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!