Gunaydin! Merhaba! Turkey is a land of contrasts as the pictures show. The Taurus mountains are close to the Mediterranean. We're here in the resort town of Antalya through tonight, July 9, 2009. This is the most luxurious place in which we've stayed.
I twisted my ankle and skinned my right knee yesterday on the brutal descent along a rocky trail from Termessos, an ancient Anatolian ruin situated about 3,000 feet above sea level and 34 km inland from Antalya. All one needs to do is to see the terrain to understand how the ancient Termessians successfully fought off Alexander the Great in 333 BC! They certainly couldn't grow crops, but the fierce Termessians robbed unsuspecting caravans of food and anything else they wanted!
When they told us this was a rock beach at Antalya, I immediately pictured Etretat on the French coast where sunbathers lounge on pebbles the size of grapes. Not so in Antalya! At the back of this luxurious hotel, the Marmara Antayla, one jumps into the Med from a manmade patio platform situated between giant rock formations. Some of our Fulbright members have already been swimming in the salty Med, but I didn't even bring a bathing suit! There is also a gorgeous outdoor pool. The pool would be tempting in the early morning if I had a bathing suit.
The contasts in terrain, living conditions, food, and degrees of civility are marked. Watching peasant women dressed in salvar (baggy pants) and headscarves toil in the Anatolia fields is quite the opposite of watching the upper middle class play tennis and luxuriate in poolside amenities. And television, even if I don't understand all of the spoken Turkish, is not that much different from some of the ridiculous American sitcoms! Arabesque music is played everywhere.
Well, I guess I'll dress and drag myself to the magnificent array of Turkish breakfast foods awaiting us in the sixth-floor dining area overlooking the outdoor pool. We'll never stay at another hotel in Turkey as grand as this! C'est la vie! Oops! French is not spoken here. Cay serviyorum! (I love tea!) Ekmek serviyorum! (I love bread!) The language is agglutinative, meaning that a lot of information is added at the end of words and sentences. Cay, the word for tea, it's pronounced like chai. Cay, lutfen simply means tea, please.
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