I’ve had a taste of Turkey and I want more! (Sorry! – I promise I won’t do that again!)

But yes, the feeling of needing more time started with a flick through the Lonely Planet Turkey, when I realised there were all these other places in Turkey other than Istanbul, like Ephesus (I think), where you can see Roman and Greek ruins, and then other places with beautiful beaches, etc.

Istanbul itself was pretty do-able in the what ended up being a 3-day weekend (damn airports and planes and buses!) – we got in all the sights: the Aya Sofia (yes we were stunned into silence when we walked in, even with the huge scaffolding smack bang in the middle of it); the Blue Mosque (which paled in comparison to the Aya Sofia); the Grand Bazaar (a bit dead in the evening when we went, and a bit more shopping complex/arcade than market); the Spice Market (aka Egyptian Bazaar - where we got our bazaar fix, as well as some turkish delight and apple tea to take home); the Topkapi Palace (I highly recommend paying extra for a private guide - it’s an experience in itself, being regaled by stories of politics and murder in the harem, of how mothers would use the Turkish baths to look for prospective daughters-in-law and to assess them, etc, peppered liberally with humour); a boozy night at a Turkish music club; and lots of eating. Ivan and Michelle even squeezed in a trip to a hamam, to get professionally flogged by some um, larger, Turks. Only thing I would’ve liked to do that I didn’t get to do: shop for a bag – apparently Turkey is a great place to shop for leather.

Not as cheap as I’d hoped (damn inflation and the booming Turkish economy! - it was never going to work out very cheap, having paid dearly for the flights, and then tipped over by an expensive dinner one night, and a boozy night the next – that raki is expensive!), but great fun.

Best thing? The Turks – they are so friendly, and it seemed like anyone who spoke a bit of English just wanted to have a chat, and they are funny funny people – always cracking jokes. So yeah, some of it was sales, but a good deal of it was just pure friendliness. Like the man who walked us to a restaurant the first afternoon we were there, and then the guy who asked us into his little shop to warm our hands over his fire (Turkey was cold! It snowed Boxing Day, and London was positively balmy when we got back), and then his friend who was hoping to sell us some rugs, but was delightful to chat to anyway; the waiter who told us about goat-herding in Kurdistan, and fighting in the army during the Iraq war; the man on ferry who taught us how to remember how to say ‘thank you’ in Turkish, and told us about the booming leather industry in Turkey; our waiter in the expensive restaurant who, on hearing me say I like pomegranate seeds – I wouldn’t let him take Michelle’s half-eaten fruit salad away because I wanted to pick at the few seeds left - brought me a pomegranate, then returned with a plate and knife, and cut it open for me, and had a dozen more jokes with us besides that one; the man who we followed out of the Spice Market to a little coffee stall (Michelle smelt coffee, and then we say him collecting empty cups from the market vendors) - more hole-in-the-wall really – where we sat on stools and crates outside some very modest looking shops and had the cheapest coffees and teas we had the whole weekend (3 Turkish lira for 2 coffees and 2 apple teas). And then, the man who stopped his taxi and picked us up when we tried to hail one, refused to let us pay for it, was then reluctant to have dinner with us, but then ended up taking us to the previously mentioned Turkish club, where we then had to work our way through a large bottle of raki – we didn’t like it when we first tried it, but when you have a whole bottle to get through, you learn to like it - and who after many drinks  got all emotional (he had been living in London for 3 years, didn’t speak much English, hated London but planned to stay because he was making a good living there, and was in Istanbul alone on business for a few days - wife and 1 year old son in London - and would’ve spent the night drinking by himself, when we came along and changed that). He then picked up another Turk who was over from France with a friend but was out drinking by himself as well, and didn’t speak much Turkish, and praised my rather povo meagre attempts at French (which he said was miles above Ivan’s – Ivan speaks like, none), and he then also got all emotional as well. Sealed our impression of Turks being  warm open people, very genuine people, sales pitches aside. That was Christmas Day, our last night there.

Worst thing? Iv and Vish have both just bought SLR cameras, and I got so impossibly jealous of them! Turkey was a great place to practise taking photos – so many subjects, lots of colours, people who wanted you to take their photos. I became a bit annoying I think, telling them to up the aperture, decrease the shutter speed, adjust the white balace, when I wanted certain pictures (I barely took any shots with my own camera, so displeased was I with its limitations). I think I need to play around with my camera more though, because it does have manual mode, and you get manual control over quite a few functions. And getting an SLR camera out of the question – far too big and too expensive for me to carry around. Although it does look impressive (more persuasive I think when you want to ask people to be in your photos)… and the photos!  

I have just discovered Nik Naks. They don’t have Twisties here, but they have Nik Naks, which are basically the same thing, except that they come in better flavours, in my opinion. I tried the ’scampi and lemon’ flavour yesterday (tangy!), and because they didn’t have that today, I had the ‘rib ‘n’ saucy’ flavour, which was also very more-ish.

I ‘ve also become addicted to these crisps called Kips. I think they’re made of rice flour or something like that; the closest thing they come to is those Asian style ‘krupuk’ inspired chips you can get both here and Oz, but they’re much lighter than that. I think they’re prawn cocktail flavour, but whatever flavour they are, they’re tangy. Very tangy. And very more-ish. They come in those little individual serve packs, but too many times I’ve very nearly eaten the whole 6-pack in one go.

I’ve just realised how expensive drinks can be here. Wednesday night, I bought 2 drinks at a pub and paid £7-something. Which this morning I realised is $17 or so. For 2 drinks – a pint of draught beer, and a 500ml bottle of cider! It could’ve just been the pub we were at, but still!

A reason NOT to travel in winter – fog. Nat’s flying to Austria today, but spent yesterday and this morning stressing that her flight might get cancelled. This morning everything was shrouded in fog, and it was bloody freezing as well (London’s only supposed to get to a top of 3 degrees today).

Our flight to Turkey on Saturday is at risk as well. It still feels a bit wrong to be going to Turkey for Christmas – Paul remarked last night “We eat turkey for Christmas – did you get confused?”

Prague

Prague is a really beautiful city. They say that it’s been lucky, to have escaped damage during World War II, and to have kept all the older architecture etc, and you really do appreciate that when you’re there.

Busy with tourists though, despite the fact that it was winter. I would hate to imagine what it would be like in summer (it’s so tempting to do more trave in summer!)

As I said before, the Christmas markets weren’t that great. There were gingerbread stalls, mulled wine stalls, food stalls (generally all selling variations of hotdogs, frankfurters, pretty much sausages any which way you want them), stalls with wooden toys, but most of them were quite similar to each other, and a good number of stalls were selling very touristy Prague souvenirs. The best stalls were the ones selling trdlo – Czech pastries, which are made of dough that I think would be very much like bread dough, rolled long and thin, then wrapped round and round a roller, then rolled flat, cooked over heat, then rolled in a mixture of sugar, vanilla, cinnamon (I think), almonds (or mixed nuts), and sometimes also toffee (I think it was toffee? it was something that gave it a strong fruit peel flavour, and I liked the simpler sugar and cinnamon ones). So warm and sweet and doughy. Yum. I’m not sure though whether these were just Christmas snacks or all year round snacks – should’ve asked. Unfortunately we found out on the last day – we did a day trip on the last day and the Czech guide, this sweet very young looking girl, told us this - that at 40 CZK (= £1) these little snacks were too expensive for most Czechs.

We did do a lot of shopping, because I was hoping to cash in on the fact that things are supposed to be comparatively cheap. Sadly didn’t get any clothes, try as I might - can you believe the boy bagged 2 jackets (at H&M, which seems a bit of a waste of a trip really, but he badly needed one of those), as well as this great trench coat (very KGB) at a second-hand clothes shop I dragged him into, while I left with nothing! I did buy a pair of old mother of pearl opera glasses (not that much of a bargain at ~£37, but cheaper than the ones that were ~£62), and lots of toiletries. The clothes we found that were Czech made/designed were either not really cheaper, or very much lacking in style.

What we did cash in on was the food – meals were cheap, and beer was cheap. I think at most of the places we ate a pint of beer was less than £1 or about the same, and cheaper then a small bottle of water. The choices for food though, if you want to go traditional, like in Austria and I imagine Germany as well, weren’t great – lots of meat, lots of dumplings, potatoes. Luckily there were less traditional and more creative options available at quite a few places (although for vegetarians fried/breaded camembert seemed to crop up quite often). And, funny this, but you could get italian hot chocolate in quite a few places, where I’d failed miserably to get it anywhere in Italy!

Must recommend where we stayed – Shelter Pension, where we got pretty much a little wing of the apartment (as in Italy, the hotel was two larger apartments in the same floor of an apartment block that I imagine would’ve previously housed wealthier families), with a very roomy bedroom, and a shower and a toilet but separate rather than ensuite (this was our double room with private bathroom). And I can absolutely warn anyone against going to the U Stare Pani Jazz Club – absolutely no atmosphere – too polished, too swanky hotel-ish, an absolute rip-off at 200 CZK admission (lunch for two of us on average came to 400 CZK) – no doubt geared towards American tourists (and Prague is full of them, and yes I use the term in a derogatory manner – I know I know I shouldn’t make sweeping generalisations but I do think Americans are the worst kind of tourists).

I’m annoyed because I would rather have given the money to any number of the beggars that we saw. The beggars in Prague beg on their knees, face down to the ground, hands cupped together. The first time I saw one I thought he was passed out, or asleep; it was with the second one that I realised what they were doing. And thought how stirring it was – something about the pose that seemed to suggest dignity, as if they realised that they were reliant on the kindness of others, and would ask for this, and be grateful for this, as well as the fact that holding the pose seemed kind of yogic thereby requiring discipline, compared to sitting on your arse expecting people to throw change at you. I ‘ve never seen beggars beg like that before, but maybe they do in other places as well?   

Nat messaged me last night to make sure I was alright (I got back from Prague Sunday night but haven’t been home yet) – it was really sweet of her, and she was so cute about it, she said something like “I don’t want to sound like your mum or anything, but…” Isn’t she a sweetheart?

Prague was nice. I won’t write a post on it now, because I’ll be here at least another hour if I start now, and it’s already 6.

The last few working days have been madness. Last week being only a 3-day week for me, the pressure was on, what with the referrals rolling in. Wednesday was particularly bad, because I had to leave at 3.30 to make the flight to Prague, Robert had left at lunchtime, there were a couple of new referrals that had been waiting 1-2 days, I had a bunch of reviews to do, and then voice stuff took out like 2 hours I hadn’t bargained on losing. Monday and today I’ve taken on a handful of news as well as doing the reviews I need to do, to make up for leaving Robert to deal with the onslaught of referrals on Thursday and Friday.

I need to go! I need to get home and have dinner, chill, and catch up with Nat – she went to Berlin over the weekend, and I want to know if German Christmas markets really are as good as they’re reknowned to be (Prague’s Christmas market wasn’t that impressive).

I just spent the last hour trying to get tickets to Carmen, and I don’t even know if I’ll like opera. It only started over the weekend, and tickets have all just about sold out for all performances. So here I am scouring eBay, the best friend of scalpers world-round.

Yesterday we had a Christmas lunch in the canteen. A bit sad really but the things you gotta do, you know. Anyway, other than stuffing ourselves to bursting point with some rather unextraordinary food, we also got complimentary ‘festive crackers’ for our £5.50 (uncharacteristically reasonable for the canteen). My cracker had one of those ‘fortune-telling fish’ (I’ve not pulled many crackers in my time, but Lucy said it’s quite common to get them in crackers) – a little cellophane fish which apparently tells you something about yourself depending on how it curls, whether the head or the tail moves etc. Mine had both head and tail up, or moving (I can’t remember anymore) – which apparently means I’m in love.

Now this on its own is a rather insignificant fact. But the fact that instead of thinking ‘yeah sure, whatever, what a charming little toy’ when I read that, the fact that my stomach turned when I read that, and I felt like throwing the fish on the floor, that was a bit of a concern.

Just as, the night before, I sat in a cinema watching Casino Royale with the oft-mentioned boy, and felt a bit funny watching some of the scenes, and then uneasy whenever he squeezed my hands during some of those scenes, and then felt embarassed that I had been quite happy to squeeze his hand at some of the funnier moments, or just about crush them during some of the more frightening gruesome bits (me! who can’t stand holding hands! now all too comfortable with it).

And the sad sad realisation that on the weekend, I could’ve had a good portion of the weekend to myself, or to spend with other people, but instead, chose to initiate contact with him – twice – despite the fact that I thought to myself how good it felt having the weekend to myself, to do crap at home. And ended up spending a good deal of the weekend with him.

And then invited myself over last night as well.

And Jane thought she was just teasing when she asked me if I was enjoying “married life” – (she did get the rise out of me she had hoped for) .

Is this what happens to other people?

Oh god it’s awful! 

Wicked was so not my thing. The story was very very clever - credit to the author who wrote the book the musical was based on – but the music… it was all a bit big. Very much a blockbuster musical – not to say that there was no quality to it; it was good at times - but a lot of it was repetitive: songs almost always crescendoed to ear-splitting grandness - yawn. And the actress who played Glinda was far too Legally Blonde (I don’t think you can do style without taking it to the extreme), and her style of singing, of being, was painfully irritating. But I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been, and wouldn’t have known the very clever story (it really was) because it’s highly unlikely I would ever have read the book.

Oh! – I don’t know whether this is common knowledge or not; I certainly didn’t know until Matt told me sometime ago, but the word kabaret in German (I think it’s with a k?) isn’t to Germans the same as cabaret is to us, ie burlesque, but is instead quite political comedy. I’m a bit fuzzy as to whether it’s stand-up comedy (which is what I understood from Matt), or is other types of shows. If anyone knows, please do explain!