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.