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!

Blackpool and Fethiye are shaking!

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!)

Building work continues

We spent all yesterday choosing a colour to paint the hotel.  Actually, we started looking at paint catalogues a few weeks ago and had sort of decided on one colour, but I was having second thoughts.  It is very hard to look at a small splodge of colour on a paint catalogue and imagine what that will look like transferred to an enormous building.  I know, because twice I have chosen a colour I thought would look good – and been disappointed. 

Turkey hasn’t yet expanded to tester pots for the indecisive (I have two pots of paint bought and then rejected when we were painting our bedroom recently!)  Still, we drove the builder so mad pouring over endless catalogues that he bought the smallest available tins of several colours for us to try.  In the end, the one we had sort of decided on a few weeks ago seems to be what we are going for and Cem and I both like it at the moment; but then again we have only tried it on a two metre square section of wall and there is quite a lot to go..!

The plumber has finished work in the rooms and the bathrooms have all been re-grouted.  He is now crawling around in loft spaces to change the direction of flow or drain pipes so we can get rid of the unsightly down pipes on the front of the building.  Yesterday I thought we should all be wearing hard hats as when he dismantled bits of it, they would come crashing down from above with no warning.  But of course this is Turkey and there are no health and safety bullies around!  



what a mess!



There are plasterers working away all over the hotel and even the garden has had a shake up – literally as it has been ploughed up prior to reseeding with something called mouse ear (don’t somehow think that is the botanical name) which doesn’t need mowing.  Cem, Yılmaz, Murat and various friends are doing their bit to add to the noise, mess and general chaos by sanding the furniture that missed their attentions last year.  Some of you know what a huge job that turned into last year.  Luckily there are only three rooms left to do.



the dream team (Cem and Kaan)



So…any of you coming back for a repeat stay this year will see the new improved Poppy Apartments!

The other thing that we are working on at the moment – all be it more quietly - is finding staff. This is no easy task.  Yılmaz and Elif will be here for their third year, cooking and cleaning respectively, but we have to find another cleaner (last year I had a frantic call from Cem while I was in London saying HE was cleaning rooms) and a new barman as Cengiz is going to do his national service.  By the way, for those of you who know him, he has cut his hair in preparation and I didn’t recognize him!

Finding staff here is no easy matter.  In the past, we have made some mistakes – partly due to desperation – hiring both Turkish people AND a couple of English people that have not worked out well (that’s the nice way of putting it), so we are a bit more choosy now. We have had two ladies come to see us about the cleaning job; one lives an hour and a half away by bus and the other has never worked before and hadn’t even told her husband she was applying for a job.  Needless to say, we are still looking….

Plumbers and headaches

Finally…work has started on the hotel.  We have had to decide what is urgent and what can be put off until next year as, despite our dire threats of not taking their guests this year and the resultant apologies (and bottle of Jack Daniels forwarded to Cem), we have still not received the remainder of the money from one of the agencies for last year’s guests.  They are supposed to pay 50% of the money for this year’s advance bookings in May, but that seems increasingly unlikely.  What seems almost certain is that we will start the season with another big dispute with them, sitting in their office explaining that it is hard to pay electric bills, wages etc. when there is no money coming in.  We also make threats to leave the next arrivals at the gate, but the trouble is they know these threats are empty as we don’t want to ruin anybody’s holiday.  So they have us over a barrel really.

Anyway, there is very nice young plumber in the hotel, quietly and efficiently going round each room fixing the many leaks and drips.  Since we built the hotel, the most persistent problems have been of the plumbing variety.  Part of the problem is poor quality materials – pipes that with no warning split and turn rooms into paddling pools, not to mention a strange toilet-flush system that relies crucially on a piece of string.  If the string is too long, the toilet doesn’t flush properly; too short and the reservoir never closes off and the water runs continuously.  It’s not enough to get them the right length as each time you pull it, the nylon thread slips slightly and will eventually be too long again.  Who invented this system?

Another problem is the workmanship.  If I ever build anything again, I will take most care choosing the plumber.  The one we used when building the hotel fancied himself as a bit of an artist and designed pipe connections to rival spaghetti junction for the number of bends and turns they take.  Perhaps he ordered too many pipes and felt he needed to get them all in somewhere, I don’t know.  Anyway, I don’t need to detail the result of these bends on the free flow of water through the pipes.  Suffice it to say that we are now aware of the various ‘black spots’ in the plumbing system and leave easy access to these points.

Tuesday was Cem’s birthday.  We didn’t make a big deal of it, but we had a couple of friends round for dinner and some drinks.  Entertainment was in the form of the boys’ wii – and it’s amazing how grown men are happy to look ridiculous spinning imaginary hula hoops, or flying – in bird form – between imaginary perches, as long as there is enough vodka involved.

Cem celebrating his birthday

I had a couple of glasses of red wine, but not enough to deserve the fuzzy head I had yesterday morning.  It wasn’t aided by the fact that the whole world seemed determined to make a lot of noise – starting with the hotel opposite us whose generator was working at full volume, and the building site next door which had a very large digger delivered - toe-curling screeches as it drove down off the lorry, then the drone of it digging out the foundations for walls.

I went to the hotel to give a lesson and the marble men turned up to polish the travertine round the pool.  This involves a machine which looks a bit like those that polish floors in schools and hospitals, but grinds the top layer off the marble – you can imagine the noise that makes.  To top it all, the plumber decided to tackle the room with the biggest problem, which involved breaking the wall with an angle grinder.

Oh well – it will all be worth it if the plumbing problems are sorted!

Seasonal Adjustments

Sometimes guests have asked me, looking at the seemingly endless days of sunshine, if I don’t ‘miss the seasons’.  Actually, there is much more variation through the year here than most people experience at home.

Firstly the weather.  I won’t go into it much (I seem to mention it a lot!) but the summer sunshine definitely does NOT last all year round.  The two worst months of January and February are out of the way and as usual I was amazed that as soon as we get into March, spring is in the air and the sun seems to be warmer.  Still, there is some rain and it poured down so hard while I was at the market on Sunday that everyone was marooned under the canopies.  These are not, however, are guarantee of staying dry since the water builds up on top of them until it reaches some crucial point and then empties itself in a bucket load – splat – not good if you are standing under that point! 

With the spring weather, the whole world seems to come alive again.  The Poppy tortoises were out the other day – three of them, still covered in dirt (they dig themselves underground to hibernate), playing chase round the garden with a view to making up for lost time!  Soon the martins will be here again – their fourteenth year – to raise more babies and leave their messages all down the front wall (and on Kenny’s window sill!)

 A trip to the market also reminds you what time of year it is as many things are seasonal.  At the moment oranges are plentiful and cheap, but strawberries will be around soon and then the wonderful cherries.  Even some fish are seasonal so ‘hamsi’ (sardines), which are very popular here, are only good for a few months in winter and you must have those from the Black Sea as they are (apparently) the best.

But the biggest difference, or course, is due to tourism.  Through the winter everywhere is quiet and I can walk the dog on the beach and not pass another person.  Soon, the beach will be full of sunbeds, umbrellas and frying bodies.

As we count the weeks until the season opens, many businesses have started repairs and improvements; builders are racing to get houses finished before the building ban comes into effect and everyone is getting ready for some hard work (and looking forward to earning money again).  We also all start talking about what sort of a season it will be, and how things like the price of fuel and unrest in Egypt will affect bookings.

I have this to say… we have never before had so many reservations at this time of year.  So, barring any more volcanic clouds or bankrupt tour operators, fingers crossed it is going to be a good year.

waves at the beach last week