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.