Trivia.

It is hard to know what to write this week. If you aren't aware of what is happening in Turkey google it. It makes everything else seem less important. Fethiye remains peaceful and safe. You are as safe as you ever are to travel here.

We are starting to gear up for summer - the children finish school next Friday for three long months of holidays. I'm pretty happy about this. I genuinely like having the boys at home. Hero is heading off on this camp it looks like an amazing experience. And by amazing I mean he will enjoy the tree climbing and rafting no end, and I am so so glad I don't have to watch! We also have to make a decision on whether Rafey is ready to progress to the first class. He is not an academically minded kid, and proper school is really hard work. He has also had some speech difficulties. After one year in the pre-school he is much improved, but not perfect. It might be better to give him another year doing easy things than push him to go further when he is not really ready-ready. This summer I will be trying to help him learn to read, if he manages we will let him go into year one. If not we will have a big palaver on our hands trying to stop him.

This made me laugh a lot. Screen shots of amusing captions on TV

You Know You've been in Turkey a Long Time When...

How to know when you have passed the point of no return and 'gone native.'


You actually feel more comfortable with slippers than without

You find 'animals in the home' a surprising concept

You get mad if people ask "are you from Russia?" rather than "where are you from?"

You keep un-opened milk in the cupboard not the refrigerator.

On holidays abroad, the colour and size of courgettes and cucumbers are so different from what you are used to you struggle to be sure if they are labelled correctly.

You still wear a sweater when it's 25 degrees celsius  (80f)

Chickens wandering around in urban areas no longer surprise you.

Just the word bacon is exciting, as are packet spice mixes, and cadbury chocolate.

You plan sentences in your head before you say them.

You think minced meat (ground beef) is "ready food."

You automatically remove your shoes when entering a home.

You start to view cars as a luxury item.

You notice people who do not have Mediterranean colouring.

You return to your country of origin and have to remind yourself to make eye contact with the opposite sex.

An unknown man saying good morning to you on the street is confusing, mildly threatening, something to think about.

You find "tourist clothes" both culturally and weather inappropriate.

The words "son fiyat" fill you with excitement.

You know what to do with pekmez.

You can find a passable substitute for just about any unobtainable ingredient in any Western recipe.

Squat toilets make you groan but not run.

When you visit family, you find the price of everything unbelievably expensive.

You stop buying chocolate in green wrappers and expecting it to be minty.

On trips abroad you are surprised how few people smoke.

If someone brings you a plate of food, you never return the plate empty.

As a parent, you are thrown into confusion on holidays because the kid shouting "Mummy!" is not yours.

You are surprised when people understand you on the first time of asking.

You cook 'Turklish' food.

When in a foreign supermarket you are weirded out a) because the fruit department has no smell, b) because none of the available fruit is in season, c) because pork is not in a special section labelled with giant warning signs / very very very expensive.

You stop thinking men holding hands is an indication of their sexuality.

You don't hear the mosque-man singing any more.

If you go to a restaurant and order fish, you are surprised if it turns up and doesn't actually look like a fish.

The people abroad you feel closest to are those who update their status on facebook most frequently.

You think the supplements in a Sunday newspaper are the best bit.

You stop being surprised when people consider yogurt a condiment.

Two men fighting in the middle of the main road? maneouver around them and keep on driving. Don't bother looking back.

If you live in the south - sunny weather and hot water become inextricably linked in your mind.

When new arrivals complain about Turkey you a) can give them a positive for each of their negatives, b) wish they would go back to where they came from.

When the adverts come on TV the remote is already in your hand to turn the volume down.

You have stopped wondering why people keep a small chair in their shower.

Pasta served with a basket of bread? why not!

You are unsurprised when it takes twenty forms and visits to five different government departments to do anything official. You have a stash of at least twenty passport photos.

Lawns are something remarkable.

Whether from a builder, a doctor, or a dentist you never trust the first diagnoses.

You accept dust balls appearing one day after vacuuming as a fact of life.

You are deeply shocked if you see underwear in full view on a washing line.

You realise that not being able to understand loud speaker announcements from the village intercom and from passing vans is in no way a reflection on your ability to speak Turkish. The locals can't understand them either.

You tell new Turkish friends you are "waiting for them" to come over. You know you will never see them again.

The idea of mixing water, salt, and yogurt to make a bubbly drink, no longer seems unfathomably weird.

You stop calling somewhere other than where you live 'home.'

If you really thought about it, you'd describe yourself as an immigrant not an expat.

Note: I wrote an article in a similar vein a few years back for the newspaper Today's Zaman. If you want to read it, click here.

The village school.

I love my children's school. It is a local, government (i.e. free,) village school. Last year there was a big upheaval in how the education system is structured in Turkey - there were a lot of pros and cons and a lot of debate (you can read about some of that here if you are interested,) but unsurprisingly enough (so far as I can see public opinion never does more than soften the blow of the inevitable here ) it happened and everyone is managing just fine. For us it meant that our current school changed from providing eight years of continuous education, to four. The middle school the boys would have then attended was one we would have liked to avoid. This certainly wasn't the end of the world but it gave us the push we needed to make the decision to change schools. Not only did we change schools, but we bought a house in the same area as the new school - when I look back at the decision making process it has all become a bit chicken-and-eggish in my mind, did we choose the house because of the school, or the school because of the house, I'm not sure but either way it has worked out very well. When we lived in Ankara there was no way on earth my husband would have let the boys go to a government school. The class sizes were massive (up to sixty kids,) and the children who went were the ones who couldn't afford to go to private school. I have no problem with people being poor - but we found that the other children refused to accept my oldest, his foreignness was just wrong to them. Anyway, happily we moved to Fethiye. Our oldest was due to start school that September so we started looking. First stop was the local private school in Çaliş. I was unimpressed. Not that the school seemed bad, but the days were long 8.30 to 4.30 which seemed unreasonable like a full time job to me and not what I wanted my hen six year old to do. The class sizes were ok at a maximum of twenty two, but it just wasn't special enough for its very high price tag. I have always been opposed to paying for primary education - why should I pay for my kid to finger paint? I wanted to look at some government schools. My husband hated the idea, but like me he is fairly thrifty and paying the equivalent of two houses over the next eight years appealed to him as little as it appealed to me. We asked around and were told again and again Yunus Nadi, Yunus Nadi, everyone wants to get there kid in there... So we went to see it and we loved it. It has the most beautiful location - the playground literally ends with the sea, the outside walls are covered in child drawn paintings, and child-made tiles. It ticked a lot of boxes. It was a little tricky to get in as we were not in the catchment zone, but my husband is very used to getting his own way and managed to circumvent things so our son could be enrolled (in fact a couple of months later we moved into the catchment zone so this was no longer an issue.) It didn't quite live up to it's glowing reports. The teachers seemed to believe that the children needed three hours of homework every night. Three hours! That's a lot of homework. When there is that much work to do, quality goes out the window and it is just about finishing. I asked around, worried that it was just us struggling as my son was stronger in English than Turkish, but everyone was telling the same story. The other main disappointment was the lack of community. Almost every child at the school came from somewhere else and they all came on the bus. I'd hoped by moving close to the school that I'd get to know the other parents, but I didn't. Because they didn't come to the school. Ever. Unless the teacher had demanded a parent teacher conference they weren't there. The children who didn't come on the bus walked home alone - I was the crazy Brit walking my six year old home, because I didn't trust him to go alone. We left on a good note, they put on a fabulous (though expensive) school show. The kind of thing that any non-family member would be bored by, but made me burst with pride at every turn. But ultimately there was nothing I would miss when we moved away.   It's funny how I can not realise how much I dislike a place until I have left it. We lived in Ankara for six years. Six year where I felt supremely indifferent about my life. I neither loved nor hated the place, it was simply somewhere to be to allow the children a chance to learn Turkish before we moved somewhere (anywhere) else. When we moved to Fethiye I fell in love - with the sea, with the vibrant community, with the relaxed and accepting way of life. It was months before I stopped having nightmares about going back to Ankara. When my oldest left his first school, I was again filled with indifference. I was proud of all that he had achieved - making friends, learning to write, learning to read in Turkish, but I was not sad to be leaving. In the end the misery of trying to coerce a six year old to sit still and do homework for three hours after a day at school, and the somewhat standoffish nature of the other parents had outweighed the schools other good points.   The new school is just lovely. It is very much a village school.  My youngest is in the anaokul (kindergarten) and in the six months he has been attending he hasn't once said he doesn't want to go - when he walks into the classroom he is swamped by other kids wanting his attention. It is a pleasure to me to see him in the playground hustling the other kids into playing different ball games with him - his speech development has been very slow and he still can't pronounce some letters yet somehow it doesn't matter. My oldest has a stream of kids knocking on our door to ask "can Hero come out and play...?" he has a vastly reduced amount of homework (only one hour if he sets his mind to it) - he has time to be a kid again. The really draw to the school though is how unspoilt the people are. We are ever so slightly outside the tourist zone of the main town. The people here still farm their small holdings - and rely on their produce. I was waiting in the playground the other day when a kid turned up with five litres of milk in an old plastic water bottle, he delivered it to another mother - fresh from their cow that morning. In fact I think the village has a higher population of chickens than people. And yet almost all of them seem to have a family member or two married to someone foreign - they have welcomed me. I love walking through the village and having people smile and wave at me. Note. On Friday my oldest came home and told me he'd been punched, he didn't seem in the least bothered by this, apparently he was protecting one of his friends. I don't really have anything to say about this, so far as I can say it was more just a case of kids fighting rather than bullying, but I thought I would mention it after my rave review of the school just to temper it a little. Nothing ever fits neatly in a box, however much I want it to!

 

Adventure in the village no. 1

Today was a landmark day for me... finally, after six months living here, I walked into the village and had a look at the shops by myself. It's not a long walk. I have done it with the kids, I have driven through repeatedly. I have occasionally been pulled into one store or another by my husband, whose style of shopping is to hustle me into a place as fast as he can, show me what he has found, half listen to my opinion on it, and then hustle me out again. I have only been in the village grocery store once, and that was with both boys and my husband, all hell-bent on running in different directions and all wanting to hold my hand as they did so - if only I had three hands, detachable ones would be perfect.



I have actually been putting this experience off for a long while. Empty shops intimidate me. Overly helpful shop assistants intimidate me. People looking, staring, and whispering about me makes me cringe. And they do, point and whisper that is. I am the foreignist foreigner around - six feet tall, blonde, lacking in a headscarf, lacking baggy floral trousers, I'm not from round here!



Whatever, that's the back story, the point is I did it, and I was mightily rewarded - turns out that because there are a high number of foreigners in our area (at least in the summer months) there are also lots of foreign goodies in the very rural looking shops. I found vicks vapour rub! For the uninitiated vicks is a weird menthol concoction that you rub on your chest when you have a cold. I actually can't remember missing vicks vapour rub even once over the last decade, but now I have a pot, and if I get a cold I can clean my sinuses in no time. Go me! I also found safety pins, which I never have enough of, elastic bands, birthday cake candles (you can get them anywhere, but these were really really cheap and came with a 'happy birthday' cake sign,) not-crazily-expensive roll on deodorant named after various random states of being - I really wanted 'Crazy' but the smell was such that you would have to be crazy to buy it, so in the end settled for 'Pretty' and 'Happy,' the second of which I was definitely feeling and the first I think my armpits will appreciate.



However, all these fabulous items paled into significance once I got to the DIY shop. Man that place is awesome. It doesn't have a great range of stock, but to make up for that they have made a shop window mannequin out of pipe and dressed it in their uniform (t-shirt, baseball cap.) The shop assistant is totally unconcerned, he offers to help you, then if you say no, he makes himself vanish. I don't know how he did that. The guy in the "cheap" (yes I mean those inverted commas, with spades on) shop was insane, he just never stopped talking, I don't know what he was saying. I can speak Turkish, I just can't speak speeding blur. Anyway, awesome-DIY-guy was there at the checkout but somehow he wasn't. He didn't seem to be watching me, or doing any kind of activity, or anything, but he was miraculously present when I wanted to know the price of my one fabulous purchase, which was.... wait for it...

In case this is not common vernacular where you are from, in the UK a muff is how teenage boys might refer to the hair between a woman's legs. Or at least they used to. No idea now, I don't know any teenage boys. As mine are both at school in Turkey I guess they'll learn some random Turkish word to describe in, check back in 5 years time and I'll let you know.

More exciting than the name alone, are the 'using places...

 

...that's right this little baby will keep lobster from coming out your drains. I cant tell you the number of lobsters we've had in our bathroom. And I hate those bastard, snappy, blue, crustaceans bleugh, never again, the muff matic and I will take you down. Ha. Best three lira I've ever spent.