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.

A quick note from Küçükkuyu

If I don't make this quick the rest of the family will be most annoyed. We're into our week at the Şamlı's summer house by now, and it's delightfully restful. The days go something like this:

5 a.m. - call to prayer from the local mosque. Hmmm - should we get up? It's almost light.... zzzzzz.

7 - Ron gets up. Should I join him? Hmmmmm - zzzzz.

9:30 - Get up & dressed. Sit on the lowest balcony sipping Nescafé (the only form of non-Turkish coffee around), reading and getting ready to face the day.

10:30 - Breakfast starts. Nothing fancy: tomatoes, cheese, olives, fresh bread, a kind of jam-like conserve that you dip bread into, eggs, cold meat, Turkish tea.

Noon - breakfast ends. Discuss what to do for the day (as though there's any question).

1 p.m. - head to the beach. Swim, tan (with SPF 30 lotion), read, drink tea, drink beer, play tavla (backgammon), learn Turkish, swim...

8 p.m. - back home for dinner prepared by the aunties. Nothing special, they say, just the world's best börek or barbecue or something similar. It looks like some sort of eggplant is underway today.

9 - eat

10 - finish eating

10:30 - fall into bed

Next day - repeat.

Not a bad life.

Our apartment in İzmir is all organized and paid for. We'll be back there towards the end of the month after trips to the Black Sea (cool) and Konya (hot). I have some pictures but can't upload them today. Göröşünüz! (see ya!)

Back to church at last!

We finally made it to church today. Won't confess how long it's been since we were there last. I wanted to check out St. John's here in Izmir. It was a pleasant and worshipful experience.

It didn't look promising at first. The first thing we noticed as we approached the building was the sound of chain saws. The city had chosen Sunday morning to trim the palm trees outside the church (we hadn't realized that palms need so much attention). The power was off because there was a huge lift truck manoevering around electric lines. So we walked into the dark church on a carpet of palms. Here's the view from inside the front door:


The noise continued throughout the service, with no sound system to help. But it was still a good worship experience.

One thing I liked was the use of Turkish in the service. The gospel was read in English and Turkish (I now have a Turkish copy of the New Testament), and the first 1/3 of the sermon was in Turkish. The prayers of the people were in English and Turkish, and there were other bits in both languages, too. There seem to be quite a few Turkish members of the congregation, and many of the English-speaking members seem comfortable in Turkish too.

We were warmly greeted. One of the Turkish men, someone who seems deeply involved with all aspects of the church's life, volunteered to come with us tomorrow to help us sign the lease on our new apartment.

We do indeed have an apartment in an interesting and convenient part of town. It's not down on the seashore as I'd hoped - that one isn't available after all - but up on a hillside in an ancient Jewish part of town. Interesting connection there: some of my ancestors way back in the mists of history were Spanish Jews. The ones I'm descended from went to Holland to escape the Inquisition. Others came here, to Izmir, and settled in the part of town we'll be living in.

I hope we'll have some pictures of the apartment next time. Today I've uploaded a bunch more to our Yahoo photo album.

A great thing about Turkey

After yesterday's negative musings I thought I should balance things up by saying that on the whole Turkey & the Turks are amazing. To have a strong and distinct society in our homogenized world is a remarkable achievement, and they do it in a big way.

One of the things I admire is Turkish television. I don't know how many networks there are or how they are funded, but there's lots of TV and it's all in Turkish. Sometimes you see an American film with Turkish subtitles, but the by far the vast majority of programming is original. Every night there are hours of locally-made sitcoms and soap operas, and they're hugely popular. Our friends seem embarrassed by this, but there's nothing to be embarrassed about. They're professionally done and really interesting. (Of course we understand at best a quarter of what's going on, but they seem good to us.)

The thing that blows me away is that the Turkish TV industry has a possible audience of - at best - 100 million people. That's the entire population of Turkey plus the Turkish diaspora in Germany and around the world. And for that they produce hours and hours and hours of original stuff. How much original Canadian programming is there? Hockey Night in Canada and ....

The Turks are a strong and proud nation, and rightly so. So their streets are a little dirty - so what? They're full of life and lots of fun to be around.

On the news front: it looks like we might have found an apartment in a most interesting part of town: üçyol, up on the hillside overlooking the fashionable part of town. There's not much fashionable about this place, but it's charming and it is in a neighbourhood that reminds us a lot of Büyükada - small old shops that sell just about anything you can think of. It's close to the Metro so we can get downtown fast, and it costs about half what a seashore place would. More later.

An environmental look at Turkey

I won't claim to be the world's greatest environmentalist. My favourite car was our Honda CR-V, which counts as an SUV (but a very small one, really!). I waste as much as the next person. I drive too much and walk too little. I use more electricity in a day than a third-world village does in a year. I enjoy the occasional shop-till-you-drop experience when I'm feeling blue. But I do know that everything I buy, like my own body, wıll end up in the garbage dump sometime. And garbage ain't pretty.

You'd think after 10,000 years of civilization Turks would be more aware of the environment around them than an uncultured Canadian. But you'd be wrong.

Gas here costs $2.50 a litre. And everyone who can afford it drives a car. They drive fast and they drive loud and they drive dirty, leaving trails of trash behind. Highways here are filthy. So are the streets. So are the lanes. When the wind blows you're likely to be blinded not just by dust but by flying plastic bags. That in spite of the cities' and towns' commendable efforts to clean the streets, which seem to be washed daily.

People spit and blow their noses onto the street. Dogs dressed in embroidered jackets on rhinestone-studded leashes leave their deposits in the middle of the sidewalk. The first sentence I mastered in Turkish, on a rainy morning in Büyükada with its picturesque horse-drawn carriages was "I've got horse shit between my toes". The roads are not pretty. No wonder they're washed often.

Turks smoke. They smoke when they get up in the morning and when they go to bed at night. They smoke before, during and after meals. They smoke inside and they smoke outside. They smoke in hospitals, restaurants, hotels, internet cafes - not airports, though. And when they're done the butts lie where they're left.

The Sea of Marmara around Istanbul is an ocean of plastic - bottles, bags, tampon applicators, and unidentifyable crap. I don't know why the dolphins still swim there. No one else does, except the street kids.

Putting out the garbage is an experience. After thirty years of composting and recycling we're not used to dumping everything into a plastic shopping bag and tying it to the fencepost to be picked up in the morning. We're told that there are people who pick over the garbage at the dump and make a good living from what they find, so we shouldn't worry about throwing away everything. I don't feel good about it.

What archaeologists are rummaging through at places like Troy and Çatal Höyük is the accumulated detritus of the aeons. Without garbage they'd have nothing to study. Maybe that's why Turks are so good at leaving their messes lying around. But I wish they weren't.

Some of the younger generation are beginning to think about what they're doing. Greenpeace has a few members, and there are other organizations beginning to form around specific issues. I wish them luck. I know I'm going to do what I can - pick up garbage when it's not too hazardous, be careful about what we buy, try to find some place to live where we can compost. And ask questions and talk about the issue, of course.

I hope future archaeologists have a hard time tracking down evidence of this civilization.

İzmir at last!

Here we are, starting our 24th hour in İzmir and liking it very much. It's hot. The word that kept popping into my head yesterday afternoon as we waited for a lift to an apartment we wanted to check out was fırın, Turkish for "oven". Somehow English didn't seem adequate to describe it. Forget about frying eggs on the sidewalk - you could grill a steak! But it's a dry heat, unlike İstanbul. When we unpacked things we'd put into our suitcases just hours ago in İstanbul they felt wet. We had to hang everything up to dry. İzmir's humidity is around 35% and İstanbul's is closer to 80%, which makes the degree or so difference in temperature quite bearable.

This is a lovely city. It's much newer than İstanbul, having been razed by a fire and a marauding army in 1922. The nice thing about that is that its streets don't follow 10,000-year-old cow paths. It still has lots of ancient history to enjoy, having been settled for at least 3,000 years that we know of and probably much longer - a fertile river vally beside the Aegean Sea would not have been left empty for long, I'm sure.

The gut feeling I had that this is the place we need to stay is much stronger now, particularly after seeing the apartment we'd been told about a while ago. It's right on the waterfront, facing the palm-lined boulevard that follows the harbour. It's bright and clean and furnished with lovely older Turkish furniture. It's owned by a recently-married Turkish-American couple slightly older than we are who seem congenial and helpful contacts and probably excellent landlords. Impulsive Leslie would have rented it on the spot, but sensible Ron and Begüm are doing more research. No problem as long as we end up with that place.

No pictures to download yet, but for a look at where the apartment ıs have a look at this. İzmır has ferrıes like İstanbul going between waterfront piers, but they don't seem as frantic. Nothing about this city seems all that frantic, actually. I think we might like it here.