Easy when you know the language

We expected that the hotel would provide shampoo, toothpaste, soap - don't they all do that nowadays? - so we didn't pack any. As a result we were wandering around Selcuk on our first afternoon there looking for a supermarket so we could buy what we needed. The man in the Tourist Information office told us where there was a Tansaş store - a big supermarket that seems common in country towns.

But try as we might we couldn't find it. We thought we had found the right building, but it seemed to be just restaurants. We wandered off through the streets and found an electrical store - we wanted to buy an electrical power board anyway, so we dropped in. The proprietor didn't speak any English, but we managed the transaction with our few stuttering phrases in Turkish.

Then I scrambled together a few more words and asked him where the Tansas store was. He took us to the window and pointed down the road.

As we left the store Peter was chuckling about the fact the man had told us how easy it would be to find - "elementary" in fact. He was saying something about "Elementary, my dear Watson ..."

Of course, he had forgotten that "elli" means "fifty", it was about fifty metres to the supermarket ...