run on such hillsides. But every spare piece of land there grows something: corn, beans & squash - usually together, as the Iroquois did it - or at least hay.

In the Kootenays we thought mountaintops where uninhabitable. Here that's where you live. Maybe that comes from the days (not so long ago, like 80 years or less) when war was what the men did in summer. It never seems to have occurred to the Turkish electric power gurus that you can't get electricity to people living in the mountains. Of course you can! One night we were driving up a mountainside when it was getting dark, and the number of lights around us, along the mountain ridges above us and in the valleys below us, nearly equalled the stars in the sky. At times like that you remember that Turkey has 70 million people squashed into really quite a small space.

The women of the yaylalar cover their heads like most traditional Muslim women here, but you don't get the feeling it's from any special piety. Anyone with half a brain who works outside wears something on their head. They wear their head scarves tied in a special way that keeps it tidy for work and provides some padding when they have to carry heavy things on their heads.

There's more obvious religious feeling here, though, than in the west. Most of the day you see men at the fountains outside the mosques (every village has one) washing in preparation for prayer. That's another one of the men's jobs. Women have no time for that.

The yaylalar provide an interesting contrast with the way Canada treats its indigenous peoples. Two non-Turkish ethnic groups live in these valleys. Both have their own language and look surprisingly northern European. They're generally blonde or brown-haired and blue-eyed with quite fair skins. And like our indigenous people, their cultures have been disrupted by education. At one time the children were taken from the mountaintop villages and sent away to residential schools. Now the whole family comes down when it's time for school to start, so the villages are populated only in the summer. Fortunately the Turkish government supports the teaching of at least the ethnic music and dancing, so not all is lost yet. At two of our hotels the dinner entertainment was a couple of the young male waiters doing amazing dances to wild pipe music - dances that came straight from Riverdance. It seems to me that these people are somehow Celtic, as the Galatians that Paul wrote to were (they lived in the south of Turkey).

The Black Sea coastline east of Trabzon is lovely. The sea and its wide sandy beaches come almost up to the highway. The trees between the beaches and highway are full of tents - families spend their summer holidays tenting there. The water is warm and clean-looking with enough surf to be fun. East of Trabzon there are no beaches. There used to be, but the government decided trade with the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union - Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the like - is more important. The seashore is being filled in with rocks cut from the surrounding mountains and with municipal waste, and the highway is being widened to 4 lanes to accommodate the heavy truck traffic.

Of course the earth will have its revenge. The week before we visited there were heavy rains in the mountains. One river turned into a raging torrent and wiped out a gravel pit with the people in it. The road is still difficult through there.
Public hearings and environmental assessment are foreign notions, luxuries maybe that Turkey can't afford. One of the world's great whitewater rivers, the Çorush, is being dammed for flood control and power. No one asked the locals what they thought. We were probably among the last people who could marvel at its wild beauty.
I wonder whether I'm going to be able to keep my mouth shut about such things. Probably not - I couldn't on this tour. But what right do I have to say anything?

Garbage. Why can't people here pick up after themselves?

We didn't see any wild animals and heard very few birds in the mountains.

It's an unimaginably beautiful part of the world.

Our pictures are gradually getting uploaded to our Yahoo album.