I used to have morals. Or rather, lines I said I would not cross.

Then I met Mustafa, and took leave of what little sanity I had left.

Oh well. The boat is good.

I am off for a week or so, to meet up with the APs in Antalya and thence back to the tourist hells of the West Coast, followed by a Visa run to some island or other, and then we shall see.

* posted by nat 7:18 AM

Sunday, May 29, 2005

On Saturday Musti hung around the island stalking unsuspecting Turkish day-trippers, and I wandered up and took him lunch, which we ate out on the boat while ferrying twelve eleven-year-old boys around the island. It was slightly windy, so on the south-east side of the peninsula the waves tossed us about a bit. The boys all stayed firmly sitting down.

Once we got back to the beach the boat was then mobbed by a group of girls the same age. Who when they got to the waves decided they would spend the whole time trying to stand up, and then falling over, attempting to throw themselves into the motor, and other such idiocies. The upshot was I did a lot of the steering. (Mustafa was protecting his precious motor.)

This is just further proof that Turkish women (most of them) have NO COMMON SENSE WHATSOEVER.

Afterward we ate ice-cream, and then as the wind picked up we thought we'd go and throw the boat head-on into some larger waves and see if it fell apart or not. Obviously it didn't. Lots of fun!

* posted by nat 7:54 AM

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Yesterday we played ferry and took two Germans up to the other end of the lake to put them on the last part of the St Paul trail. We left at eight and the light on the lake was superb. I have tons of pictures of sparkling water. It took about two and a half hours up, and just over two hours back (including a quick, quiet break to bash nails into the propeller to stop it falling off). I spent too much time steering, and am beginning to get the hang of standing up at the back of the boat and steering with my foot, as well as running along the side of the boat to get up to the front without quite falling in (we took the little yellow boat, as it is slightly faster and uses less petrol). It is also a lot of fun aiming the boat at unsuspecting large orange geese in order to get them to take off, because we are cruel and it is a lot of effort for them to heave themselves up into the air - there is much splashing and squawking, and it is very amusing.

*

It's obviously getting close to the time to go away from Egirdir for a bit, beause we have had the marriage conversation again, but this time with a twist:

Him: If I was twenty, I'd marry you, however I'm over thirty now, so there's no point.
Me: But I don't want to marry you. And anyway, if you were twenty you'd be too young for me.
Him: Yes, but I'd do it so I could go to England.
Me: But I don't want to go to England, so what's the point.
Him: *long pause* So you'd marry me so you could stay in Turkey?
Me: I have managed to stay in Turkey for quite a while now without marrying you.
Him: Come back and buy that nice house down the road!
Me: Ha! Do you want to live in it?
Him: What? With you?
Me: Well if I bought it, I might just live in it.
Him: *long pause* We'll see.
Me: We'll dig a tunnel from the harbour so you can come up without people seeing.

* posted by nat 6:54 AM

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Yesterday evening, following a slightly doomed attempt to explain the existence of Wales to Mustafa using the little maps in the back of my diary, I then showed him that the highest point in England is 978 metres, which he found incredibly hilarious.

Musa bought slightly too many beers with him yesterday evening and we watched the Champions League final from behind a nargile and vast amounts of mixed nibbles. We got slightly bored around extra time however and decided to go for a quick walk to the island and back, stopping in one of the restuarants to watch the last couple of penalties. Life was very silly. Slept very well after that!

Today I am doing laundry and playing Boggle, and wishing I had not drunk quite so many nasty bottles of Efes. One day I will learn.

* posted by nat 9:04 AM

Monday, May 23, 2005

I am having a clumsy day - so far have dropped a frying pan, several peieces of cutlery, half a cucumber and a full mug of tea (my own, all over me). Hurrah.

Have also had a furious row with the communist lady at the post office who will not send a fax for love nor money (especially not money; sending a fax is far too expensive, dearie, you don't want to do a thing like that, and neither do I. ARGH!). Several rounds of Boggle and chocolate later it suddenly occurred to me that if I can find someone with a scanner I can scan in the sheet and then fax it from here.

Then it occurred to me I could just send it back to the UK and get someone to fax it from there. But all this is a rather moot point as I have not yet found a scanner. Still, Mustafa knows the guy who has one of the little net cafes in town, so once he has finished banging about in his boat (it's still got holes in it, however it is fabulous and does windy wavy lakes far better than the other one, it does not hit every wave like it is going to fall apart), I am going to stalk him and make him take me down there. If it has a scanner.

On a side note, the lake is finally a proper swimmable temperature and I am not quite sunburnt on one shoulder. Also a few people have been through and left me lots of trashy romance novels. Hurrah!

ETA: Stropped on the terrace about communist post offices, and was marched down to the tiny telecom booth, who sent off my fax for 750,000TL!

And Musa has come from Istanbul. Hurrah!

And Fenerbahce are champions again... we had fireworks last night in town!

* posted by nat 12:49 PM

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Yesterday, having had a bunch of people who wanted a boat trip, the weather refused to cooperate and we ended up not going (today it is sunny, a bit windy - we are off in an hour or so!)

So I sat in the pension and sulked and decided that I was going to cook lunch, so I cooked up a vast pot of my usual lentil-and-lemon-gloop and offered it to everybody in the expectation of them all having a spoonful each and then me having food for a week - but no. I had one bowlful and came back to find that four hungry Turks had polished the whole lot off! (Hurrah, Turks who eat strange foreign food!)

Anyhow, it's time for breakfast. My stomach is awash with tea, so it's definitely time for vast amounts of salad and cheese.

ETA: Also yesterday, an old couple walked in, very sweet, after buying a couple of books. The lady turned out to be a Hittite scholar, so we got into rather a long conversation, and she said she'd probably see me at SOAS in the Autumn. Whee!

* posted by nat 7:37 AM

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

As Thursday is a holiday, and thus there is a long weekend coming up, the town council have chosen today to start digging up the entire street that runs along the front of the pension, as they are going to put the electricity cables underground.

It is quite difficult therefore to get out without breaking my neck, and thus I missed getting down to the harbour in time to see the new boat going into the water. Nevertheless it went in perfectly fine without me, and - shock horror - floats!

It is gloriously hot, and I have got my first mosquito bite of the summer, which is quite an achievement seeing as there are all of two mosquitoes around. The rest are big lake flies, which do not bite but buzz around annoyingly and manage to get themselves squashed by accident.

I am still waiting for anyone to notice that the skirt I have been wearing for the past two days is in fact the scarf/shawl I was wearing when I turned up a month ago. No takers yet!

* posted by nat 3:56 PM

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Friday turned all stressful, and culminated in my setting my hair on fire while lighting a cigarette on the kitchen stove. (I don't smoke, but the situation called for a cigarette.) At which point Mustafa, after checking my hair had stopped smouldering and giving me a lecture (while chain-smoking) about how bad smoking was (it sends you bald!) said "All right. Tomorrow we go Adada!"

So we went early in the morning, bouncing along on the inter-village dolmus, and walked over the hill to Adada, which was once a large ancient city (another 40,000 people up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere!) that was famous for minting coins and for looking pretty. It's now so little visited that the authorities can't even be bothered to charge an entrance fee. So we clambered into temples, followed roadways, hopped up and down steps, balanced our way along fallen columns, rolled in the flowers in the meadow, chased butterflies, and bickered happily about bad government through the ages.

Then we walked down through the valley along the King's Road: wide, ancient paving stones, part of the original Efes-Babylon road. As there was no-one about, we had a lot of fun discovering the echoes in the valley, inventing King's Road hopscotch, and choosing to take picnic breaks sat in the middle of the road.

Once we got to the bottom we cut across the fields, walked up along the asphalt road (hijacking an unsuspecting hiker on the way - he recovered), then got a lift up the hill to Sütçüler, where Mustafa beat me 5-0 at tavla for possibly the first time ever, and I ate chocolate ice-cream while we sat on the swing-chair outside the hostel and attempted - and failed - to swing it off its hinges. Later Jon turned up and then Ibo Karacan (the pansyioncu) drove us all into the woods where several middle-aged men were living it up with rakı round a bonfire, and once it got a bit dark and cold we came back and ate too much dinner. I fell asleep around about the time the pension turned into an international chess championship centre.

This morning the only thing I managed to identify from the range of spreads on the breakfast table was the thyme honey - there were several weird things that "come from a tree I think" and something that had sesame seeds in it "probably" - I dutifully tried everything and washed it down with a lot of tea.

We came back the scenic route (along side of canyon with steep drop just inches away) and rolled into Lale just in time to get the last two cups of tea from the teapot. I am probably going to spend the rest of the day flat on my back, but it was utterly worth it!

* posted by nat 9:26 AM

Friday, May 13, 2005

Finally a stretch of beautiful weather! Mustafa has been out continuously fibreglassing and painting the new boat (which still appears to have holes in it; I have told him under no circumstances it it allowed to go anywhere near the water today, it being Friday 13th). I have been telling him it's going to sink; I think he's coming round to my point of view!

Two days ago I coerced some tourists into taking a boat trip, which meant I got to go along. The lake is just about swimmable temperature now - although I didn't stay in for long at all! Rest of the time spent bouncing around in the hills looking for flowers and tortoises, sunbathing (slathered in factor 50 and I still went red!), and of course barbecuing fish. Mmmm. I like boat trips.

After last week's influx of Dutch, this week Egirdir is relatively quiet, which means I have spent a lot of time lazing on the terrace, reading random books that people have left, and sticking my legs out the window in a vain attempt to get them to turn anything other than pasty white.

* posted by nat 10:50 AM

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Today: some blue sky and the promise of more, and Musti and Ibo (on leave from the army) are down by the boat looking like something might happen. Last night, with two of the old English gentlemen being back, there was much laughter and conversations about the mess one can make with fibreglass. I am getting good at translating very strange conversations.

I think I have killed my cold with a combination of raki, cheap champagne, cappucino-and-melon nargile, and Nat King Cole; my brain is still suffering from conversing in French with a Turkish man, although the past couple of days have perked up. Ibo-who-guides-trekking-parties has been through (with a trekking party), and we have had random conversations sitting halfway down the stairs or lying on the benches with our feet hanging out of the window, and he tells me I am almost perfect at least ten times a day, which I don't object to at all!

I have been teaching Rabia to cook imam bayildi, and have disovered to my horror that noone in this pension has ever heard of yenibahar. However we have been enjoying our first look at the new Lonely Planet Turkey, which lists as a highlight on page 8, going boating with a fisherman on Lake Egirdir (mmm, what did you do to her?! I asked Mustafa), and also notes in the thanks section at the back that Jon "could not find his way out of a paper bag" - That's our Jon, we said. (Although he can find whisky in his bag, so I don't really mind!)

This morning I got açma for breakfast in bed; a final sign things are truly back to normal.

* posted by nat 8:18 AM

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Have spent the day at the dentist's. Luckily not on my account, but doing the translation work for an Ozzie whose tooth chose this morning to crumble and fall out. So I got to spend an hour translating with my fingers in my ears, and drinking tea like a fiend in the waiting room while the dentist took each and every last pice of the tooth out. The dentist charged 35 million for the privilege, which the man was not having at all - he wanted to give him double, and had to be talked out embarrassing the poor dentist! I got a nice tip as well, which will keep me in strawberries for weeks!

Have spent the rest of the day in recovery.

Mustafa arrived back from the mountain and made all the right noises (terrible, awful, didn't enjoy it at all) - and then showed me lots of photos which show people having a suspiciously good time. Oh well!

ETA: Have noticed from wading around the net that there is a General Election in the UK today. First one I haven't voted in. Not that it will make a blind bit of difference anyway. Eh apathy.

* posted by nat 3:47 PM

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Do not really have the energy to explain all, but to those of you who asked for an update Mustafa and I are now talking to each other again; things are still a little rocky but should be okay. He has just gone off to Dedegöl with Jon*, two tourists and my camera; I have not been allowed to go since the forecast tonight is for around freezing, plus the yayla they are off to is at about 1,700m so it will most likely be below freezing, and this has been deemed (probably correctly) that this is the sort of thing that is likely to put me in bed for a week afterwards.

Sometimes, just sometimes, it would be nice to be normal.

So instead I am going to continue watching the fisherman in the harbour pull up the two boats that capsized and sank last night in yet more gales. It's entertaining at least.

(* Jon deserves a medal for feeding me whisky at much needed points.)

* posted by nat 10:25 AM

Monday, May 02, 2005

Sometimes it does not bother me, that everything goes so well one minute and so badly the next... this is, in actual fact, something I've had to get used to, certainly in terms of my health.

However - not everything in life has to follow this pattern, and sometimes I need to remember that before I bother putting up with it all and being fatalistic. I get so good at concentrating on the good parts of things that when I step back and realise, as I do from time to time, that there is an awful lot of crap going on, it comes as rather a shock.

Presumably this makes me a nice person to know. People who have amazingly high tolerance thresholds tend to be nice people to know. We're all easy-going and have a wonderful knack for looking on the bright side of life and making that tightrope look like it's so easy to walk and that well, at the end of the day none of that shit really matters, does it?

But occasionally you wobble. Sometimes it's a lack of planning, sometimes it's a distraction, sometimes there are just too many other people swinging on the rope. And though you don't fall (because once you fall, it's gone and it's gone forever) it's a horrible, horrible moment when you look down.

In conclusion, my hips are killing me so I'm going to stand up and go do some more leaning against the wall, because that seems to be more comfortable. And next time I'm going to think twice before I try going up mountains the direct way.

* posted by nat 6:54 PM