The 30th year: 2014/2015: Christmas in Turkey

View during breakfast

Breakfast

Lots of things going on both exciting and scary, but adrenaline-stimulating nonetheless! I took over a month of vacation, which started with skipping Christmas by flying with my best friend to Antalya, Turkey. It was certainly different spending the 24^th and 25^th of December at the beach and in a country that didn’t celebrate Christmas. In Turkey,  these days were like any other days, all businesses were open and people went on with their lives without recognizing that the Western world was celebrating this most-special Holiday.

The experience there was great, not many tourists; it actually often felt like we were the only tourists there. I realized after the first day that I couldn’t just speak German to everyone like people had suggested, so that night I learned 10 or 15 phrases in Turkish that made the next 3 days a bit easier.  We wanted to see the Turkish country side and rented a scooter with which we had two near-death experiences, mainly due to other drivers (a bus and a truck) not caring about a small scooter that they could just easily drive off the road. Despite this, we did see a big part of the real, often-poor Turkey. In retrospect, I think it was one of the craziest things I have done, once I became confident with the scooter I was driving in the Turkish freeway/Autobahn at over 120 kmph with my best friend riding on the back (she definitely had also a lot of courage and literally trusted me with her life); definitely a huge adrenaline rush.

Turkish people were extremely nice and definitely avid sales people, I was literally manipulated into buying way more stuff than I intended to. The food was better than expected and often I went to bed so full and swearing that I would never eat that much again, of course until I repeated the same cycle the next day. Surely a highlight of the food was the breakfast that was included with our hotel package, especially the cheese and honey, and more than anything the fact that we had breakfast at the age of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean and across the snowcapped Beydaglari mountains. Our hotel was right in the heart of the old city or Kaleiçi, which is accessed through the Hadrian gate that was built for a time when this Roman emperor visited Antalya when it was then part of the Roman Empire. The really well preserved ruins, houses, narrow streets and alleyways appeared to have remained stopped in time for several hundred years. The Kaleiçi had several mosques in it and waking up to the 6 AM morning-prayers on the loud speakers was a very spiritual experience. Opposite to the Hadrain gate at the other end of Kaleiçi was the Antalya port and only access to the sea. At this port we spent a lot of time seeing the fishermen come every morning with their daily catches, and watching them play backgammon in their small boats. Everybody, everywhere in Turkey when not working was playing backgammon, I sure need to learn how to play it. At this port there were also many people fishing off the pier next to a very large sign that forbid fishing off the port. In order to assimilate the culture we bought tackle, line and some weird bait from a vendor next to the pier and joined in on the fishing; both Rachel and I successfully caught one fish each (definitely not sea monsters) in a span of 20 to 30 minutes and then gave our equipment away to a local kid with whom we struggled to communicate.

 

We ended our amazing time there by going to a 700 year-old Turkish bath, where 2 really old men scrubbed us, exfoliated us, gave us a bubble bath and bubble massage, then some tea and fresh fruit before finishing with a spectacular oil massage. Needless to say, Turkey became one of my favorite countries in the world and I will make sure that I visit it many more times.