Sun and hailstorms

Mad weather – I think spring is here!  It has been really warm all this week – over 20 degrees, people out in shorts and t-shirts, doors and windows open all day sort of warm.  Then, early this morning, I heard thunder rumbling, followed by a huge storm with HAIL that is still sitting around on the ground now (9am).

We had our electric bill through from January – when we had the really cold weather – and it was more than it’s ever been – about £100 for one month.  We haven’t put up our wood-burning stove this winter (my decision because it’s smoky and dirty and I can’t light it!) so we were trying to keep the house warm with electric heaters.  The houses here are hard to heat because they don’t have cavity walls, are all tiles and marble and are basically designed to be cool in summer.  And as for the temperature in the bathroom – I think it was close to zero some mornings, not tempting when you want to take a shower!

Actually, in place of the stove, I wanted to put in an air conditioning unit, one large enough to heat our open-plan ground floor and fairly new as they are very energy efficient.  Some friends of ours who were moving house, offered us theirs (new when they moved into the old house 2 years ago) for free, so we have been hanging on for that.  Unfortunately, the house they are moving to has taken much longer to finish than expected so I finally got the a/c yesterday – now it’s too warm to use it!  Oh well – it’ll be summer soon and we can use it to cool!

somewhere between Nif and Gocek - almond trees in flower

Friends Grant and Dawn are out for a holiday.  We went for a drive the other day – up to Uzumlu, where all the almond trees are in blossom, then on to Nif and some of the mountain roads beyond.  I’d looked at the map and knew that it was fairly easy to get from there back down to Gocek so we meandered a long for a while, guessing which way to go at junctions.

Unfortunately, Turkish mountain roads have a habit of leading off merrily in one direction, only to twist and turn and take you in the complete opposite direction.  I had a similar experience last year trying to get back down on to the Kas road from Arycanda.  There was a short time when I thought we might have to turn back, but eventually we managed to find a road that took us down towards the sea and we came out at the top of the hill going into Gocek.  Had to stop and have lunch there to recover!

a glimpse of Gocek

Skiing in Sarikamis

The Cakir family has been away on holiday!  We had a few days in Ankara and from there we went to the north east of Turkey to ski.  It’s one of the few things that we all enjoy; even me who hates the cold and EVEN Cem who usually hates any form of exercise!

There are several ski centres in Turkey but the place we went is in the north east.  It’s a small town called Sarikamis and is supposedly the only place in Turkey that has the same type of snow as the Alps. It certainly has the best snow of anywhere we have skied in Turkey, but it is also the coldest place with temperatures generally -5 to -10 degrees in the day!  Sarikamis is famous in Turkey as the place where a large number (often quoted as 90,000) of Turkish soldiers froze to death whilst fighting the Russian army during World War I.

Unlike those poor soldiers, I was prepared with layers of thermals under my ski clothes, two pairs of socks and two pairs of gloves with hand warmers inside them and still my fingers – and sometimes toes – were frozen at the end of the day! But we had fun skiing.  Emre changed to snow-boarding, having a couple of lessons and learning quite well in a short time.  Kaan just wanted to be the fastest thing on skis – and with an app on his phone, he could check every day how fast he had gone (he stopped telling me when he passed 80kmh as he knew I would get cross!) as well as how far he had skied, gradients etc.

Kaan on ths slopes

We had been to Sarikamis before about 10 years ago (actually it’s where Cem’s parents grew up too).  There are now 4 more hotels at the ski centre (total 6, though the biggest was closed this year) but it was still very quiet.  It gets a bit busier at the weekend when some of the locals come to ski, but during the week you can usually get on the lift in 5 minutes at the most – and the boys were even complaining about this sometimes, I don’t know what they would think of the queues elsewhere!

There are several ski schools and the Turkish Ski Federation is always training children who might enter the national team.  We were chatting with a local boy on the lift whose brother is already in the national team and who hopes to get in it too.  He’s 14 and has been skiing since he was 5.  But he also wants to be an attorney.  It’s hard sometimes in these little places in the east of Turkey – the standard of schooling might not be so good and the children do not have the same opportunities.  We took his address to send him Kaan’s old school books and the boys were amazed that he doesn’t have a mobile phone.  In Fethiye, any child above the age of about 8 has a phone!

Emre boarding

We flew to Kars, which is the nearest town – and the regional centre – though it is much smaller than Fethiye!  Close to the Russian border (now the Georgian and Armenian borders), Kars was occupied by the Russian Empire for a time in the nineteenth century and many of the older buildings were built by the Russians.

Old Governors Residence built in 1883

It is famous for several types of cheese including a hard yellow cheese called ‘kashar’ that is like cheddar and a stringy, fibrous cheese that is best eaten when blue (with mould).  Unlike the UK where you can generally find everything everywhere, most areas still have their specialities and people like to buy it from the source.  Apart from anything else, though you can buy Kars Kashar in Fethiye, it is more expensive, so several people had asked us to get them some.  We went to a little shop, tried lots of cheese and bought three whole wheels of kashar (39kg) which were supposed to arrive yesterday by cargo; hopefully they will turn up today!

That part of Turkey is also known for having tasty meat – and particularly ‘Cag kebab’, which is marinated lamb cooked on a horizontal spit (with tail fat – ugghh!)  As a veggie, I obviously can’t comment on it, but the boys and Cem enjoyed it.