Fall Flowers

The last rose of summer

Blooming Idiots

Another week of warm weather and this one will be covered in blossoms

The Constant Gardener

These survived the dogs' diggings

Ronald looks on while Tanya works

Still a few bravely blooming

Windfall apples

Lots more where they came from

Two more dog stories

When Tanya and I were at the train station to go to Kyiv on our way to Turkey we noticed a dog lying on the walk, just resting.  We stopped top talk to her, a two to five year old Beagle-German Shepherd cross of some kind with a beautiful intelligent head.  She was quite friendly. What we didn't notice until we walked on and she followed us, walking on her two front legs only, was that she had lost both back legs about half way up.  Perils of living in a rail yard, I guess. 

Anyhow, she was pretty mobile on two legs, with massive chest and shoulder development.  Tanya immediately worried about who would look after her in winter, but she was obviously well fed and must have had a warm place to sleep.  Not a great life but a life;  making the best of it.

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About three Februaries ago, I was sitting in the car at the insurance office, waiting for some documents.  Nearby, an old babushka was cutting the small flexible branches from a weeping birch, maybe to weave something, I don't know.  Five or six dogs were playing nearby and one came over to see what she was doing.  She yelled at it and swiped at it with her twigs.  The dog ran off.

A few minutes later it was back with another dog.  the two of them stopped a safe distance from the old lady and proceeded to bark a strip off her hide.  They barked and barked and barked at her.  When they were satisfied that they had told her off sufficiently, they then went about their business.  What sort of names do dogs call people?  "You spawn of a cat"?  "You Mail Delivery Person"?

The Old Bag with the New Bag

And you expected a picture of what?

Not leather, by the way.

Kids, Cats and Horticultural Hounds

There have been a few families here with preschoolers.  They are always fun to watch. In one family, the boy, about 5 thinks he is so cool and his sister about 3 agrees totally. He swims pretty good and the girl tags after her mom using water wings to help.  No fear.  She found an friend - another three year old and the two of them had a most wonderful time running, shrieking and splashing around. I love the sound of children laughing.

There were a couple of boys maybe 18 months old. Sun hats and sandals mandatory, swimsuits optional.  Neither had any fear of the water, cold as it was, until you got used to it.  One of the boys loved to wander down the beach with his mom and collect rocks.  Last week there was a maybe 9 month old in an inflatable version of the Walker (remember them when they had wheels and your kids rode them down the basement steps?).  This version was like a life buoy with a seat that allowed the kid's legs to stick out underneath.  This little guy loved the water and would paddle like crazy to reach his mom or his babushka.

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The hotel seems to support a number of beggar cats.  I counted at least 10 different cats and kittens that show up at meal time and beg food from the guests. They are very friendly and playful and very accomplished at winning hearts and free food.  Not sure how they will fare this winter when the place shuts down.  Maybe they just move down the street to the big hotels that stay open and cater to Germans who come for the winter.

The dog that hangs around the beach can live off its fat for a few months at least.  And the big orange tom I think mooches from the fishing boats as I never saw him at the hotel.  He was up a tree one day stretched out in the sun sleeping peacefully until he was seen by the guests who all stopped to pat him. Two meters up is not enough to avoid being annoyed.

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A week or so before we left, Tanya bought four perennials at the market, took them home and transplanted them.  The dogs promptly dug them up.  Tanya had a bucket 2/3 full of manure which she then  filled with water and left for a few days.  She mixed the manure in the soil around the plants and watered them with water from the pail.  The dogs must have figured anything that smelled that good on top must have buried treasure underneath.  Maybe even a dead goat? Hence the digging.

Tanya tore a verbal strip off their hides.  Half an hour later she found all her shoes and slippers from around the front door in the middle of the street.  I expect it was Volk, He never touched mine, just hers. And you think dogs can't give you the finger?

Red Shoes

Written Thursday:

Tanya’s cold was much better today.  The sun was shining and the sky clear so we went to the beach.  Tanya didn’t go swimming which nearly killed her but she soaked up the sun for a couple hours before noon.  I went swimming then tried to get a bit of colour.  I didn’t want to sunburn my tummy – imagine a giraffe with a sore throat and you get the picture.

After lunch we went shopping.  With Valya and Elena gone home, I had to go along.  Bleah.  Tanya was closing deals she had been working on all week.  She bought a leather “Prada” handbag for $25, that she had been eyeing, then went looking for (more) shoes.  The sandals that were $8 yesterday were $10 today so she kept on going.  Found another store with these red shoes that she fell in love with.  She tried on every pair of shoes in the store but always went back to the red.  Did I mention I hate shopping?

She decided $35 was too much.  $25.  No way.  We left and got about four stores away when the salesman called out $30.  Done.

Written Friday:

Another beautiful day.  We spent an hour swimming this morning and an hour in the sun. Tanya is still coughing but couldn't stay out of the sea.  It was like glass this morning and the water is so clear you can see bottom at almost any depth.

A 6-S-ful Holiday

We have had a good holiday so far, in spite of some rain and a bad cold.  We had more than a week of sun, sand and sea, enjoyed swimming, sleeping and SHOPPING.  Turkey is a shopper’s paradise, especially in the tourist areas, starting with the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul where you go for gold and silver jewelry and for carpets.  The resort area of the Mediterranean coast on both sides of Antalya is wall to wall resorts close to the ocean and wall to wall shops “across the street” like a giant strip mall that runs for miles and miles. 

In our area, the vast majority of tourists are Russian or Ukrainian and every shopkeeper speaks Russian, though I did find a couple who also spoke English.  The stores feature the products for which Turkey has a reputation and a commercial advantage.  Leather and furs; textiles such as towels and related, clothing such as jeans and related; grocery stores selling fresh fruit, tea, coffee and Turkish Delight; souvenir shops with everything from water pipes to hand carved chess sets and restaurants selling real Turkish food for when the resort buffet starts to look the same day after day.

Valya and Elena, from Mariupol, had come on the same flight as we did and also stayed at our resort, so we had someone else besides ourselves to talk to for the first week.  Tanya and the two “girls” hit it off immediately.  Tanya spent the week with them, shopping up and down the street, about 1 km in each direction.  And I didn’t have to go.  Best part.  They harassed, cajoled, terrorized, flirted and negotiated with the Turkish men in all the shops along the way (Turkish women are rare in retail) driving the hardest bargains they could.  Because it is end of season, bargains can be had.

They found Turkish bath and massage at half the price of our hotel.  They found Ali who will pay us $50 per liter bottle of good Ukrainian vodka next time we come (we can bring four bottles between the two of us).  They found a tour to Pamukkale at $18 under the price quoted by reputable tour companies. 

Tanya found a lovely leather coat that started at $2000 but quickly came down to $600.  By dint of tough bargaining Tanya got it down to $450, after several trips to several stores, playing one against the other.  I went with her when she drove the final bargain and paid for the coat.  The store did alterations on the spot; including an extra button hole for which no matching button could then be found.  Another $10 had to come off the price and there was no backing down on Tanya’s part.

I said to the guy, who also spoke excellent English that eventually Tanya would give him money and go away but I was with her forever.  He laughed at that.  

Tanya, Elena and Valya: Shopaholics Unanimous

Tsarist Russia 1812. Republican America 2012?

"Moscow in 1812 was a sprawling city of about 250,000 inhabitants in fall. Throughout the winter months, when the nobles and their serfs returned from their country estates the population would increase by about 100,000. Rising out of a sea of single story wooden houses, many of them little more than huts, were the great stone palaces of the aristocracy. . . The palaces situated in large gardens were not nearly so numerous as the 6 cathedrals and 1500 churches that tended to the souls of the Muscovites. As elsewhere in Russia a citizen. . . either had everything or nothing. Everyone was either connected to the great families or served them. The small middle class consisted mainly of merchants and those who provided skilled services for the nobles or for the government. Many of these people were foreigners.

"To describe the Russian aristocrats are “conspicuous consumers” would be something of an understatement. . . This was underlined by the summer exodus of the nobility; when the nobles took their service entourages along, the population of the city was reduced by 28%. Yet even this statistic does not iclude everyone connected with the palaces, because staff remained behind to look after these empty “townhouses”.

"In addition to maintaining residences in St Petersburg (and Moscow). . . the great families duplicated their lavish domiciles in their summer residences outside Moscow and often on their vast agricultural domains. There, amid thousands of serfs, they lived in a grand style. To put it plainly, this very thin elite layer atop the Russian social strata was all the counted. The rest of the population were considered of little consequence. . .

"When word of what had happened at Borodino got around, the nobles at once put their serfs to work stripping their Moscow residences of all valuables. . . About 10,000 soldiers, wounded in battle needed to be moved but there were no wagons or draft teams left because everything that had wheels had been used to transport the property of the wealthy."

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"Invoking the name of God, the aroused peasants committed unspeakable cruelties and almost every kind of torture imaginable to prolong the agony of their victims. In this they were morally abetted by the fact that the average Russian believed that all west Europeans were unbaptized heathens who had been led into holy Russia by the anti-Christ. This was the way the situation had been presented to the uneducated population; from St. Petersburg, Moscow and the Russian army headquarters, manifestos attesting to these “facts” were circulated in every market square."

From: 1812: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign by Richard K Riehn. McGraw Hill 1990.