Euro-Smoke, Home

Boat Tour from Fethiye and Butts
I have to back up to elaborate on a few things along the coast. I'll start with one of our boat tours, the one out of Fethiye.
The shuttle van picked us up last, so Kim and I had to sit right in the front seat with Sophie on our lap, while the driver exercised the Turkish tradition of driving with undue regard for the safety of anyone. We wound up the hills and back down into the town of Oludeniz where our boat was waiting on the nearby beach. Our vanload was the first to arrive, so we had to wait in that stinking morning heat for 1-1/2 hours before everyone else arrived and the boat finally left. This wasn't the first time we paid a penance for being early. Turkey is full of shuttles and they always like to get there very early--in case there's any unforeseen traffic I suppose (see "To Cappadocia and the Fairy Chimneys").
The boat was largish with room for about 80 tourists to sit or take a lounge mat up top in the sun. Most of your fellow tourists were southern Europeans, young, Mediterranean, beautiful and always smoking. In fact, I've realized that in spite of how advanced Europe may seem culturally, compared to North America, much of Europe and Turkey is way behind when it comes to tabacco. All around us, everyone was feverishly smoking like it was as healthy as sunbathing and drinking iced coffee. It was odd for this North American bumpkin to see so many people smoking everywhere. Didn't they realize that it doesn't look cool anymore? They don't even seem to have any problems smoking around children, even though Turkish people are crazy about kids.
A few days later, we were in Kusadasi, a resort town on the coast whose only purpose is to provide shopping and restaurants to the thousands of cruise ship and resort vacationers that stop in at this point. Since we were finishing off our trip there with some pool time at a nice hotel, and Kusadasi was supposed to be a beach resort town, we thought we'd find the local beach and let Sophie play in the sand. Well, God bless Vancouver's beaches. Kusadasi had a sad little strip of beach monopolized by a beach quasi cafe that was charging $7 for a lounger. The rest of the beach that had room for hanging out was littered with cigarette butts and garbage. Of course, everyone lounging there was smoking. I wondered what they thought when they came down to Butt Beach and saw the mess, then proceeded to light up? Maybe "This is disgraceful! I will keep my butts in a bag and throw them away when I leave the beach," but more likely, "What a mess. Oh well, what's a few more butts?"

All of this made for an amusing irony later that evening. We were watching Jaws in our hotel room after Sophie went to bed (in English with only Turkish subtitles--a real treat for us). Brody is tossing chum into the sea while bitching about that nutbar skipper, Quint, he turns to the camera, and instead of a cigarette in his mouth, there's a cartoon flower where it should be. We noticed Quint also seemed to have had his smoke censored by a cartoon flower, drifting and bouncing around on his mouth as he wagged his head back and forth singing "Spanish Ladies". What the hell?!
I guess Turkey is doing its best to clean up the role models who may be encouraging Turkish children to smoke. Now, if they could just paste cartoon flowers on all those parents' mouths.
This guy got a screenshot of an example.
Please let me know if anyone finds a YouTube clip of the cartoon flower smoking.

Lycian Tombs
Back in Fethiye, we also took a taxi and a hike up to the Lycian tombs on the cliffside behind the city. They were hacked right out of the rock about 2400 years ago. Fethiye was leveled by an earthquake a while back, but these tombs haven't really changed at all.



From Fethiye, we bussed to Bodrum, a fancy tourist town with great architecture and a five-foot wide beach that ran along the back of the restaurants and shops. We got lunch at one of these cafes so we could use the beach loungers. They let us hang out there all day as we ordered a few drinks and Sophie played in the sand (much cleaner). The weird thing was that the beach was so narrow. There was only about seven feet of sand before you hit the water. And it turned out that the tide was still coming in. By late afternoon, we had to abandon our loungers as the front legs were in the water.
The narrow streets were closed to traffic (a brilliant idea that Sultanahmet, Istanbul might be interested in, so people don't fear for their lives), and Bodrum's buildings have a two storey height restriction, so it was nice strolling around getting hassled by the touts ("Yes, please!"). The sad thing is that the shops are like television--no matter how many channels you have, there are really only so many things to watch. We cycled through all the stuff Tourist Turkey has to sell after about seven shops, then it starts over again--same shirts, same rugs (well, okay, not exactly the same), same shoes, same bags, same souvenirs, etc. Still, nice looking town.
It was in Bodrum that we discovered how good Lentil soup could be in Turkey. I also very much appreciated the abundance of arugula at the restaurants.
A tour through Ephesus brought us to Kusadasi, which was the last stop before heading back to Istanbul.
After another overnight bus to Istanbul, we got our room at the Marmara guest House (the awesome owners held a high end room for us, probably on account of Sophie's charms) and crashed for a few hours. That afternoon, we ate and picked up some lights we had ordered from a shop nearby a few weeks earlier, then we hit the hay for our 3:30 airport shuttle.
On the flight from Amsterdam, a nice guy around 30 sat next to me, wearing a red hoodie with a monster face on it. He ordered a big glass of wine, cranked up his iPod and zipped up the front of the hoodie so he actually looked like a monster, and zoned out.
His hoodie was something like these, but more demonic.
He was very polite and soft-spoken nonetheless. For ten hours, he drank wine, about six or seven large glasses by my count, listened to his music at full blast and went to the bathroom a lot. The attendant cut him off about eight hours into the flight, but he didn't make a fuss. At the end of the flight, he complimented us on Sophie's excellent behaviour. She didn't sleep at all, but she sat very nicely, watching videos, playing and reading her books for the entire flight while the kids behind us screamed and wailed. Perhaps she was happy just knowing it was all finally over.
We picked up our car at the motel near Sea-Tac and were home by 4pm (2am Turkey time, mind you).
There it is.