“This books will give you the magic with a very low price” 3-7-07

We’ve been in Turkey for almost a week. We flew from Athens to Istanbul then to Antalya in the very south- west corner of Turkey. And now we’re making our way up the western coast by bus to Istanbul. Toumazou was not able to come with us to Turkey because it’s not very safe for him after fighting in the Turkish- Cypriot War in ’74. There is still a lot of animosity about what happened and the continued occupation of Northern Cyprus. Dr. Krentz is with us now. They definitely have very different styles. A change is nice but it will be great to get back to Greece with Toumazou. We have Turkish tour guide with us now. Her name is Gulen and every single time she gets on the bus microphone she says, “Ah, ah, ah, gunaiden” (the spelling is probably wrong on that one), which means “ah, ah, ah, good morning” in Turkish. She says this everytime not matter what time of day it is. But she only makes the bus driver say it to us also if it is actually the morning.
So far the weather has been great! It’s been warm and sunny and the sky is so blue. Gulen told us that Turkey is 99% or 95% Muslim but at least where we are I would have never guessed that from what I’ve seen. In Egypt almost every women at least wore their hair veiled and we saw lots of women completely veiled from head to toe in black, with black gloves on their hands. In Turkey, however, it seems like the exception for women to even cover their hair (I’ve been told that eastern Turkey might be different).
We spent four nights in a very cute hotel in Selcuk (pronounced “Selchuk”). I think it was run by one family, though we never saw any women. The hotel is more like a big house than a hotel and they served us dinner together every night at seven. We always have breakfast at our hotels but here they made us dinner too. Since we the only ones in the hotel and it was so small, it felt even more like we are just a big family.
Selcuk is a small town and very cute. I spent a lot of time walking around in the evenings. There seemed to be a lot of kids in the town and the school buildings are all painted bright colors, like pink and green and orange and blue. One of the buildings had every story painted a different color. I did see a lot fewer women in town than men and definitely at night there were only older men out. I walked by several groups of old men playing backgammon together. It makes me enjoy the backgammon board I just bought in Athens even more!