2011 season has opened at Poppy

2011 season’s first guests arrived yesterday and it has been a bit of a rush to get things ready. We still have the painters in and a lot of cleaning up to do but the front of the hotel looks great now the scaffold has come down and the pool is full.

Poppy Apartments 2011 new look

Actually it always seems to turn into a race to get ready in time. The year we built the hotel our very first guests were arriving in the middle of May and with just a few days to go, there was no paving round the pool and no steps up to the bar. Last year, we were still in the midst of stripping all the furniture and repainting it when we got a last minute reservation for a group of four rooms. Not wanting to turn it down, we ran around sorting out rooms and tidying up the common areas, only to have the dust cloud prevent them from coming.

In Turkey it is quite normal to leave things until the last minute. There is a Turkish proverb which says ‘don’t roll your trouser leg up until you see the stream’! I have tried really hard to think of an English equivalent but can’t come up with one; ours tend to lean more towards the ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ and ‘don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today’ philosophy!

I have to say it is one of the things that I have struggled to adjust too. I don’t get as stressed as I used to but I am still the sort of girl who would rather roll my trouser leg up if I know the stream is up ahead – even if it is still a way away!

I got excited this week when I got a letter from the accountants dealing with the demise of Goldtrail. I thought that there might actually be a pay out coming as I recently received £88 from the travel trust to cover the few nights for guests who were in at the time they went into administration. No such luck, though. Nine months after I put my claim in they have sent a letter acknowledging our claim of £2330 but saying they could not yet give any information about how much of that we are likely to receive – or when.

It would have come in very handy at the moment with the cost of the work on the hotel. As with most jobs, once you start it tends to grow so that you are doing – and spending – more than you anticipated. And we are still chasing money from the agency for last year’s guests. Since the bottle of Jack Daniels and promise to pay all in February they have been very hard to pin down….

….patience is a virtue, particularly in Turkey!

wedding anniversary last week spent waiting for electric board!