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29.1.09

Turkey: Fethiye

We arrived in the Dalaman airport in the pouring, awful, pouring rain, and were properly, finally, in actual Asia, and O and his girlfriend C were lovely and came and got us in their cars and we promptly installed the carseat in O's car so he got to listen to poor half-carsick sleepy sleepy E wail until she conked out. It was i think about a forty-five minute drive to Fethiye but I was tired and sleeping too - so might be completely off. And we couldn't stay at his family's hotel (that's the Turquoise, in Oludeniz, that's the Blue Lagoon) because it was closed for the season but he got us rooms at - oh, what was it - the Ece Saray, in Fethiye proper. But anyway first we went and had dinner, and this dinner, it kept going and going and going. There were breads and appetizers and salads, and just when you think, fine, yes, we're sleepy and a cold dinner was delicious and fine (good lord, i love what they do with grape leaves) then they come out with soup and grilled meats and hot tomatoes and more bread, and i swear i almost fell asleep in my meatballs. And we arrived finally at the hotel and immediately all fell to bed. And the next morning every room in the place, i think, has a view over the marina, and the water, and the mountains across the water, and the water, and the pretty boats, and the water. So you wake up and look straight out the window in any direction and it is six kinds of gorgeous. It was still cool enough that we wanted jackets (except for M, but he has a furnace instead of an internal thermostat) but still you could go out and walk around and there was SUN, and it was DECEMBER, and the sun in december after being in cold gray rainy slushy boring old Vienna was fantastic.

And we had breakfast at the hotel every morning but i think we were the only people there: so instead of a regular breakfast buffet they brought us plates of cold cuts and cheese and olives and croissants, and i can not ever spell croissants properly the first time, not that that is part of anything, and they brought yogurt and cereal for E and we each also got a honeycomb. Like half a cup of honeycomb, perfect little wax hexagons drippingly full with pale sugar, and i have no idea if wax is digestible or if it's entirely toxic but once i had put all on the bread that i could and finished off all the bread i ate the remainder with a spoon, and i did again the next day and the next. Even knowing that O was planning all this other eating for us, this honey, it was not possible to not eat it. And i am someone who can ration a box of fudge for a month.

And there were orange trees, lemon trees, hibiscus, passionflower (And we know that it was a passionflower because we took a photograph, and came home and googled it, and what we googled was crazy flower, and of course immediately there it was, and if Wikipedia was right then this is a Passiflora × decaisneana), little evil-eye wards set in the tile. Palm trees, and little papery flowers, and roses, and a boat (we didn't go on her) called the Lady Patricia. We walked around the marina for a bit and then met O and C and drove for a while - there is an abandoned Greek town full of empty windows and missing balconies - we had tea, because everywhere you go there is tea, and now that i think about it i am going to have a cup of tea right now.

*pause for tea*

The coast of Turkey is all very steep hills going straight down into very clear water. There are trees growing sideways out of cliffs, goats ambling casually along places that you're thinking, goats don't have opposable thumbs, what are they holding on with? And how often do the goats go missing? And can they swim? Valleys so steep only birds (or in some cases, apparently, butterflies) can land on the white beaches below. Or boats. But the water: it doesn't even seem real that something with that color can exist. Especially in such great expanses. A long crescent white beach, ending in snowy mountains, and the water is blue from your dreams, from Technicolor postcards, from old Hollywood where everything is perfect and every time a bell rings, Teacher gives you a knowing look. This blue, it is not real, it can't be, it's from the glow of old paintings and science fiction. And there it is, more and more and more of it, and you go around another hill or another cliff and there's another idyllic retreat, another and another and another, white and red triangles of boats and birds calling and the water, the absolute water.

We had a long barbecue with O's family at their resort and one of them spoke German and none of them spoke English and we forgot a hundred times how to say thank you in Turkish, how to say it's wonderful in Turkish, how to say i'm completely stuffed, but if you insist in Turkish. Turkish barbecue is delicious. I promised myself i would eat a lot more eggplant. The hospitality in Turkey - in the hotels and in the restaurants, sure, they are trying to make a dollar off you; but you can't fake it. With only a few words in common everyone was still so dear and so friendly and so open, like if we were there for another week we would be friends and be family and be there as if it had been forever. And i'm sure there must be a downside to living in a place where everyone is so convivial all the time - i have to believe there is, or i would want to move there immediately. It was beautiful and delicious and perfect, and the hospitals took good care of us, and everywhere was so welcoming. Unbelievable.

The next day - E was still coughing a good bit and tired and sicky, so she was able to sleep a whole lot in the car, which worked out as well as it could, i guess, and we could go back to the hotel room after everything was done at night and light up the shower and fill the place with steam, and it would all get a little easier again, and every day was just barely incrementally better, so you could cross your fingers and recognize, that tonight is lighter than last night, i got fifteen minutes more sleep, and that is a good thing, and oh, but still, having a sick baby in a Very Very Foreign Country at any time, three in the morning or the middle of the day, it is a worrisome thing. And when said baby wants to only sleep when attached to you and you were kind of hoping to be nursing a little bit less, rather than a little bit more, and it's hard to sleep with her on there, and the bed is not the comfiest bed you've ever met and it sure ain't your bed at home, nobody is sleeping well. So the fact that we had such a wholly excellent time when we hadn't been basically sleeping really speaks to how phenomenal a place it is.

So, the next day. More breakfast at the hotel with the honeypots and you can really see what Winnie the Pooh is talking about and how the obsession can start and if i didn't think it was probably illegal to bring biological products back into the European Union we might have had an even heavier suitcase than we did. But anyway. We drove off with O and C again (M's parents were riding with C, and we were in the car with O, and the acronyms are going to get really hard to keep track of, someday, aren't they?) and drove and drove and drove and it was all gorgeous and even in the cloudy and a little rain, the landscape. With the rocks and the trees and the hills and the valleys and not only the honey, but i am a person that likes tomatoes. And so to see a thousand greenhouses full of tomatoes, that ... that is a beautiful thing in its own right. Yum. Though it does make one want to buy Turkish tomatoes, which is way, way outside the whole hundred mile diet, not that that's something we're very good at keeping to, but if i can buy Austrian tomatoes or Turkish tomatoes, there are reasons to go either way, now.

And we drove for a while and then we came to bishopric of Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, in Demre, or Myra, or Kale, and his old church is there as a museum (the toilets are quite nice, there are two Western-style ones and two Eastern-style ones, and you'd think the Western ones would be the ones you'd use except they're out of toilet paper and so you have no choice, and it's okay, really). In the town there are Santa Claus cafeterias, Santa Claus gift shops, big Santa Claus statues like you'd see anywhere in the US in suburban yards in December, and it is a little weird, you can tell the architecture is not the same, you can tell the streets are not the same, but there is a big standard-issue red-jacketed Santa Claus standing up in the middle of the square. Somehow our camera had run out of batteries so we had to borrow M's parents' camera and we all went around the church and up and down the little street taking a lot of pictures, really, a lot of pictures. And we had lunch in one of the Santa Claus cafeterias and it was delicious (of course) and i haven't the foggiest idea what i ate, but i know there was eggplant and tomatoes in it and i know it was delicious. And we drove and drove and drove back again and had dinner at some fish place that was O's favorite and really, the guy knows his restaurants, and it was the same thing again that they bring some fancy thing, stuffed crabs or something, and bread, and garlic, and it's great and you eat a lot of it because, well, they brought a lot of it. And then they come out with the calamari, and the octopus, and the shrimp, and the mussels, and more bread, and more salads, and raki, too, and fruit juice that i swear was all freshly squeezed every single time. And then the crowning glory, the regular fish, finally, at the end, that was alive that very afternoon. And then they ask you if you want dessert.

The next day (we had so few days there, really, but we did quite well at cramming all kinds of things into them) was the last proper day we had, and we spent it wandering around Fethiye - M took E and they hung out with M's dad at O's office and did whatever manly men do when they are babysitting a little girl, i know they went for a walk at some point, and i have a funny feeling that O's very friendly secretary was giving E a whole lot of chocolate chip cookies, but she had barely been eating anything that was not directly produced by my top half, so really by then, chocolate chip cookies were a good thing. And M's mom and I went shopping with C and also O's sister, walking around the open-air markets with the jewelry and the bags and the clothes and the scarves and the hanging lamps and the candles and the backgammon and chess sets and the little carvings and the dolls. I had a big shopping list of things we had to get: eight small items for M's colleagues, sixteen small items for my colleagues, a bracelet for me, a souvenir for E's tagesmutter, et cetera. And M's mom had a similar list (though without the colleagues; it seems like an okay idiosyncrasy for a workplace to have, i guess, or as good as any): a bag, a scarf, more. The souvenir we got for E's tagesmutter was the nicest one: a real Turkish carpet bag, with traditional patterns and natural dyes, and I think it was really pretty, too, and of course when you are watching five very small people and going to the park with them, a bag with convenient stroller-drapeable handles will come in handy, i think. I hope. Anyway she said she liked it (and we also got her, by accident as somebody had given it to E as a present just for being cute, a magnet of Bishop Nicholas). And shopping is fun. It was surprising how fashionable Fethiye was, though, and i was completely unprepared to be fashionable. Admittedly i'm not fashionable in Vienna either but at least here i'm used to it and not going shopping with people i feel like i might be embarrassing. Still fun, though, and when one has the choice of Euros or Dollars, anybody will talk to you.

And that night we had dinner with O's family, again, at their house, this time, and they have a gorgeous, big, up-to-the-minute house filled with exquisite furniture and orchids and of course all the rugs you could dream of and it's very clearly in a Very Good Neighborhood, with shiny new cars in every driveway and two-story windows and modern outdoor lighting, and a dirt road to get there. Incongruous. But they had a lovely home and were hospitable, again, and everything was more delicious than what came before, especially - especially! - they do this thing with quince. What did they do? Now i have to remember the recipe. Something like, a kilogram of quince, and half a kilogram of sugar, and enough water to cover them, and you boil them for forty-five minutes, or something. The timing may have been lost in translation (and googling "poached quince," which is certainly what it was, gives widely diverse results). And then you eat them (though, of course, our hostess and her array of cooks and servants (and, yeah, that was me dropping the words "array" and "servants" there) had arranged them beautifully in a dish to show off the pinky round pinkness of them) and i think they gave us chopped walnuts to sprinkle over. Yums. (Or was that for the pumpkin? Either way.) And then there were gifts: more scarves for M's mom and for me, and the small things we'd brought for them, and really we were or anyway i was feeling completely unprepared at such a show of generosity. What do you do? We thanked them in Turkish.

And then we had to get up on the wrong end of daybreak to make it to the airport. Sigh.

Labels: food, travel

scrawled @ 20:33