It’s been unusually hot for an unusually long time here in Seattle. I generally hate Summer to begin with so… don’t get me started.
Last night I was just so wiped out from the hot day that I let my son watch a video and I laid in bed with my phone, scrolling through people’s travel photos of beautiful places on Instagram and eventually looking at my own old photos on Flickr. I’ve had Turkey on the brain (as in, the country!) because they’re finally starting to build our new deck first thing next week. I took a short trip to Turkey, maybe about 4 days or so, back in 2006. The one thing I really remembered was one hotel with a back terrace covered in floor cushions. I remember sitting out there at dusk, watching the sun set (before the mosquitos chased us back inside), sipping tea, and listening to the haunting sounds of the calls to prayer in the distance. This was on my mind because I knew that I wanted a small corner of our deck to be like this – with comfortable floor cushions to cozy up any time of the year – to sit outside in the early evening sipping wine, coffee, or tea. Whatever. These are the little bits and pieces of my travel over the years that I like to remember and bring “home”.
As I remembered this, I got frustrated once again because I’ve lost so many of my pre-iPhone day photos. I have some photos still of my time in Portugal and southern Spain, Turkey, etc but I know that I am also missing a lot of them. I wasn’t so organized then nor did I have as much storage space, so I would store most of my photos in galleries on old websites of mine without any backup. And then, without thinking, I would go back and delete all the stuff I no longer use, including entire websites, without thinking of the fact that I just deleted my only “copies” of many photos! I had managed to rescue a couple handfuls of them awhile back.
So. That being said – my time in Turkey was short (and dramatic, as many of my trips were!) but I have great memories of so much of what I saw. I was frustrated that I couldn’t remember the names of the towns I’d been to, other than Istanbul and Fethiye. But a small leap into Google, thanks to the memory of the name of a restaurant I loved, helped me put all the pieces together again!
My trip started out in Istanbul. I would love to go back but here is the one thing I’d learned: don’t go anywhere near the Grand Bazaar and open shops and markets unless you are fully rested and have your wits about you. Granted, I went 9 years ago but I imagine it’s pretty much the same. I remember being overwhelmed and frustrated at not being able to just LOOK at things without being harassed by vendors, and of course wound up buying things I didn’t want nor need. Also, while I later appreciated the beautiful sound of the calls to prayer, the first one I heard was at 5 am when I think I’d JUST managed to fall asleep after a fitful night.
At some point, I’d taken a rather adventurous bus ride from Istanbul to the South. It was adventurous for a number of reasons. One, it was a loooooong overnight ride. I was expecting comfortable seats, quiet, and um… bathrooms. On the bus. Nope. The seats were not comfortable and their were televisions blasting Turkish sitcoms (or what appeared to be sitcoms based on the laugh tracks). This was a bus for locals, not tourists – which is the way to go, but I was unprepared. The bus DID stop at a rest area once, however. A very local rest area somewhere in the middle of western Turkey. The bathrooms were not at all “Western style” – behind every door to every stall I opened was a tiled stall with a hole in the ground and a bucket and hose hanging on the wall. *grin* Again, I’m down with the local stuff and this was fascinating to me. (Honestly, it kind of makes more sense, too. I mean it might not be the most comfortable for people now used to sitting on toilets all the time, but… ya know. Also, no paper waste!) I was just glad that I had the most basic need for the bathroom, if you catch my drift, and spent a good hour or two afterwards pondering various situations. I mean, what do you do if you’re, ya know… SICK? Anyway. The bus ride ended with accidentally getting off (wrong stop) and seeing the bus take off with all my stuff and then FRANTICALLY RUNNING AFTER IT until a cab took mercy, picked me up, and said he was quite sure the bus was going to a terminal just a few miles away. LO and BEHOLD. Found the bus. Got my stuff. Got laughed at by the bus driver and a few passengers. All was well.
The names of Ankara and Antalya have always been on my mind but upon looking at a map of Turkey, I’ve realized there’s no way I had been to those towns. I DID, however, spend time in Fethiye and Patara. I can’t be sure, but I think the bus went from Istanbul to Patara and from there I went on to Fethiye. Another one of the strong memories I have is of a lovely little restaurant that JUST opened for the season – it was called The Lazy Frog. I remember sitting at a table and seeing a man walk in carrying an armload of beautiful, giant, bright green beans. I commented on them because I was living in Prague at the time and didn’t get to see such beautiful, fresh vegetables often. (Sorry, but it was true then!) The man proudly told me that they were from his garden and asked if I wanted some. Of course I said yes! I don’t remember what he did with those beans – there was light sauteeing, olive oil, and I think some pimenton – but I remember being in love with those beans and all the food, in general, in Turkey.
Remembering the name of “The Lazy Frog” led me into the Google rabbit hole. I found that the Lazy Frog is still in business (yay!), got the name of the town (Patara) which led me to the exact hotel and the beautiful Ottoman Terrace in my memory (inspiration for our deck) AND I even found a picture of the man who brought in those lovely green beans (on the left, in yellow). Ain’t the internet grand?
I searched and very quickly found pictures of hotels and IMMEDIATELY recognized the “ottoman terrace” at The Patara Viewpoint Hotel. (Fun fact: sunbathing topless in Western Turkey was ok and it was one of the many places in Europe I enjoyed such an activity. The beach in Patara is also the place I remember immediately getting a wicked sunburn because… yeah. Tired, unprepared, and just not thinking much. My skin matched my red bikini.) I also remember the mosquitos were wicked and the hotel room came equipped with a mosquito net hung from the ceiling, over the bed. Good for keeping mosquitos out, bad for trying to escape through easily when you need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Lastly, I remember sitting on the patio by the pool eating breakfast and drinking genuine Turkish coffee – I learned there that if you wanted your coffee sweetened (back then, I did), you needed to tell them upon ordering because sugar was added as they made it and not stirred in afterwards. Of all the photos I’ve found of mine, I’m sorry to see I have NONE from Patara. Sigh.
And Fethiye was full of great things. The Blue Lagoon, of course – though the dusty road to get there, on a moped, I could have done without! I imagine that road is paved over and covered with shops and hotels by now. The scenery around the coast in Fethiye was wonderful – I was particularly taken with the shipbuilding yards and all the boat skeletons.
(All of these photos below – and the dusty road! – are from the old photos I managed to salvage and revive with Instagram, of course! #tbt, right?)
I also remember the cute “hippy” Hostel in Fethiye – it had a beautiful back patio with a roof trellis covered in pink flowers. The bathroom had a “Western” toilet option AND a “not Western” hole in the floor option! Lastly – I saw whichever “Mission Impossible” was in theaters in 2006 (perhaps it was Mission Impossible II?) in Fethiye, with Turkish subtitles! Before or after the movie, I distinctly remember going to a bakery (see the delicious looking photo of the strawberry pastry below) and getting said pastry and a can of iced Nescafe coffee. *grin*
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nd, of course – since my Dad was a lifelong firefighter, I would seek out the fire stations wherever I went. I now have a bag full of international firehouse patches. *smile* These Turkish firefighters in Fethiye didn’t speak much English but they did understand what I was getting at and brought me tea and patches. They also let me get this picture.
I would love to go back and see more of Istanbul, too, including crossing the Bosphorous Strait to see BOTH sides. I remember food, of course – that always seems to stick out most for me! There was one restaurant – an Indian restaurant, of all things – that had a quiet, cozy rooftop/top floor seating area with an amazing view of the surroundings and the Blue Mosque. The Jewish Quarter made me swoon and consider moving to Turkey (I was teaching English at the time and knew of many teachers who’d gone to Turkey and loved it.)
