I’ve never done this before

The directions are simple, according to may_b: Go to this site and pick 5 cards which describe you in highly unflattering ways.

Limiting oneself to five is difficult. It would also be more enlightening if people did it for you.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

An' foolish notion:

Magnetic Attraction

Perhaps Tanya's steely resolve and iron will account for the attraction that she has for fridge magnets. We collect them from places we have visited as souvenirs we can afford. We added two new ones this last trip from Myra and St Nicholas Church.

I bought three others for her in Ankara. One says "Young at heart, other parts slightly older". She says she is putting that one in the bedroom. . . Another says "A garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever". She quite liked it and hung it by the front door. The last one says "I've shopped all my life and still have nothing to wear". That one cracked her up but she said there were no pictures of shoes on it. Mel would understand.

Good Saint Nicholas aka Santa Claus

Saint Nicholas was born in Asia Minor sometime after 250 AD. He eventually became Bishop of Myra, the capital of Lycia under the Byzantine Empire. He is greatly revered by the Orthodox Church and is Patron Saint of both Russia and Greece. How he morphed into Santa Claus is a long story.

After his death in 343 AD, a number of churches were built in his honour in Myra. The last church was built about the 8th century and was renovated some 300 years later after it was destroyed by war or earthquakes. The structure is undergoing extensive reconstruction though it is used for church services every Dec 6th on St Nicholas’ Day. The base of the church is about 7 meters below today’s ground level.

Baby Swallows

While I was away, we had two new doors installed in the passage way, lights and plug-ins installed and the walls finished in preparation for painting. Everyone was aware of the swallows and their nest and worked with them in mind. The eggs hatched sometime before July 20th. The electricians had to run the wiring just above the nest after the babies had hatched so they were especially careful.

There are four babies and four adult birds are looking after them. I have no idea about the family life of swallows, so why the extra couple are involved, I don't know. They are all quite used to humans around so this morning when I took their pictures they sat more or less calmly thorugh the whole episode. The four babies fill the nest to over flowing but would not cooperate well enough to get a good shot of all four at once.

Home Sweet Home

Tanya and I arrived home yesterday afternoon. Home never looked so good. And the garden never looked so bad. There had been good rains the first two weeks I had been gone but the week Tanya and I were on holiday, temperatures were in the mid-30's all week. Our house and dog sitter , Katya, had watered most of the house plants and some of the outdoor flower pots but there were casualties. The flower beds were a mess and the kitchen garden a desert. Tanya took the garden hose to the flowers but left the kitchen garden till today.

We had corn on the cob and fresh tomatoes for supper last night from our own garden and today picked a pail of tomatoes and peppers. Cucs are about finished but we have about 15 liters of dill pickles in our root cellar which should do us. Our apricots are done and the apples are growing fast. The ground is littered with little green apples and pits from apricots.

The sunflowers have heads the size of dinner plates but no seeds. The birds cleaned off each and every one. We were glad for them, rotten little birds!!

Volk and Bobik were glad to see me and enjoyed their walk along the river/marsh area. The trail was heavily over grown. Tomorrow I will buy a machete and pretend I am Alan Quartermain. The dogs did not want to go back into the yard last evening so they got an extra half hour of freedom.

We slept like the dead for 15 hours in the coolness of the night breeze through our windows. Holidays are OK but there is no place like home.

Presa di Finica

OK, so I was confused. We are staying at the Presa di Finica Resort at Finike which is SW of Antalya about the same distance as Alanya is to the SE of Antalya. We are semi-enjoying our holiday. The resort is lovely, beach wonderful, water wonderful, food good, rip-off artists everywhere as always over charging tourists but the excursion we took to Myra on Saturday was good value for the money. Everything is perfect except...

Big problem is Air Conditioning works only periodically and does not work properly when it is on. Ventilation fan runs when patio doors are closed but AC hours are from 6:30 am to 9:00 am; 3:30 pm to 7:00 pm and 10:30 pm to 2:00 am. Even when it is on, it is hard to tell the difference in air temp. We slept on the balcony every night just to survive the heat in the room.

Tanya is MAD! That is something you never want aimed at you, and you can be sure I will tread carefully all my days that it is never aimed at me. She bitched at everyone she could find all week so today they put us in a suite for our last two days. We are not sure the AC works any better but it is certainly a nicer room. When we get home we are both writing letters to the Presidents of the hotel and the tour company to ask why they spoil a wonderful place with cheap AC.

The front desk was not helpful about internet either. Tried to sell us 15 Euro cards for one hour wifi. So this morning the girl at the Customer Relations desk says that there is wifi here that doesn’t need a card from the desk. Sure enough. 10 Euro for 300 minutes on credit card. But even better, I found a high speed cable just asking to plug into my laptop, so it is free.

We will be home Tuesday and I am looking forward to it, though once we learned to ignore the AC and simply pretended it didn’t exist it was easier as all else is perfect in my books.

Shopping in the Saman Pazar

Saturday I went with friends to the Saman Pazar (Straw Bazaar) in old Ankara. There is a mosque there that is centuries old, the oldest in Ankara and the fortress on the hill was so old that all the groups I knew (Byzantines, Crusaders, Seljuks, Ottomans), had simply added to it. Many of the buildings have been or are being renovated, though there are still some that look very old.
We went though a museum founded and funded by the Koç (Koch) family in memory of their patriarch who began the family fortune working in his father’s hardware store and expanded it in the 50’s and 60’s with a combination of business acumen and good connections. Koç senior brought General Electric, Ford and Fiat to Turkey in the 50’s. Koç Group accounted for some 9% (I was told) of the Turkish GDP a couple of decades ago though economic expansion has since reduced the percentage.
The shops sell mainly antiques. Beautiful old furniture likely from the houses of the rich during Ottoman times caught my eye along with metal work, carpets and ceramics. The skill of the craftsmen was so evident in every piece. I could only buy what I could carry home to Marianivka so settled for an old print. Tanya will tell me if it is Russian or not but I could not resist the step-dancing grandfather and child.