Rain doesn’t stop play

It’s been raining in Fethiye! The weather has been mixed for the last few days, plenty of sunshine but some showers too. Yesterday there were more showers than sun – drizzle actually which is not something we see a lot of here. It was still warm and didn’t really stop guests from doing things – but they did get a bit soggy when they didn’t time it right. As it’s half term week at home there are some families with children out too but the kids don’t seem to care and are in the pool even while it’s raining. It is better today and supposed to get hotter and hotter through the week.


It was unfortunate that the weather was miserable on Saturday morning as that was the day of the fourth Çalış Carnival. Most of the stalls didn’t bother setting up for the exhibition and though the sun came out for the parade in the afternoon, I think quite a few participants and spectators had been put off. Kaan and I made sure we painted a square each in the communal painting as we have each year. Other than that, the best thing was a forestry department helicopter which landed just above the beach (scattering people in every direction as they realized it really was going to land…health and safety at its best!)


painting at the carnival

Saturday was also Grant’s ‘official’ birthday. It isn’t actually his birthday until June but as it’s a big one Dawn thought he would enjoy celebrating it out here. We decorated the bar with the balloons and banners she had brought over – and when he walked in he asked whose birthday it was!! The cake was a masterpiece – with a particularly fetching photo of him balancing a lemon on his nose printed into the icing.

Grant's birthday cake

There was no water in Çalış yesterday. The water board was fixing pipes somewhere and said it would be back on between 5 and 6; actually it was the middle of the night before it came back properly by which time some guests were a little fed up (especially as it had rained most of the day!) and I was seriously stressed.

But everything seems worthwhile at times like this….a guest who arrived at Poppy for the first time a couple of days ago just told me she can’t believe people ‘dare’ (her word) write anything nasty on the internet about us; she loves it here and is going to put on a good recommendation when she gets home. Hopefully Trip Advisor will not start removing our good reviews like they did last year…

Hordes of students and football hooligans

The news for this week….


Fenerbahçe won the football league here. Everything still hung on the last match which was yesterday evening, so with Cem, the boys and many friends and family supporting Fenerbahçe, there was a lot of excitement round here. Personally I wasn’t bothered - my team is Beşiktaş and I only support them to annoy Cem – but I would rather they are all happy and celebrating than miserable and sulking. Some of you know how seriously they take their football here, and how noisy they are about it. Even the municipal tannoy system crackled into life at the end of the match with the Fenerbahçe march…so apologies to any guests who were hoping for an early night!

It was also noisy for a while on Saturday. As I mentioned last week, Turkish guests are not very good at making reservations and here is a good example. Twenty-six sixteen year old girls and nine teachers on a school trip turned up at about 6pm on Saturday night looking for diner and rooms for the night. That would not be SO unreasonable, except for the fact that they stayed here last year and had our phone number! We sorted the rooms out (including evicting Murat from his room) and then Cem went shopping while Yılmaz and I ran around in the kitchen, but it would have been less stressful if they had just telephoned even a couple of hours before to say they were on their way!

Still plenty of bookings coming in and we are full for middle of June and middle of July. We are now having a struggle with the agency, who sold at 15% discount for all bookings up to start of May (that is 15% off OUR money of course not theirs!), on the basis that they would pay 50% of all those bookings on 15 May. Guess what – they haven’t! It is getting so tiring, calling and visiting (and listening to their stories about what a difficult time THEY are having), that we are considering not working with them. The other agency we have a contract with are – apparently (we have only just started working with them) – much more reliable.

But mostly this week I am happy because Frank and Lorraine are here, Grant and Dawn are here (see photo of Kaan and Grant below) and my sister and brother-in-law are coming tomorrow so I’m giving myself the day off!


Kaan and Grant 'bombing'



.Horse riding and other stuff

I’ve been busy with my most hated task – checking all 20 rooms to make sure the taps aren’t dripping, the air conditioning works and they have their full complement of cups, plates, saucepans etc. etc. I hate it because it involves running up and down stairs and in and out of rooms until my feet hurt. I hate it because however many lists I make, there is always something you miss first time round. And I hate it because it is a never-ending task…even when I am satisfied that a room is ‘done’, of course light bulbs blow, cups get broken and people walk off with things, meaning that they need checking before each new guest.


This year I added to my job by buying new pillows, pillow protectors, shower curtains, table cloths and bedspreads, all of which had to be distributed/fitted/hung. One day I would like to get a pedometer and see how far I walk just round the hotel; it must be good fitness training! Happily I’m pretty much finished – for now – and the rooms are looking good.

On Sunday I gave myself the afternoon off and went horse riding with Kaan. It was the first time we had been to the place in Çalış. The horses are not big but they were quite lively and seemed happy to be going out. The great thing about it is that you ride right along the edge of the sea – in the water if you want! Kaan was very good - it’s a couple of years since he’s been riding, but he was confident and in control and really looked the part. I will still send people to the lovely stables in Kaya village for a good ride. Their horses are superb and they cater for all levels of riders from beginners to experienced – giving lessons in the school as well as taking people out around the quiet tracks of the village. But the horses in Çalış are fun for a ride along the beach.



Kaan the cowboy

 19 May is another holiday here – this time Youth and Sport Festival. The children have 5 days off school and I arrived at the hotel this morning to find we have 7 rooms of guests from Ankara, who seem between them, to have about 25 children! It’s certainly woken the place up, especially as the children were all excited on their first morning and therefore extra noisy.

Actually, there are only 3 weeks left until the school summer holiday begins here – even earlier than usual because of the general election. With Ramazan (the month of fasting) starting at the beginning of August, most Turkish people will be looking to take their holiday in late June or July. Unfortunately, many will be disappointed as hotels are pretty full already for that time and Turkish people are notoriously bad at making reservations (like the 7 rooms who turned up here at 7 last night without a booking). Maybe this year they will learn!

how cute is that - a 2-day old foal (and Kaan of course!)

Weddings

So…weddings seem to be the theme of the week!  I enjoyed watching a few bits of the royal wedding.  Being away from it all gives me a strange fondness for ceremony and traditions, though I am sure if lived there I would be sick to death of it.  I had to laugh at the comparisons between this wedding and Charles and Diana’s – all of which suggested that the signs from this one were much better.  But I don’t remember anyone at the time suggesting that the future for Charles and Di was anything less than wonderful.  Then again, I didn’t pay much attention to that one either – I was fourteen at the time and thought she must be mad to be marrying someone SO old!

There are a lot of customs surrounding Turkish weddings.  Some of them are no longer in favour – understandable when you learn that weddings traditionally lasted forty days!  In villages they still often last three days, starting with the groom going with a group of his relatives to collect the bride from her home! 

In towns, the celebrations usually include a henna party the night before the wedding, when the bride celebrates her last night in her parental home with her female relatives.  The following evening the wedding ceremony takes place.  Both involve a lot of dancing, a very large cake (six or seven tiers is the norm) and a lot of noise from the ‘davul’ (drum) and ‘zurna’ – a flute-type instrument with sounds, to my ear at least, like a large and very angry mosquito.  Oh – and when they get really excited they tend to fire shots from guns, supposedly into the air though if there is raki involved too things occasionally end rather badly.

One of the truly amazing things about Turkish weddings, when compared to the UK, is that they are arranged and done in just a few weeks.  The wedding we went to last weekend, a very smart affair in Tuana Beach Club with a popular local singer and musicians, was arranged in three weeks! And you don’t have to spend ages thinking what to buy the happy couple because the tradition is to pin gold or money on them so they can go and buy what they need…much more sensible.

Our wedding at Montana Hotel

We had a wedding that was a mixture of English and Turkish – as were the guests.  We started with drinks around the pool at Montana Hotel (above Ölüdeniz) where we did the official signing of the register.  Tradition says that whoever treads first on the other’s foot at this point will be the ‘boss’ at home.  And that was me!  We then took over the hotel restaurant for a meal and – of course – a lot of dancing.  The belly dancer was a nice change for the English guests!

Fethiye is now a popular place for weddings, with the lagoon at Ölüdeniz and weddings aboard gulets being particularly favoured.  I recently investigated wedding options for a friend, including a hotel wedding in Çalış, a beach wedding at Ölüdeniz and a gulet wedding.  The prices varied a lot and some of the people involved seemed to me to be charging a bit more than necessary but it’s certainly still possible to have a lovely wedding here at a reasonable price.

We even held a wedding at Poppy a few years ago for our neighbour’s son.  A friend who does wedding organization did the decorations and we did the rest.  Now if we could just have a pool that converted to a dance floor….!  

Poppy decorated for a wedding

A host of celebrations

It’s been rather a hectic week. Apart from still trying to finish things off at the hotel, 23 April is Children’s Day in Turkey.  It is celebrated everywhere with fantastic dance and gymnastic displays for which the children (and teachers) spend months preparing.  Kaan’s school go even further and organize an International Children’s Dance Festival.

The day was designated Children’s Festival in 1927 with the aim of celebrating children as the future of the nation.  The date is significant because it commemorates the first day the Turkish Grand National Assembly met in 1920 as they struggled to establish the new republic against the Allies who were happily dividing up the land that is now Turkey!  Atatürk, the first Prime Minister of the new Republic, dedicated the date to the children who would be the protectors of its freedom.  The actual name of the holiday is National Sovereignty and Children’s Festival.

To support this, one of the traditions of Children’s Day is for children to take over top official roles for the day and give their ideas and wishes.  It has also always been the aim to make it an international holiday and many children from other countries are invited to take part in the celebrations.

Kaan’s school have about 500 children visiting from 12 countries.  They come from places as diverse as Russia and Indonesia and spend the week being taken out and entertained, as well as entertaining with their dancing.  Last night was the actual competition and the Indonesian group won for the second year, but it is lovely just to see all the different costumes and the different styles of dance.

One of the dancers from Kazakistan

Some of the groups stay in hotels and some stay with families; we have a 10-year old Lithuanian boy who endured a 3-day coach journey to get here and has the same to face going home this week.  He is quiet and polite but speaks good English for a 10 year old and after the first night, when he spoke with his mum and was a bit teary, he has been fine!

Kaan and his friend

In addition to all this, we had a big wedding to go to on Saturday.  Some of you might have seen the Cem’s pictures of the bridal car which he organized and drove – nothing sleek and elegant of course but a huge, mean Dodge Ram pick up!  The groom was delighted but I think the bride must have struggled to climb into it in her gown.
Then, of course, it was Easter weekend, which doesn't get a lot of attention here except among the ex-pats but we did celebrate with a few (specially brought over) chocolate eggs.

And finally, though it didn’t focus in our activities, 23 April is also St George’s Day and here are a couple of facts that amazed me when I discovered them.  Firstly, St George is in no way exclusively English and is actually the patron saint of quite a list lot of countries – including Lithuania; and secondly, though there are various accounts of his life, he appears to have come from Cappadocia in Turkey!

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!

Fethiye Museum and the British Museum

Work on the hotel is progressing – slowly. The outside has been painted – in parts; other bits are still the old yellowish colour. I was so impressed when the painters arrived and the first thing they did was to put up a professional-looking scaffold. However I haven’t seen them use it since; it seems they prefer to hang off balconies or the roof reaching as far as they can – and then a bit more. I wonder if our insurance covers industrial accidents!


Kaan and I finally went to check out the refurbished Fethiye Museum last week. It’s not very big and doesn’t take long to look around but the pieces are quite well displayed now. There are a few statues and carved panels; one of the most significant pieces is a mosaic floor from the Temple of Apollo at Letoon which shows the symbols of Apollo – a bow and arrow and a lyre. The rest is mostly small pots, coins and jewellery.

The most amazing thing, for me, is the age of the things there; it starts with a cabinet of late Bronze Age items some of which date from 3000 BC! Most of the things belonged to the Lycian people who lived in this area from that time until about the sixth century AD. Letoon, where the mosaic was found, was the spiritual centre of Lycia but other important settlements include Tlos, Xanthos (jeep safaris usually visit these), Cadianda and Telmessos, which was located where Fethiye is today and is still visible in the form of the amphitheatre and rock tombs.

One of the interesting things about Lycia and its people is that it represents the first example of a democratic federation. Each settlement was a self-governing city-state but joined together in the Lycian League to organize trade between cities and defence of the area. Free male citizens of each city elected their representatives on the League’s Assembly whose number depended on the size of the city. Another interesting fact is the number of important leaders who came to Lycia, including Alexander the Great and the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who built huge grain stores at Patara during his stay there.

You can see the remains of these and many other features of Lycia during a visit to Fethiye. Actually, you can visit some of it without even coming to Fethiye as there are some large pieces in the British Museum. Years ago, after Cem had spent the summer showing jeep safari customers the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos, we visited the British Museum. When we got to the Xanthian room and he saw the real tomb (the one on site is a copy) he got – understandably – a little worked up and we left the museum shortly afterwards! During a visit to the area in 1838, Charles Fellows sent 70 crates of artefacts back to the British Museum and while I don’t dispute his work in uncovering some of these things and making sure they were preserved, I think it is time most of them were returned here, to be displayed in the Fethiye museum!