Author Archive
A very Merry Christmas to everyone who reads this and I hope you have a happy and healthy 2012. Christmas in Turkey is a very muted affair and only really celebrated by the Christians living here of course. The shops have a lot of decorations though, Turks generally use the same sort of decorations to celebrate New Year (Yıl Başı). Nearly every Christmas Day I have been here has been a beautiful day with warm sunshine and clear blue skies and this year is no exception. Here’s a picture of Minnie in the sun this morning.
I had a very enjoyable week in Prague recently. The weather wasn’t much to shout about most of the time but walking around the city looking at the famous buildings in the evening was very pleasant. Here are some photographs:
Charles Bridge is a famous piece of old architecture.
It has an arch at both ends and plenty of other interesting architecture around it.
In the square there is a famous astronomical clock with automata figures that stand at the openings in turn when the hour comes.
Also in the square was a Christmas Market with stalls selling souvenirs, various foods and hot wine which we had a go at.
Also had a lovely tree with cascading lights that a still photo doesn’t do justice to.
This lamp caught my eye
And these decorated eggs in a shop window looked photogenic.
Shindler’s lift caused a smile as it took us up in the world.
No relation to the hero played by Liam Neeson in the film Shindler’s List apparently.
I renewed my health insurance the week before last and the agent asked me if I’d like to go to the hospital in Antalya to see a specialist about my finger (previous post explains) to see if some reconstruction surgery would be possible. It seemed like a good idea so I went, he also booked me in for a complete medical check-up which had very good results apart from slightly raised blood pressure. Anyway the upshot was that I will go in January for an operation on my hand to fix the problem. I’ll let you know how it goes, hopefully with pictures if I’m allowed to take them.
Here’s another Christmas Day photograph to end with.
Last weekend I went to the wedding of my friend Suleyman’s daughter. She had asked me to take some photographs so in an effort to make it easy for her to share them I made a website so that she could send the address to all her friends. Here is a LINK to the site if you’re interested in having a look.
About three years ago the remote control handset for my satellite decoder started acting up. I fitted new batteries and pressed the buttons harder but it didn’t make any difference so naturally, being me, I took it to bits. After a few minutes examining everything it seemed to me that the rubber buttons that you push have a carbonised rubber tip which touches two contacts on a printed circuit board and makes a connection. The carbonised rubber was worn and cracked on some of the buttons causing the connection not to be made. Ok I thought, I can glue some tinfoil on the business end of these buttons and it will work again. So I did and it did and everything was sweetness and light in my house…..until last week.
The remote control stopped controlling, anywhere from remote to very very close. I went to town to see about getting a new one. It was seven years old and an unusual model (of course it bloody was!!) so I could not get a new one. Universal remotes don’t work with my “unusual model” decoder. I had to buy a new decoder complete with remote control. So I did. Yesterday.
So in the evening I sat down with a glass of wine and the user handbook (in Turkish) and the new remote controller to see about setting it up. It’s only a new piece of electronics and my Turkish is ok, not fluent but I have a dictionary. How hard can it be?
This afternoon the man from the shop came and put the decoder card in the right way up!!!!!!!!
Oh the shame!!!
We had a forecast of heavy rain a few days ago. Now that can sometimes mean we don’t actually get any but more often than not we get at least one day of it. When rain comes here it is usually pretty heavy and as I had been trying to leave harvesting my grapes till the last minute I decided that I’d better get on with it otherwise there would be none left. I collected two wheelbarrows full, it was quite an effort standing on a plastic chair and reaching up using muscles not used in a while. I only fell off the chair once but that was enough.
Treading grapes is not the most efficient way of extracting the juice by a long chalk. The grapes keep squidging up between your toes and around your feet. What you could do with is a couple of things like big potato mashers strapped to your feet, but then you’d also need a bigger container to do it in. I only had a blue plastic barrel that swimming pool chemicals had come in so I just had to make do with bare (but washed) feet.
I’ve used two large water bottles to do the first fermenting in, 38 litres altogether. The fermentation was a bit slow to start but it is now well on the way. The white things on the top are balloons with the bit you blow through cut off and a couple of pinpricks made in them to let the gas out when the pressure makes them expand enough but stop the ingress of contamination when the fermentation slows down.
I’ll let you know when I bottle the wine but I have to collect a few more bottles first. I’m using 1 litre screw top bottles like I did last time. It took three years for the last lot to become drinkable and very nice it was too. I’m looking forward to this batch being ready and in the meantime I’ll be planting some more vines at the front of the house, red grapes this time.
Just thought I’d let you know that the new marina in Kaş is now open for business and fully operational. Here’s a photograph, some boats on the pontoons already and I’ve seen a couple of big luxury motor yachts in there too.
This helicopter flew over my house a few days ago. I checked it out with Google and it seems to be a Russian made KA 32. Judging by the stretcher carrier bolted on the side I’d guess it is in search and rescue mode, but what do I know?
Last week I went with some friends to visit a winery in Elmalı up in the mountains about 100km from here. We had a stroll around Elmalı looking for a place to eat and came across a street with an interesting looking shop where they sold pots and pans for all purposes.
Likya Wines in Elmalı is quite a small operation at the moment but I’m sure it will grow as it’s fame spreads.
We had a tour of the production facilities and then tasted a few wines.
Even Jancis Robinson had some nice things to say about Likya Wines, I liked them too and spent far too much money buying some.
You can’t trust a tortoise! Just when you think you’ve made a little friend because you’ve fed him some water a few times and he doesn’t run away from you now, even rescued him from the jaws of death, well the jaws of my new dog anyway, and put him back on his feet, even given him some tomato and lettuce to munch, what does he do? He bites off your flowers at the bottom of the stem, that’s what he does, ungrateful little bugger! Well the next time the dog is harrassing him he can fight his own battle!
Sitting on my smaller patio at the end of the house late a few nights ago I spotted a dark shape moving around. It was a roundish thing about nine inches long (no I’m not metricated yet) and shuffled around sniffing and rootling in the grass. It was a hedgehog! It’s the first live one I’ve seen here in seven years, I’ve seen the odd dead one on the road but never a live one before, I’m absolutely delighted that he/she chooses to live here or at least visit for the time being. I can’t leave food out for him because of attracting mice and rats so I’ll sit out and wait to see it again and feed it then, it didn!t want the carrot that I gave it, maybe I’ll get some meaty dog food.
As I was coming out of town the other day I spotted a display of solar water equipment on the back of large pick-up truck. I stopped and
had a chat with the salesman, the upshot of that being a team of guys fitted it on a tower at my house last Tuesday afternoon. The whole set up including the tower cost me 1200 lira (about £430 at today’s exchange rate). I’m well pleased with it, the water is scalding hot and I’m looking forward to a big reduction in my electricity bills now that I’m not running the electric water heater 24/7/365. I’m also looking forward to some long hot baths during next winter. Click the picture to see the large version.
My friend Suleyman has had a truck as long as I’ve known him. For some years now he has wanted to give up the heavy job of loading and driving it and get a car that he do a bit of private hire driving with, a few airport transfers and the like. Yesterday he came up my drive tooting the horn on his new car pleased as punch with himself. It’s a 2002 Fiat Doblo with 151,000 kilometers on the clock and he got it for TL14,500. It’s very clean and tidy and looks like he got a bargain.
Here is follow-up to the Arycanda post. Following that adventure packed day we went to Patara, Xanthos and Letoon.
Patara was quite nice but a big renovation job is currently underway there.
It has the obligatory theatre,
and various other relics including a very good road with columns which would have had a roof over it to provide shade.
Lots more to see there but I just want to whet your appetites for now.
We also went to Xanthos which was a real disappointment because the famed mosaics were covered with a protective membrane and tons of sand! We searched high and low for anything else unique but came up with nothing, very disappointing.
Letoon was next on the list, after driving around in circles for an hour or so we eventually found it and the same thing had occurred there, more covered up mosaics. I did find a bit of one that wasn’t covered up though.
There was also a new/restored mosaic that was uncovered but it looked so new and the design so different that I think it is a modern design and not old at all. So I won’t include a photo.
When we left Letoon we stopped for lunch in a small restaurant and got stung with a big bill for not much refreshment, the same would have cost us half that in Kaş.
Kaş Festival.
The three day Kaş Festival for the opening of the tourist season was a very successful event. One of the happenings was the sinking of a boat to form a new reef and attraction for scuba diving. A few years ago they sank a replica of an old Phoenician trading vessel but this time it was an old coastguard boat, the one on the right below.
I went out on a friend’s little sailing boat and we seemed to meet lots of friends out there. The coastguard boat seemed to take an age to get anywhere near sinking and then went down in a rush.
Afterwards we went and had a beer over in Limanağzı in a small bay opposite the main part of the town. A very nice afternoon out on the sea.
I was quite happy with one dog but since Wilf’s departure Minnie has seemed to be missing the company of another dog. When I’ve been away she has been going up the road a couple of miles to visit some friends who have five or six dogs. They didn’t mind and I was happy to fetch her back each time but the root cause wasn’t being addressed. I’d been thinking of getting another dog and had my ear bent a bit to take a puppy but I preferred to have an older dog, in the end I took in this one because she had been abused by someone who had hacked her tail off. I’ll refrain from giving my opinion of what should be done to abusers of animals.
I have called her Molly after my niece’s baby daughter, she’s about 12 or 15 months old and is keen on chewing things, mats, shoes etc. In fact one of my rubber gardening shoes has gone missing altogether, I can’t find it anywhere so I hope she hasn’t eaten it.
I’ve been doing a bit of sightseeing in the last couple of weeks, places that I should have been to but haven’t. I was introduced to a visitor from America who is going to a lot of places around the world photographing and writing about them. She wanted to have a look at some of the archaeological sites near here so I decided to take a few days off from my labours, drag out my camera which hasn’t seen any proper work for a while and accompany her. Arykanda was the first place we went. There is a main road which goes north from Finike but the coast road is such a trial to get there I thought we could do it more quickly heading north from Demre which is a lot nearer. It wasn’t until we got lost up in the mountains and needed help from the maps that I noticed that a section of one of the roads was indicated on the map in orange colour, the rest were all red. Well we toured around a lot of dirt roads until we came close to getting bogged down and I decided that going back a few miles was the bravest thing to do. We could have been stuck in mud up there for a long time and we hadn’t seen anyone to ask the way so we turned round and retraced our steps until we saw a sign and followed that road. The signs up there are very few and far between.
This is an abandoned school on the road into the mountains, people have moved away from a lot of villages into the towns and cities for a less hard life so the countryside is often deserted apart from a few goatherders.
Anyway we eventually found the right road and carried on until I saw a sign for Arykanda in my rearview mirror and stopped to have a look. The sign that should have been facing our side of the road had a truck parked in front of it blocking my view so we went up a little lane and found the place.
Arykanda was discovered by an English traveller and researcher Charles Fellows, one of the first travel writers of which there are now legions trotting around the globe. It was seen by other travellers during the following years but remained largely forgotten due to the difficulties of getting there.
Arykanda appears to have been inhabited from the end of the late Calcolithic Age (Copper Age beginning in the late 5th Millenium BC) and survived because of it’s easily defensible location with a huge rock cliff behind it and thick forests in front. Even now it is barely visible from the road and is easy to miss if you don’t see the signposts. After a string of earthquakes necessitating major rebuilding each time the inhabitants moved to a place a little way away.
The city is now being conserved and tourism is being encouraged although there were only a few people there when we visited. There are temples dedicated to Helios and Trajan and the remains of other temples as yet of unknown dedication. Here are a few photographs to whet the appetite.
This is the bath complex from the rear and the front respectively.
The centre of one of the mosaics, the photograph doesn’t really do the whole thing justice.
There are lots more things to see, and the setting below the huge cliff is stunning, it is well worth a visit.
On the lane up to the site there is a very nice pension and restaurant where we had something to eat and met Mustafa and Aysel who own and run it. A very pleasant watering hole after clambering around ruins and getting lost in the mountains.
Next will be Patara, Xanthos and Letoon.
I’ve been trying for two months now to get a new residence permit, a three year one because that’s when my passport will have to be renewed so that’s all I can apply for. What prompted this was the dramatic reduction in price of the permit. It now costs less than a quarter of it’s price a few months ago so it’s a ‘no-brainer’ as they seem to say these days.
The first time I went to the Yabancılar Şube Mudurluğu (the department managing foreigners) in Kemer was at the beginning of April shortly after this price reduction but I was told to go and get a new one at the Turkish Consulate in London because I had a Title Deed (Tapu). Well after a lot of phone calls that turned out to be incorrect and I was told about it the following morning but it put me off going again for a couple of weeks, I thought I’d let them iron out the wrinkles in new system.
The second time I went, two weeks ago, I again had a problem beyond my control. One of the documents that I needed to present to them was a letter from my bank certifying that I had the requisite amount in my accounts to live in Turkey for the three years, they don’t want me to be a drain on their social security system. I’m not entitled anyway but that’s neither here nor there. Unfortunately when the bank wrote the letter for me they included my middle name, but my passport doesn’t show my middle name, so it wasn’t accepted. I could have been somebody else, by this time I wished I had been somebody else! Anybody else! Yes I know, it does seem a strange thing but when you’re dealing with officialdom sometimes strange things happen. Here strange things happen a lot so although I was surprised and extremely annoyed I bowed my head and drove home. Oh! Did I mention that the office I went to was two and a half hours away by car? Well it is and I’d wasted ten hours by now, not to mention the petrol.
I went back last week (2.5hrs) with the offending letter now reprinted and my name changed so as to tally with my passport. Great, this time for sure. Wrong! Years ago applicants needed a certificate of address from the Vice Governor’s offices confirming the address at which you live. Then they started asking for utility bills so I had taken along my bills but they caused uproar and hilarity in the office. Apparently “on the right as you enter Çukurbağ village” was not specific enough. They wanted a house number, I told them eighty seven but no, only a certificate from the Vice Governer’s office would do. I leaned on the counter with both elbows and held my head in my hands, then looked up at the policewoman with my best puppy-dog eyes and said “but I’ve been here three times so far, if I leave the stuff with you and you issue my permit, when I come back to collect it I swear I will bring the address certificate with me, is that ok?” Well women do that sort of thing to men all the time don’t they, so I don’t see why a bit of equality shouldn’t creep in on my side every now and then. Anyway the policewoman she say yes! So then I had to go and pay at the Tax Offices two miles away and returned after having lunch to give them the receipt and get a ticket bearing the date for me to go back and pick it up. While I was having lunch I noticed a tyre fitters shop next door so enquired about the cost of new tyres for my car. Reasonable price, instant fitting and balancing so I said I’ll be back next week, then I went back home (2.5hrs).
On Monday this week I went and got the address certificate in Kaş, what number is your house they asked, eighty seven I said, so then they printed out the document and gave it to me. It took two minutes to get certified proof that I knew my house number!
On Wednesday I took my scooter for it’s biennial roadworthiness test. There were too many there to be done in one day so I left it in Mehmet the mechanic’s capable hands to get it done on Thursday.
On Thursday I went (2.5hrs) back to the Kemer, left my car with the tyre fitter for four new tyres and crossed the road to the office. My new residence permit was ready, I handed over the address certification and walked out a very happy and mostly legal resident of Turkey again, it’s good to be back in the fold.
When I got back home (2.5hrs) I found that Mehmet had got my scooter through the test successfully, a couple of minor things to be repaired but it’s legal to ride it anyway. A good week, I had a glass of wine to celebrate.
Cukurbagli's Blog 
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