Turkey Flat

Turkish bread is flat (and yummy), and a 'flat' is what they (English speakers) call an apartment here.

So, here is our Turkey flat:

The best part is the lovely spacious living room.

At the end of the room is a delightful little balcony - a great place for meals as well as the all-important washing line.

The buildings visible from the balcony are the school where we work, and the foliage in between is a pomegranate tree, olive tree, couple of fig trees ... all that cool Mediterranean stuff!

The rest of the flat is a little more on the funky side from an Oz point of view.

The kitchen is a weird shape, impossible to get a decent pic of.

Its bright and pleasant, and the bench and draining board seem to be marble. The stove presents me with some problems as the actual stove-top is about armpit-height for me, so you can imagine what a nightmare stirring a pot of bolognaise would be ...

Then there is the bathroom. There is a "squat" toilet. AAAAAaaaahhhh!!

Once we got over the shock of that we realised it is only being used as a storage room because there is a SECOND toilet.

Its not immediately obvious, but once you sit there with one elbow resting on the sink and one knee jammed against the bath, you realise they really have tucked it away in the corner! (And it does have one of those useful little 'bidet' squirter things that are part of the whole Turkish toilet scene... )

Then, of course, there is Turkish bath - designed for sitting in.

Nice idea, I'm sure, but I am going to have to get over (and get rid of) the stuff that has collected from the washing machine outlet running into there before I can comfortably sit. For an Oz-style stand up shower its hard to decide between standing hard up against the wall in the tiny lower section, or stepping up onto the slippery seat part. There is definitely an art to using this thing.

The bedrooms (two of them) are particularly un-spectacular, mostly because the furniture is old and past its use-by.

Its going to be fun. Once we get over this jet-lag.

On our first morning we got up at 2.30am - well, it was 7.30am back "home".

This morning, our second in Turkey, I got up at 4.30 ... doing better! Peter did too, but he's gone back to sleep, clever lad. But then he is sleeping on the downhill side of our (a bit broken!) bed. I think tonight it will have to be either the mattress on the floor, or open out the sofa in the lounge room.

Or maybe I'll just be tired enough to fall asleep standing up.