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.