How weird is this? I was hiding in reception because tiles were being lowered from the roof and rather a lot seemed to be falling out of the bucket, threatening to cause serious damage to anyone who happened to be walking underneath. I was checking the newspapers and had just read that Blackpool experienced an earthquake at 3.30 this morning. Now some of you will know that Blackpool is the home of some dear friends of ours – so I was just trying to open MSN to ask Grant if he had been jumping around at that time, when I felt the table shake and realised we were having an earthquake!
It’s not so unusual here, but it has been several months since I felt the last one. We checked on the Government site where the details are published almost immediately, and it registered 6.3 in strength but the centre was 12km deep under the sea off Rhodes.
Living here, you get quite used to feeling quakes, and quite good at judging how big they are. Sometimes it seems as though your chair or bed has suddenly become wobbly, sometimes it feels as if you’ve had one too many drinks and your head is spinning. But the thing to remember is that these relatively small and frequent tremors are good; they show that the plates are moving and not building up pressure for a big quake.
Since the big earthquake near İstanbul in 1999, some Turks have shown a tendency to panic at the slightest hint of an earthquake. I don’t imagine it was reported in the UK, but over here the newspapers were full of how the only person to jump out of a window during the terrible earthquake in Japan was a Turkish guy living near Tokyo; he jumped out once, went back inside, felt the second quake and jumped out AGAIN! The newspapers explained it with this phrase: ‘Even in Japan, a Turk is still a Turk’!
However, at Poppy I am pleased to report that nobody jumped out of any windows and even the guy who was sitting on the roof at the time (of course with no safety line – this it Turkey!) looked very puzzled when we told him to take care. I have also been up on the roof in the last couple of days – not exactly sitting on it, as the workers do, but poking my head through it to get an idea of the view from the soon-to-be-there balcony of the brand new roof apartment. It is going to be great up there; you can even get a glimpse of the sea in a couple of places!
Other work is progressing, never quite as quickly as I hope but perhaps that is because I’m too impatient. And that just goes to show that even in Turkey, a Brit is still a Brit!!
(By the way I am having some trouble posting blogs since blogspot has been banned in Turkey; please bear with me!)
