Letter 23

Dear Clare, Sarah and Mortgage Payers


We're now into February and we will be leaving Bodrum next week to move to Eceabat on the European shore of the Dardanelles. We'll miss this place and the people a lot but we're resolved to visit here every winter because we've made so many friends and it's a place where we feel at home. Alicja organised a club for foreigners while we were here and last night we had a St Valentines day party at the marina bar and 120 people turned up. When we were trying to think of a name for this foreigners club I wanted to call it "The Salman Rushdie Appreciation Society" but I was out voted on it.

The atmosphere was just great and we didn't realise how many people we knew until we saw them all together. The great thing about all these people is that none of them are boring, boring people stay at home in the security of their own countries I think, and the types that try somewhere as off beat as Turkey are usually fairly adventurous. Not many of them decided on Turkey without seeing it as we did, but the majority of them came here for a holiday and fell in love with a Turk and ended up marrying and staying here. Our English friends Helen & Malcolm came here for a holiday and like quite a few people at the party they didn't want to go back. They both had good jobs with well above average pay in the advertising industry but like us, they felt that life was passing by outside the window somewhere while they were inside working.

They bought a carpet while they were here on vacation and Ali the shop owner spoke English, so after a couple of days they went back to him and told him they wanted to live here and as he was the only person they could communicate with, would he answer a few questions for them. That was two years ago and Ali still hasn't stopped answering questions yet but now Helen & Malcolm have a real estate agency and they are keeping their heads above water and getting more out of life than when they were working in England. The funny thing is that neither of them had ever had anything whatsoever to do with real estate before. I do admire people like that who are prepared to have a go at a different life instead of stagnating in the same old rut.

Others we know have just come here hoping to find something eventually and everyone has got something or the other going in the end. Russell is an American writer friend of ours and he makes enough to live on by writing articles for travel magazines about the Bodrum area. This guy didn't have any job to come to when he decided to come to Turkey and he's only got one leg which limits the chances of employment considerably but it didn't stop him from having a go. Actually, when we were at the party I told him that we were moving to Eceabat and he asked me if I would go to the hospital up there and speak to an English speaking husband and wife doctor team for him. I thought he was going to get me to ask them when his other leg would be finished but he just wanted us to give them his regards.

Mid May 1990

Yes, it’s been a long time since I put computer ribbon to paper but we've been incredibly busy and even now I don't really have the time but we have a large pile of half read, unanswered letters and we feel guilty. We were due to leave Bodrum on a Sunday but on the Saturday of the previous week, my sister arrived out of the blue. It gave me quite a shock to come down the stairs at work and find her sitting in a chair in front of me. It was great to see her and so we took the week off and showed her around. She fell in love with it all and one day she wants to live here.

Unfortunately, it put us back a week but we figured that we'd be able to catch up on it before opening the restaurant if we got stuck into the work and put in a few extra hours. We couldn't have been more wrong. A truck was supposed to come down from Eceabat on a regular monthly run and the driver was going to take our furniture back with him. After waiting another week with a promise of tomorrow, tomorrow, we finally had to hire a truck in Bodrum and pay a small fortune for transport. When the driver arrived we showed him what was to be moved before setting off and I lifted the mattress from the bed. We had bought the bed and mattress from the people who moved out of the flat when we moved in and we had never really paid any attention to it at all. Now, when I came to move it I found that they had put a full length polythene sheet between the mattress and the base of the bed and when I lifted the mattress we found that there was about two gallons of water laying on the polythene and the bottom of the mattress was rotten. It was all very embarrassing in front of the truck driver as it all ran onto the floor

We were to meet the truck at the other end of the ten hour journey to Eceabat but as we drove out of the field in which Raelene was parked, disaster struck. The van was heavily loaded and we struck a piece of ancient Greek stonework with the fuel tank and the diesel started to pour out. We didn't find out until we had traveled six or seven kilometres and gradually started to smell the diesel. There was no alternative but to head back to Bodrum. This was at six in the morning and so we drove straight to Helen & Malcolm’s place and got them out of bed.

It had only been six hours since we had said our goodbyes to them. They had cooked us a magnificent going away dinner and the last thing Malcolm had said to me was "remember, if there's anything you need...". Well now was the time to take the poor bugger at his word and he ran back & forth with different sized bits of wood and other objects, which he tried in vain to block up the hole with, while I sat there with my finger covering it. Eventually, with the aid of Methi, our solicitor, Malcolm located a guy who it was rumoured could do the job and we drove straight to his garage while we still had diesel left. At that hour of the morning the place was shut and we parked the van outside and went back to have breakfast. A couple of hours later we returned to the garage to see the proprietor who was looking a little disgruntled because his premises (shack with tin roof and earth floor) were downstream of the van. I didn't know that the van held so much diesel but now his floor was one soggy diesely mess and his inspection pit had two centimetres of diesel in it too.

He agreed to do the job which under the circumstances I thought was very generous because I'd have told me to piss off and never come back. It took hours and we eventually got away at three that afternoon. Something was telling us not to leave Bodrum, all the signs were there and we should have taken note of them. At three in the morning we arrived at the ferry crossing on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, we were only twenty five minutes away from our new home but the ferries had stopped running for the night and we slept in the van so that we would be able to catch the first ferry at five thirty am. At precisely five thirty am we were awakened not by our alarm clock but by the ferryboat's fog horn as it left the quay and us behind.

I struggled into some tracksuit pants and opened the door to look for a place to pee and was immediately accosted by a T shirt salesman. These guys sell Turkish imitation La Coste tops to the unsuspecting tourist but at five thirty in the morning I wasn't quite prepared for a broken German T shirt sales spiel and said "Oh piss off will you?" and he said "yes sir thank you very much". I found breakfast. It was called a "Bomba" and it consisted of a three or four inch lump of bread cut in half and a fried egg and some spicy herbs placed inside. This was then put into a funny looking contraption which toasted it and injected steam at the same time. With the use of the steam they can use yesterday’s bread and you can't tell the difference, anyway it was a good breakfast and one that I'd recommend as long as you don't look at the steaming/toasting machine which is always decidedly unhygienic in its appearance.

The ferries across the Dardanelles are first class, they hold a number of trucks, buses, cars, handcarts, donkey carts, goats, chickens, sheep and ladies with headscarves. We even saw a man with a big brown bear on a piece of string walk off one a few weeks later. You can buy coffee and tea on them and they are clean and warm in the winter and they have telephones on them from which you can call anywhere in the world if you have enough jetons. On the other side we watched Eceabat draw closer and I was just a little worried that Alicja would throw up on sight but she coped with it rather well and we drove off the ferry around to what was going to be the restaurant and as I got out of the car, the truck from Bodrum arrived. The driver had had troubles too and was late and had caught the same ferry as us.

I went around to get Huseyin & Jane out of bed and we unloaded everything at Huseyin's sisters house. Even at such an early hour all the neighbours turned out and stood around the back of the truck to see our belongings which although meager looked expensive to them. It's a peasant's village you see and even if they have money they don't go in for things like bookcases and 1951 model washing machines. They were all very impressed and some of the people actually came up and felt some of our things as they came off of the truck, that is until the decomposing mattress was unloaded. That seemed to set the seal of approval on it all, we seemed much more acceptable with a rotting mattress.

We all went around to the future restaurant where Jane & Huseyin had already knocked out a wall between the kitchen and a black hole and started some of the renovations. The restaurant is part of a hotel, originally the hotel restaurant but it didn't pay too well and since then it has seen a variety of tenants, the last one being a bank. There was a problem, several problems actually but the most immediate one was water coming through the ceiling which wasn't happening when we first inspected the place and there were two leaking radiators dripping water all over the floor. Huseyin had asked Rafet the owner to fix the problem on many occasions but nothing had been done. Drastic action was called for. I waited for Rafet to turn up in the morning and I pounced. It didn't occur to me that I couldn't speak Turkish and when I cornered him I then realised that I couldn't communicate so taking him by the arm I took him in to the premises and showed him the ceiling. He was most apologetic and said that he wasn't aware of the problem but a plumber would be around at nine the next morning.

I thought that Huseyin would be suitably impressed with the way I handled the big man but he didn't say anything. The next afternoon I cornered Rafet again, "Oh the plumber's busy, he'll be here today". He wasn't, so back to Rafet I went. I was experiencing what we now call the “Turkish Tomorrow”; the guys at the Australian Embassy call it TITS - (This Is Turkey Son). Rafet dragged it out for three weeks, he wasn't being difficult either, he was just behaving in the normal, accepted Turkish way. We wrote him letters got a solicitor onto him, ranted & raved at him, said nasty things about his parentage but no, it was all done the Turkish way - late, and you're not expected to get angry about it. You should just allow three times as long as your estimate for everything and sit back and drink tea until it happens.

Every morning we would paddle into the restaurant and sweep the water out of the door before cooking our breakfast and we carefully positioned the table so as not to get drips in the butter. We tried to shame Rafet at first by putting signs in the window "The New Eceabat Aquarium" in Turkish but to no avail. Next we put up a sign offering swimming lessons in the "New Eceabat Pool" and we drew a big level indicator on a piece of cardboard and we increased the level every day with a red texta but we had to curtail this activity when one afternoon a man knocked at the door and wanted to enrol his daughter for swimming lessons and was quite agitated at finding that it was all a joke. Rumours were rampant concerning what the shop was going to be and after three weeks we had to go and see the Mayor and tell him our real intentions because he'd sent a message to us indicating that we didn't have a license for an aquarium and he was concerned that we might want to import Piranhas or something.

Alicja and I couldn't find a flat to live in and we had to stay at Rafet's flea ridden hotel for five weeks. It was a dirty disgusting dive of a place. Within half a metre of our window was a chimney, under which was a wood fired boiler which provided the hot water and so ventilating the room was impossible. We didn't open the window for the whole five weeks and the air in there was foul. We tried to move the single beds together but underneath them was at least ten years worth of cigarette butts, toffee papers and other miscellaneous rubbish and the hotel didn't possess a vacuum cleaner. I tried to plug in our little electric heater but the socket fell out of the wall. We used our own blankets and sheets and we washed them out every week and hung them in the restaurant to dry because the hotel bedding was filthy. I must add here that Rafet wasn't charging us for the room.

There was a shower on our floor which was shared between three rooms and it too hadn't been cleaned for a number of years. We scrubbed it with disinfectant and used it for a week until I discovered that every time we showered, a wet patch appeared on our restaurant ceiling below. The drainage was the usual Turkish standard and took an hour or so for the water to drain away. We would go up to bed dog tired at one in the morning after a hard days work in the restaurant painting or plastering or whatever only to find that someone had just used the shower and we would have to wait for the water to drain away. Then one night Alicja was in the bathroom and out of the drain popped a big ball of pubic hair (Turks often shave themselves all over) which was obviously the cause of the drainage problem and had been there for a very long time.

We complained and from then on the staff let us use whatever room was free to shower in which was thoroughly decent of them but over the next couple of weeks we used every shower in the place and they were all the same. One night I was shaving when the plumbing from the wash basin fell on my feet. I looked underneath and saw that it had been held in place by a piece of string which had rotted through. Showering in the different rooms gave us a chance to look at the place and it was appalling. In the three luxury suites there were headboards on the beds made from polystyrene which had come from the cartons used for packing refrigerators and people had scratched big holes in them, spilt orange juice over them etc. and quite often there were half eaten meals on the bedside tables. The windows were caked with so many years of cigarette smoke that it was difficult to see through them.

We never saw the cheapest rooms because they didn't have showers and as we were westerners they thought that we should only see the best in the place. We lived out of a suitcase literally because the wardrobes were too foul to put our clothes in. Life does of course have its brighter moments but we didn't see any of them for a few weeks. While we were staying at Rafet's "Ece Hotel" Jane, Alicja and I drove to Greece in the van to buy Nescafe and bacon. Nescafe is about one third of the price in Greece and bacon in Turkey is of course hard to come by. We have a habit of visiting Greece on public holidays and we arrived in Alexandropoulis to find the majority of the shops shut but managed to get most of what we were looking for.

Upon arrival at the Turkish border however, I was told that they wouldn't let the van into the country because the German Zolle plates and registration were only valid for one entry into Turkey and only for fifteen days. Bullshit I said, I've been living in Bodrum for months and I've been out of the country twice to the Greek island of Cos and it’s never been a problem, "you can see from my passport that I'm telling the truth". They told me rather firmly that they couldn't care less what they did in Bodrum but here at Ipsala they did things right and the car must be locked up until I took it out of the country permanently or registered it in another country. Now I've done a lot of research on this subject and spoken to all the customs officials in Bodrum about it and I was sure that I was on firm ground when I told them that they didn't know the law and that I would get a solicitor onto it and they were going to have to pay me compensation and so on.

They didn't budge so I rang my solicitor who rang them and tore them off a strip, then he spoke to me and said that the customs people seemed fairly sure of what they were doing and that I should go along with them for the moment until he had enough time to check into the matter. After all a solicitor can't be an expert on every subject at the drop of a hat but he was almost sure that they were wrong because of the Bodrum customs people letting foreigners go to Greece and come back every three months.

I put the phone down and said "OK you win, what do I do now". By this time four or five hours had elapsed and I'd made the fatal mistake of being angry with them. If you ever come to Turkey bear in mind that you must never but never get angry with an official of any sort, you must exhibit infinite patience. Luckily they had changed shifts by then and a new crew were on duty and Alicja had calmed me down a little. They told me that the first crew were right in locking the van up but they didn't want the van at the border and I would have to take it to Canakkale and have it impounded there. I agreed at once because Canakkale is only a ferry ride away from the restaurant and I'd be able to visit the van, start the engine now and again and keep an eye on it. I also pointed out to them that the van was our home and that as we couldn't afford any other form of accommodation we would need to sleep in the customs pound.

They said that we would be able to sleep in it alright and we set off for Canakkale, accompanied by a customs official who came along to see that we didn't disappear. We had to pay 130,000 Turkish lira for this guy's bus fare back to Ipsala and for his board in Rafet's crumby hotel and on the way we had to wait while he went into a restaurant for his evening meal. When he came out I informed him that I needed diesel for the van and as he had my 130,000 lira I could proceed no further unless he gave me some of the money back. This wasn't in the rules and with no previous precedent being set for giving foreigners some of their money back he didn't know what to do. He took a long time to make up his mind but finally he realised that we were in the middle of nowhere and he couldn't leave us unguarded to go back to Ipsala to sort it out. He handed over the cash and I filled up with fuel.

This done, I told him that we had a change of plan and we were now going back through Ipsala and on to Greece, and, he couldn't stop us from leaving the country. My plan was to drive back into Greece and then enter Turkey through another border post and try my luck. Up until then he had been quite a nice person but now he turned really nasty and after talking to the girls I was persuaded to do the sensible thing and proceed to Canakkale. We arrived in Eceabat and I thought that we would have to get the ferry to Canakkale straight away but the customs official didn't want to, he wanted to drag it out and stay in a hotel for the night so we stopped at the restaurant which at the time looked more like a building site than anything else but in one corner we had the cooker and an old table and chairs. I invited the customs man to sit down and asked him if he'd like a cup of coffee or tea and he couldn't seem to adjust to the fact that although we had a few arguments in the last few hours, I was still prepared to be civil enough to offer him a drink - after all, it wasn't a personal thing.

He at first declined but a few minutes later said that he would have a cup of coffee but he would make it himself. our kettle which we bought in Austria is a standard western type kettle, not electric but the type that you put on the gas stove and it has a whistle on top just like the old fashioned things that everyone's parents used to use (that is if you're over forty). The customs man hadn't seen anything like this before and when the whistle went off it quite alarmed him and he momentarily panicked until I stood up and turned the gas off. I motioned to lift the kettle but he was still sulking and moved my hand aside to let me know that he was perfectly capable of making his own coffee without my help. But he wasn't.

He put the coffee and sugar in the cup and then proceeded to pour the water in the cup with the whistle still on the kettle and when it was slow to come out, he started to use it like a vinegar shaker. After about three minutes of shaking he had about half a cupful but then the whistle came off of the end and the resulting gush of boiling water knocked the cup over, filled the sugar dish and ruined all his paperwork which he'd left on the table. I didn't laugh, at least not outwardly but it was difficult not to. As for our new found friend, he said I'll see you at ten in the morning and went off to book into Rafet's hotel.

In the morning Huseyin, the customs man and I set off on the ferry to get the van impounded in the Canakkale customs pound. I had to pay the 20,000 lira fare for the van and I also had to pay for the Mustaffa's ticket which wasn't exactly fair considering that they had taken 130,000 lira from me for his transport & accommodation but TITS I thought. It took seven hours to sort things out in Canakkale what with long discussions, filling out numerous forms in quadruplicate and so on but in the end they came up with the answer - "you must take the car back to Ipsala and leave it there" they said. And do you know what? I smiled the whole time and even though I hated doing it, it's the only thing to do.

If I'd shown the slightest sign of irritation it wouldn't have gone half as well. As it was, they kindly offered to impound my car free of charge for up to four months (after which they would confiscate it) but if I'd caused trouble they could have charged me whatever they liked for the storage of the van. At the time of writing, it has been there for two months and I can't figure a way of getting it out without paying nearly five thousand American dollars. Yes, I know that you are all saying to yourselves "he can simply do this or do that" but believe me we're bloody experts on this now and it just isn't that simple.

My solicitor finally found that the customs department' sticking as they were to the strict letter of the law, were legally right in impounding the van. Bodrum is more relaxed, it's a tourist town and they get most of their revenue from tourism and therefore turn a blind eye to the comings and goings of foreigners in cars. The Bodrum customs department are prevailed upon by the town council and the tourism department to take it easy on foreigners because if foreigners start complaining to travel magazines, newspapers and so on, then Bodrum's tourist revenue could drop and they don't want that to happen, but at Ipsala they don't care about this sort of thing and they apply the law. I've spoken to a lot of truck drivers now (at the time of writing, the restaurant is open) and they all tell me that the customs people here are far worse than places like Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Enough about the van and the customs people, our problems were now about to start. Two weeks later we had a telegram from Poland to say that Alicja's Mum was very ill and in hospital. She had to leave straight away and fly to Warsaw and it was quite a blow to us because it was just at a time when we needed her skills and her level headed approach to problems. None of us had realised just how valuable her input was until she had gone, I was completely lost and didn't cope at all well with the day to day irritations which Turkey presents a foreigner with when trying to establish a business.

Things now become a little jumbled and disjointed because I can't remember what happened at what time, all we did was to set up a small time hamburger bar come pub which could have been done inside six weeks in Australia but here it has been going on for nearly six months and it's still not finished as far as all the legal work is concerned. One night while Alicja was away, we sat down and went through a list of 58 items which we had either purchased or had custom made for us by carpenters, welders etc and we could count only three which had been right first time.

It was about this time that I finally moved into an apartment. It took something like two months to find a landlord who would rent anything to us. We found out later that this was the first time that a foreigner had come to live in Eceabat and everyone was wary of us. There is a German couple here living three doors down from us but the husband's father used to employ people from Eceabat in his factory in Germany and Martin, the son, already knew the locals through frequent trips here for years before he settled here so everyone was familiar with him but with us it was different.

There were lots of empty houses and flats in the village but nobody would rent one to us. Every day Huseyin would go out looking for a place for us but returned each time with the stock answer that "they don't want to rent to strange people". In the end he found us a reasonably good flat by Eceabat standards and it is owned by a fisherman who is shunned by most of the villagers. The reason for this is that he is blind in one eye and a couple of years ago he killed a child when he was driving his car. He shouldn't have had a license to start with but that's easy in Turkey - all you do is bribe the policeman. His penalty for killing the child was I think, two weeks in jail and now he is driving around, still with his license.

One day I was standing outside the restaurant with Huseyin and two local policemen when a man on a motor bike went wobbling up the road, clearly very drunk. The policemen thought this was a great laugh and they were imitating him by swaying from side to side. I said to Huseyin that this was to me a very strange state of affairs and he said that this guy is permanently pissed and goes up the street like this every day and the police always laugh about it. I said "what if you had a child and he ran over it and killed it". Huseyin said "then I kill him". This is the general way that Turks think, they wouldn't think of locking the guy up so that he couldn't run anyone over.

Back to the flat. Jane & Huseyin were staying at his parents place in cramped conditions and so they moved in with me and I was glad of the company. We were told that the flat was ready but the electricity would be turned on the next day so if we cared to move in, we could use an extension lead from the landlord Emin's place downstairs. We quickly rigged this up and spent the night sleeping in relative comfort after what seemed like ages. The next night we came home but the electric situation was exactly the same. This went on with various excuses for over a month.

The electricity inspector had looked at the place and said that although it was a new flat, the electrics were all wrong and needed some more work before the flat would meet the required standard. The inspector had up until two months before, been the local police commissioner and had held that post for fifteen years, he knew bugger all about electricity but told the landlord that for a price, he would do it himself. I made a few enquiries about the inspector and found that he'd had no experience whatsoever with wiring houses, it hadn't ever been his hobby or anything, but if he did the job then the landlord would have no trouble in getting the required certificate to say all was electrically safe.

As I said, it took over a month and the guy worked every day on it, I don't know what happened to his regular inspecting work. He had no tools at all and used whatever was hanging around the house like kitchen knives and scissors and Sellotape instead of insulation tape. He dug holes in the walls with my screwdrivers and then using our bread knife, mixed plaster on our kitchen table to fill them back in again. Some days we would come home and find that a power point that worked yesterday, worked no longer and we would have to tell the landlord who didn't want to upset the bloke. On other days we could have two lights on but switching on a third caused a blackout. I had a very close call one night when the lights went out though. I just happened to have a plastic handled knife in my hand when we had a blackout and I went to the fuse box to have a look. The fuse box/meter box is made of metal with a metal door and I just touched the door with the knife. The lights came on again.

I realised at once that there was a serious problem so I went and got a plastic handled screwdriver and carefully opened the metal door. There were two bare wires inside touching the unpainted meter box door which was acting as a piece of wire itself and completing the circuit that was giving us light. If I'd touched it with my bare hands I doubt if I'd still be alive because I was standing in water at the time because it had been raining and our roof leaks. Finally I gave up complaining and said he could leave it as it was but even now some of the power points don't work and others will only power light bulbs but nothing else.

I spoke to the electrician who was wiring our restaurant at the time and he told me that this is the general standard here, that people in villages aren't used to electricity yet although its been here a long time and every year there are lots of accidents through peoples ignorance of what electricity can do to them if it isn't handled in the right way. He is the only decent tradesman I've so far come across here and even he told me that he's had no formal training at all and has picked up all his knowledge from books. Now he has a license to do just about anything electrical in the village and he's never had to take an examination.

When we bought an electric chip cooker and plugged it in, we all received a hefty electric shock from it so we sent for Ciad the electrician and he told us that the hotel (which we are a part of) wasn't earthed at all and that he would have to bury a big metal plate under the ground and earth the hotel to it before he could guarantee that we would receive no further shocks, he also added that well over 80% of the houses in Eceabat are not earthed or at least, not by design.

Four or five paragraphs ago I wrote "back to the flat" didn't I? - Sorry. Apart from the lack of electricity there was another reason why there was a delay in our moving in and that was that there was no outside access to the place. They had built this upstairs flat with a door but had neglected to build steps up to the door and as it's an upstairs flat, well, TITS. Eventually a builder was found who quoted the right price and the concrete steps were built but I'm sure that a handrail will never turn up, it isn't considered important. When Turks paint walls they seldom put any covering on the floor to catch the spilled paint and when Turks paint, there's a lot of it. I've seen it time and again, the floor has to be cleaned anyway so why bother. Unless I take a wire brush to the tiles which cover the entire floor area it will be some months before the paint will wear off of them.

OK so the standard is low but we're not in Australia and we can't expect the same standard can we?. But think of this - in the bathroom there are two washing machine taps but they're both connected to the cold water and there's no power point to plug a machine into anyway. There's also a hole for a flue in one of the bathroom walls. This is so that your wood hot water heater can get rid of its smoke and exhaust gasses. That's OK I suppose but we asked politely if Emin would mind if we put an electric hot water heater in. He wasn't sure if the electricity authorities would approve such a thing so we settled for a bottled gas one. When we came to install the thing however, we found that the water connections were at a higher level than the flue hole and the hot exhaust gasses were forced to go down instead of up. It would have been worse still with the wood fired heater because it's a lot taller than a gas one. There are lots of other things wrong with the bathroom but TITS.

The kitchen, lounge room and one of the bedrooms have round holes in the walls which are covered with metal inserts. These are the entrances to the chimneys and you are supposed to install your wood burning stove and run the flue into one of these holes. The problem is that these chimneys are also used by the people downstairs and when they decide to light their heater, cooker or water heater, the smoke belches out into our lounge room too and we have a big brown stain down the lounge room wall because every time it rains, it dissolves the soot in the chimney and it runs out of these holes in the wall. The chimneys don't have a bend in them you see, so the rain runs straight in.

When we moved in, I opened the door to the hall and was confronted with another door only six centimetres in front of me. I don't know what went through the mind of the carpenter when he was doing the job but in my book he rates as a non thinking bloody idiot. Who needs two doors six centimetres apart? It was like indoor double glazing. The whole place is like this but I shouldn't complain because as Jane pointed out yesterday we have the best flat in Eceabat.

I must tell you a little story which I am absolutely sure is true but in this day and age seems unbelievable. There is a guy here of about thirty years of age and he has a nickname which equates to "he who has had carnal knowledge of a dog". I thought this was a bit of an insult and I asked why people should call him such a thing, especially to his face as they do. It came about a little over two years ago. The guy had managed to get himself laid by a tourist and he caught some kind of venereal disease and so he went to the doctor who advised him to have sexual intercourse with a dog. One night his friends all helped him find a dog and stood around in a circle with their backs to him so that nobody could see him perform the act but alas he couldn't get it up. They let the dog go and a few minutes later he found that the dog wasn't a bad sort after all and his wedding tackle was working OK and they had to chase the poor animal through the streets until they found it again.

The peculiar thing is that there's no shame attached to this episode at all, in fact a Turkish friend of mine who lives in Bodrum and came up here over the ANZAC week and is well traveled in Turkey told me that the belief that sex with an animal is the best cure for venereal diseases is not unusual in out of the way Turkish villages. Anyway this guy is now called dog fucker to his face and he doesn't mind in the slightest. I enquired as to whether his problem was cured by his canine friend and the reply was a shrug of the shoulders and "well, he's alright now".

I don't suppose that all of you are familiar with Ramazan, it's a religious month of observance during which Muslims do not smoke, eat or drink between the hours of sunrise and sunset. A lot of people lose weight over this period of semi fasting and I would think that it probably does them the world of good. When were renovating the premises, the two chefs would cook us a lovely Turkish meal and we would sit at the tables and eat it but these two guys would sit in the kitchen and eat by themselves. I kept on at them, telling them that there was no distinction between bosses and workers in this company and that they should come and sit with us. They made excuses every day that they were more comfortable sitting in the kitchen on top of the gas bottles and so on until one day at breakfast when there was only myself and Mehmet present and I told him that I felt uncomfortable sitting at the table while he sat in the kitchen,

It was then that he explained to me "there are 4,000 people in this village and 3,500 of them observe ramazan and if they see me eating, I'll be very unpopular". I apologised for being so ignorant - what a twit. It was around about then, when Huseyin & Jane were staying with me that I had this terrible dream. There was all this banging going on in my head and it reminded me of the noise that I had heard when I was under a gas anaesthetic as a kid while having a tooth extracted. It went on for a long time and I woke up. The noise was still going on though and I gradually realised that it was three o'clock in the morning and there was some idiot somewhere beating the shit out of a drum.

I was disorientated and I got up and looked out of the window and to my complete wonderment there was this guy right outside the window staring up into the air and banging for all he was worth on one of those big drums like the man who dresses in a bearskin uses in Scottish military parade bands. I shouted to him to stop the racket but he couldn't hear me and after a while he wandered off down the street still drumming. In the morning I said to Huseyin "did you hear that nutcase outside the window last night, he was wandering around beating a drum". "Oh yes, he replied, that's to wake everyone up before sunrise so that they can have breakfast". A couple of days later he came around again in broad daylight giving a repeat performance, this was so that everyone could rush out and pay him for waking them up. I'd willingly have paid him double to stay away from our street because he came every second night.

It became obvious after a while that Eceabat was part of the real Turkey and Bodrum wasn't. Bodrum is a tourist town and the people and the officials are used to foreigners. In Eceabat, no foreigner had ever tried to start a business before let alone a foreigner with a bona fide tourist company. They didn't understand the law as it applies to tourist companies and I didn't understand that designated tourist towns have a different set of rules in Turkey to non tourist towns.

We had visited the mayor and the police commissioner of the town when we were first considering renting the premises because we wanted to make sure that we would be able to obtain an alcohol license. They had both told us that alcohol was out of the question because the premises were within 100 metres of the new mosque which was still under construction but with a little further discussion the Mayor had said "that is unless you have a tourist company, then you can sell alcohol right under a mosque". "OK" we said "we'll form a tourist company". "OK" said the Mayor and the police commissioner, "we'll give you a license as soon as you show us that you have a tourist company".

Two months later we arrived with the required papers and they told us that we couldn't sell alcohol. We asked them why but all they could do was say that it wasn't up to them, the decision was up to the Kaymakam who is the politically appointed governor of the district and a very important man. We went to see him but he said that the decision wasn't up to him but an alcohol license was definitely not on and that he could only give us one if a minister from Ankara informed him in writing that he should give us permission. "Anyway'" he said "people have tried to get an alcohol license for that place before and one of them was very well connected and he got the minister to phone me and instruct me to give the necessary permission but he wouldn't put it in writing so I couldn't do it because if anything went wrong, I could get my arse kicked instead of the minister".

This political football went on for weeks and at one stage I had managed to get the man above the Kaymakam to recommend to him that he fix us up with a licence. We were summoned to the Kaymakam's office and told in no uncertain terms that he couldn't make an exception for us. We pointed out that it was different in our case because we had a legally registered tourism company and that our restaurant was going to be on Australian television and in international newspapers and what would people from other countries think of this pub with no beer? It was all futile; the guy just didn't understand that his town was going to be the international centre of attraction for three days on the 75th anniversary of ANZAC day.

He added as we were on the way out though that he had a friend in Ankara who would be able to grant us a license for a bribe - the bastard was after money and there was no friend in Ankara at all. I discussed it with Huseyin but he didn't know how to go about taking up the offer and we gave up on it. I think that the Kaymakam must have come under a little pressure from the man above him a few days later because he came in and told us that he would be visiting us the next morning to present us with the long awaited license.

Nothing happened and so the next day we contacted him an he told us that he had driven by our premises and had seen a foreigner sitting outside at one of our tables drinking beer and that meant that we were already selling it and so we wouldn't be getting a license and if we didn't stop the practice straight away, the police would shut us down. It was a lie, or if it wasn't, we had certainly never sold the guy a beer and we invited the Kaymakam to inspect the restaurant so that he could see for himself that we didn't have any alcohol whatsoever in the place. He replied that by the time he arrived, we would have hidden all the beer. He was just hanging out for his bribe.

Eventually, after we had been open for a week with literally hundreds of beer swilling Aussies walking in and asking why THE BOB HAWKE PUB didn't sell beer, a journalist arrived and said that he wanted to do a story on us.

I said that I had a rather good story and related to him all the problems we were having. The story appeared in the paper the next morning and we were given a licence straight away, the police commissioner rang and told us to come and collect it. We were very busy that morning and didn't have time to go and pick it up apart from the fact that we couldn't get any beer delivered until the next day so there was no hurry. Half an hour later the police commissioner rang back and pleaded with us to come and pick up our license because he'd be in trouble if we didn't. I'm sorry to say that this is what Turkey is like. While all this wrangling was going on, there were other shops selling beer right next to and under the bloody mosque. Every step of the way we had been refused a license on religious grounds so whether or not they changed the religion I don't know.

Had the door of the new mosque been on the far side of the building we would have been outside the 100 metre limit and have qualified for an alcohol license immediately. I pointed out to all the bureaucratic twits who mattered in the place that in other towns in Turkey beer wines and spirits were sold within 20 metres of mosques and it didn't seem to bother anyone and I quoted instances and offered to follow it up with photographs but the stock answer to this and other attempts was "that's OK in a tourist town but not in Eceabat".

One night we sat down and talked about all this and Huseyin said "the mosque is no good anyway and it can't really be used as a mosque". I asked why and he said "because my friend fuck one tourist in there and it says in the Koran that once a thing like this happens, it can't be used anymore". I asked what happened to his friend and was told that the police beat him up very badly for his misdeed.

They didn't like the idea of a foreigner being in town from the outset really, and put all the obstacles in our way that they possibly could. We bought a roll of plastic grass like they put down on indoor tennis courts. We'd seen it on the pavements in plenty of other places in Turkey and thought it would brighten the place up a bit but the Mayor thought differently and told us that "we could under no circumstances put it out on the pavement in this town". They limited us to a maximum of three outside tables in spite of the fact that everybody else had four or six. There were literally twenty or more incidents similar to this and I must admit that it tried our patience a little and we became ratty with each other.

They wouldn't let us use water from a hose to clean the pavement despite the fact that every other shop in town uses this method to clean the council’s pavement. One day a council worker came along and painted the kerbstones white. He did it with a floor brush and it was a pretty scruffy job so I went out with a paint brush to tidy it up but the police came along and stopped me because they said that it would make the Mayor angry.

By law we had to purchase a cash register but in Turkey it's not that easy. As we formed the company hundreds of kilometres away in Bodrum, the cash register had to be purchased in Bodrum and the tax department had to play with it for a day to see that it hadn't been doctored because here, the cash register is a legal thing. Every hour while it's switched on, it computes a total of the tax you have to pay at the end of the month and once the tax department is happy with the way it performs it has to be sealed so that you can't fiddle it. Then it has to be taken to a notary and he writes something or the other about it and officially stamps it as being ready for use.

After all this crap it had to come back from Bodrum and the local tax department in Canakkale started the process all over again. All the company books which deal with the day’s takings etc. have to be taken to the notary and he stamps every single page of them. A person from the tax department comes around every day and they just order a cup of coffee and sit in the place to observe how much business you are doing and whether you are putting it through the register. He sits there for an hour or more and it's not always the same guy so that you can't get used to him and know who he is and bribe him. These guys note the time and how much money you took so that they can compare it with the cash register roll later on and see if you are lying about your takings. If they consider that you've made a false declaration, they don't fine you but instead they shut you down for a few days.

One morning I was approached by Tancur, one of the hotel workers, and he asked if I would teach him English and I readily agreed because he was a nice guy and I got on well with him. During the course of the day other people got to hear about it and I ended up with something like twenty people all wanting to learn. Three of them explained that they were illiterate and only wanted conversational English - no books. All they wanted was to be able to communicate with tourists so that it would make it easier to sell T shirts, pottery etc.

I thought it was a great idea, they'd learn English, I'd get to learn Turkish from it and perhaps from this I would get to meet more people and perhaps they would all stop looking at me sideways when I walked down the street. I said that although we wouldn't bother with books we would need a room with a blackboard because my Turkish is practically non existent and when stuck for a word, I could draw a diagram. No problem they all assured me. School finishes next week and the Kaymakam will let us have one of the school rooms.

The Kaymakam came in for his regular free cup of coffee an hour later and through Huseyin I told him about all these guys wanting to learn English. "No they don't" he said. "They are all having a joke with you". I persisted although I could see that Huseyin as my interpreter was looking a little uncomfortable. "Listen to me" said the big chief. There's a free government English course over in Canakkale and they can all go over and attend it if they're so keen to learn English.

I asked Huseyin to explain that some of these guys were illiterate in Turkish and couldn't handle the book work. "Then they can attend a free literacy class, they don't need you" he said. Huseyin then said to me that he thought it wise not to push things any further because the Kaymakam is not the person to fall out with, "he can cause no end of trouble if he has it in for you".

On another occasion I was taking photographs of the guys across the road from us who sell food from street barrows to the tourists who are queuing up to get on the ferry boat. The Kaymakam turned up again for his free coffee and said something to Huseyin. Huseyin approached me and told me that the Kaymakam would like to look through the view-finder of my camera so I handed it over. The next question was "how much did it cost". I told him that with that particular telephoto lens, the whole thing would have been something like seven hundred dollars. He handed it back to me and said to Huseyin that he wasn't stupid, I shouldn't lie to him like that and for seven hundred dollars it was possible to buy a much, much bigger camera. This was the sort of mentality which prevailed in Eceabat and this was the top man talking.

About two weeks before we opened and were trying to find our way through this bureaucratic minefield, both of our partners came to me independently and said that they were having problems with each other and didn't want to get married anymore so I took on the role of marriage guidance counselor and was quite successful at it for a while but I don't know how long my advice will be effective for. We had already tried to make as much mileage out of their wedding as possible with the press because a Turk marrying an Aussie on the 75th anniversary of ANZAC day was quite a thing and the press loved it.

Unfortunately it was during this period that Alicja's mother died in Poland, if I wasn't depressed already, this was the end and I was ready to lock the doors and just run away from Turkey altogether. Alicja and I hadn't seen each other for about three weeks at this stage and I was very worried about her and couldn't always get a phone connection between Turkey and Poland. Alicja went through a tough time trying to get her mother buried, there being no available cemetery space left in Warsaw and all in all it was one of the lowest and loneliest points in both of our lives. Throughout this period I had only one person to talk to who understood exactly what was going on and what I was trying to achieve and he was in Bodrum. It was our English speaking solicitor, Methi. This guy is extremely clever and I owe him a big debt of gratitude. Practically every day I'd ring him with a problem and he'd sort it out.

On the day when our partners had told me that they wanted to call the marriage off I sent them home to my flat with a bottle of whisky and told them to talk things over. This left me alone in a half completed restaurant in a Turkish village where the authorities were hostile to me and I didn't have a single soul with whom I could communicate. I considered my position. What if my partners decided to break off their relationship and go their own separate ways? I'd already overheard Jane on the phone asking about the price of a one way ticket to Australia. I went out and bought myself a bottle of raki and drunk the lot. I was a babbling idiot an hour later when I rang Methi and the next day I felt terrible at having rang him whilst I was in that state.

Isn't this letter just the most depressing thing you've ever read?

We finally opened on 20th April, five days before ANZAC day after Huseyin had chased around a million government departments getting rubber stamps on pieces of paper and it was a great success. We were full to overflowing for ten days and made a lot of money. Huseyin appeared live on Adelaide radio, we were on TV in England and Australia and in newspapers and magazines in three countries. The whole of Eceabat stood still for us, none of the restaurants had any business at all worth speaking of and there were people outside our place sitting all over the pavement and so far out into the road that the police had to move them to get the traffic through.

The 26th of April was fun at last. That was the day of the great sewerage flood. Yes folks, it ain't all over yet. It was about five in the evening when a truck pulled up outside and connected up to the sewerage system of the hotel next door. We share a common drainage system with the hotel and this truck had arrived to pump out the septic tank underneath the ground. The truck was already half full of effluent from some place else when the driver connected the suction hose to the delivery end of the pump. It was the day after ANZAC day and the second busiest day of the year for us and Eceabat.

He started the pump and blew shit, tampons, condoms and assorted other nasties out of our toilets so hard that it hit the roof, it also came out of our kitchen sinks. The restaurant was full at the time when this wall of water came flowing through the place and the first I knew of it was when all the ladies started screaming and running out. The doorway proved to be inadequate to cope with this volume of traffic and so some people with shit all over their shoes ran back into the place and leapt up on the chairs and tables. I don't know how close you've ever come to a nervous breakdown but for me the time was fast approaching. I just burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter like a bloody maniac.

We all grabbed mops and tea towels on sticks and things and started trying to push this stuff out of the door amidst both cheers and screams from the onlookers and all these people had their video cameras running and there were flashes going off as they all took photographs. It was then, as I was pushing a load out of the door, that a guy I'd seen in town on a couple of occasions previously, came up to me and said "Oh Peter I'm from the Australian embassy and this is Fred Smith (I forget the name) from the Melbourne Age newspaper who'd like to do an article on the business". "Sorry Fred" I said "I'm in the shit at the moment, can you come back a little later?" "Yes" said Fred "no problems at all". He never showed up again though.

Throughout this whole episode there were four Aussie soldiers sitting calmly discussing football in one corner. Everyone else had fled in panic leaving behind cameras, handbags and so forth but these guys just sat here with shit floating around their boots as if it happened to them every day. I paddled over to them and said "sorry about all this boys" and one of them looked up and quietly said "no worries, we said we were going out for a night on the piss anyhow".

It sure was a quick way to clear the place out though, better than shouting fire or anything - trouble was that they didn't come back again.

The one bright spot during this period was Mehmet. Mehmet turned up looking for a job one day and I didn't want to take him on because he didn't speak one word of English. Huseyin however assured me that he was a hard worker and that he would learn English quickly. I wasn't convinced but as we desperately needed someone and the rest of Eceabat, though mostly unemployed, didn't want to work for us, I agreed. He was twenty three years of age with red hair and an awful looking Ghengis Khan moustache which I insisted that he shave off before starting with us and he was so short that he could hardly see over the bar. Mehmet had been the proud owner of the moustache for two years but said "you're the boss, is there anything else that you don't like about me?" "Yes" I said," your fingernails". "What's wrong with them" he said. "They're bloody filthy, that's what's wrong with them" I replied. "OK you're the boss" he repeated.

The next day he turned up for his first days work with cuts all over his upper lip and fingernails which he or some member of his family had bitten down to the quick. But he was all smiles and that was a big change for me - people in Eceabat don't smile a hell of a lot. I immediately set about teaching him English and he immediately set about learning with the result that within two weeks he was serving behind the bar and doing a very good job of it too. On the third day he looked at me for a few seconds and went away. I watched him, he was looking at a piece of paper. He returned and boldly stated "Mr Peter, I love you". It just broke me up and made me laugh the whole day.

Shortly after he started, he was sweeping the floor and I showed him the vacuum cleaner and explained that I would like him to use it instead because of the dust that he was causing with the brush. He looked at it and said that he could manage OK with the brush but thanked me for thinking of him. I couldn't get the message through so I waited for Huseyin who told him that I didn't want him to use the brush but he also told me that he doubted that Mehmet had actually seen a vacuum cleaner before except maybe in a shop window and that he didn't know of the existence of a vacuum cleaner in any home in Eceabat.

The next day I produced the vacuum cleaner from the cupboard and used it for a few minutes and invited Mehmet to have a go at it. He was clearly scared of it but got used to the idea and then there was no stopping him. I told him that he could use the brush outside on the pavement but no, he wanted to do the pavement with it as well. I didn't object and pretty soon Mehmet was out there acting like some sort of professor of electronics explaining the workings of it to all his friends.

He wasn't used to it completely though and I watched him at breakfast in the morning as he carefully swept up three piles of dust with the broom and then sucked them up with the vac'. Some time later he came to me and told me that the vacuum cleaner was all finished and kaput and we'd have to get another one. On investigation I found that the bag was full, I hadn't told him about the bag. I asked him to follow me and we went across the other side of the road to the big council rubbish bin and I showed him the bag and showed him how to empty it. He was very impressed.

That was on the Thursday. On the following Sunday, he got a piece of paper stuck in the hose, immediately thought to himself that the bag was full and opened it up in the middle of the restaurant and with bag in hand set off for the rubbish bin. He tripped over one of the chair legs and fell headlong on the floor, covering two breakfast customers in clouds of dust. He stood up with his face, hair and eyebrows covered in dust and said to the elderly German couple "It's my pleasure, don't mention it".

First I had to explain that we were teaching Mehmet English and he didn't really mean that it was his pleasure to fill their coffee cups with vacuum cleaner dust, then I had to explain to Mehmet that his choice of English phrases was incorrect and then get him to cook these people two new breakfasts. He was very upset that I was displeased with him and insisted that he should vacuum the customers clothes off but they'd had enough and left with their new breakfasts only half eaten.

Mehmet is now the expert on the vacuum cleaner and uses it for everything, we don't have a speck of dust in the place at any time, he's read and re read the instruction manual, discussed it at length with the village electrician and is a dab hand at plucking flies off the wall with it. He's used the warm exhaust from it to re shape plastic plumbing fixtures for the toilets and to freshen the previous days bread rolls on one occasion when the baker delivered late. This last application for a vacuum cleaner was ingenious. We were in at six in the morning and the bread was late. "No problems he assured me" and took a polythene bag and half a dozen rolls which he had sprinkled with water. He then made a few holes for the air to escape and put the vacuum cleaner exhaust into it. In five minutes the rolls were as fresh as they had been when they were delivered the previous day.

I borrowed an electric drill from Martin our German neighbour and it came complete with a very smart looking box of thirty drill bits of all types, metal, masonry and wood drills. I didn't think to ask Mehmet if he'd ever used an electric drill before and I gave him a number of little jobs to do with it and he was pleased that I had the confidence in him to trust him with the drill. My confidence was misplaced however.

To hang a mirror in the ladies toilet he had used one of Martin's wood drills to drill into the masonry. Not only that but he had the drill running in reverse for ten minutes or so and it melted the end of the drill bit. I looked at all the other drills and eight or nine of them were completely ruined. I returned them to Martin a week later after trying in vain to replace them and offered to buy him a new set if he could get them sent over from Germany. Martin was very understanding, said that he'd lived in Eceabat for a while now and wasn't surprised in the least. Mehmet isn't silly, to the contrary he is bright; he just hasn't been exposed to things like this before.

I don't think that he's ever had a girlfriend and in that regard isn't at all unusual in this area where arranged marriages still go on. Turkey is still full of thirty to forty year old virgins and most of them haven't so much as held hands with a girl. One day our other worker Bayram, who is far from virginal was going up to Istanbul to meet a girl and he arranged to take Mehmet with him on a blind date to meet this 16 year old schoolgirl. He instantly fell in love and has been moping around now for weeks. It seems that this girl has been promised to another and she prefers our Mehmet. She told him over the phone that if she has to marry this guy she will kill herself and now he's a permanent wreck through worrying about the situation.

Bayram is a different sort of guy altogether and has hung around Eceabat for years trying to get foreign girls to fall in love with him so that he can get a passport out of Turkey. He's not well liked in the village because of this and his general western ways but he doesn't care a damn what others think of him. He's very handsome and absolutely charming and polite but one of the vainest people I've yet come across and goes to body building because he thinks that all western girls are hooked on men's bodies. He keeps telling me that once he gets to Australia and walks around the beach, all the girls will fall in love with him.

He's not without disasters either but he speaks good English and works like a Trojan, he might even be one - Troy is only 30 minutes up the road. When he first started I asked him to paint the walls on the outside of the restaurant and gave him a roller and all the necessary equipment. He said that he understood the writing on the outside of the can about diluting it with water but he didn't understand at all and diluted it to the whitewash consistency that Turks use to paint their houses.

It was about as runny as milk. He dipped the roller in it and ran it up the wall. Of course as the roller spun around it splattered him with white paint and he panicked. He wanted to ask me what to do and he forgot to put the roller down first. He came charging through the restaurant with roller in hand dripping paint all over the floor and then realised what he'd done and hesitated in the middle, he then made up his mind to carry on into the kitchen and made a run for the sink but when he got there it was full of dishes so he spun around twice and ran back out again. He looked just like Manuel out of Fawlty Towers and I couldn't help laughing although we spent at least an hour cleaning the floor afterwards.

On another occasion I did an unusual thing, I had a hamburger for lunch. It was revolting. I looked into it and found that instead of lettuce they were using endive. They didn't know the difference, I asked how long they had been using it and they told me a week.

I went around to the butchers with Alicja to get a kilo of minced beef one afternoon. She wouldn't tell me why she wanted me to come but she'd been asking me for a long time so off we went. I couldn't help laughing; he must have been a lousy shot with the meat axe because the poor man didn't have any fingers at all on his right hand. He cut a lump of meat off of the side of a cow with one hand and one elbow and placed it in the mincer. He then proceeded to use the stump of his right hand as a ramrod to push the meat into the mincer and every time he pulled it out of the machine it looked as though it had only just swallowed up his fingers especially when he put it through the second time and the stump came out covered in blood. I could just imagine it happening at Safeways meat counter in Melbourne.

I can just see him applying for the job.

Hasan. The advert didn't say anything about having two hands

Personnel Manager. Well we er um didn't expect any unidexters to apply

Hasan. I've been a butcher for twenty five years; I can do the job as well as anyone

Personnel Manager. Well,- we did really want someone, shall we say a little more ambidextrous. But rest assured that if no two handed butchers apply I can safely say that you've got yourself a job.

One evening as the muezzin called the faithful to prayer I suddenly thought to myself that I'd go to the service because the troublesome mosque had been completed in time for the ANZAC day celebrations. It was a beautiful building inside and the service was interesting and attended by six old men. Afterwards they all came up and spoke to me and were friendly. They didn't realise that I was the person who had caused such a stink over the alcohol license and I asked them a few questions. I asked why the rosary type beads which they all carried and fondled so lovingly during the service came in groups of thirty three. I thought that like freemasonry, there was one for every year of Christs life. (Your actual Jesus figures quite prominently in the Koran) None of them had a clue.

I'd been reading the Koran and I asked them all some quite elementary questions which I already knew the answers to but they were all struck dumb, they didn't know anything at all about their religion. I'm a bloody atheist and I knew more about it than the whole lot of them put together. I asked what was the normal attendance of these services and they said that these days there were only ten regulars, all advanced in years, and the young people these days were no longer interested in religion. I said that I supposed that most people still used the old mosque but was told that no they were the crowd from the old mosque and that they had all recently moved here to worship.

So all this trouble over the alcohol license had been to satisfy this handful of geriatric old religious farts who already had a perfectly good mosque to start with and knew bugger all about their religion anyway. TITS.

That's enough for now but I can tell you that our experiences in Eceabat over a three month period would fill a few books.


Bye for now


Alicja & Peter