Step Into the Light

Day 2 in Turkeyland began with a trip to the ‘beach’. There was no sand, which I can’t say is an entirely bad thing. I never enjoyed coming home after a trip to Gunnamata and dumping 3 kilos of sand out of my undies and sweeping the sand dunes out of my car. There were also no sharks, stingrays, rip tides, stonefish, poison cone shells or irukandji jellyfish. None of that beachy stuff, just sunbeds and umbrellas and a cute cafe owner who scurries around to serve you chips and beer while you’re sunbaking. Gunnamatta can kiss my Mediterranean suntanned ass, thank you.

Better than Mornington

Once we’d roasted ourselves to perfection (apologies to 50 year old Inga – I know you’re going to wind up wrinkled and melanoma riddled, but bugger it, this mocha skin is worth it!), we went in search of food and found ourselves at the Bay Bay Cafe Bar.

It's pronounced 'bye bye'

Let me say this about Melbourne: yes, there is an extraordinary range of bars, clubs, cafes and restaurants in Melbourne. It’s our fair city’s drawcard. There’s something for everyone. Chinese, Japanese, cosy, pumping, jumping, bohemian, singles, swingers, younger, older, decrepit – there’s something for every taste and budget. However, if your something is nice ambience, nice decor and great hospitality, expect to pay an arm and a leg for it. Heaven help you if you want a smile as well. For my entire stay in Kaş, I didn’t walk into a single place that wasn’t oozing with atmosphere, friendliness and amazing customer service – regardless of menu prices. Bay Bay is no exception; it consists of three landscaped levels built into a hill overlooking the marina. Taking the lushness of my surroundings into account, I scanned the menu with my Melbourne brain – pizza toast, 5 Turkish lira. In a place like this, at that price, it must be miniscule, therefore I’ll order two of them. Mistake. Pizza toast in Turkish apparently means massive toasted sandwich the size of my head, overflowing with every kind of smoked meat and grilled vegetable imaginable. I ended up feeding most of them to some random kitties that clearly sensed my distress.

Opportunistic scavengers

(Apologies in advance for any neck problems, I really don't know how to turn photos around on here)

Feeling a tad bloated, Fi, Mandy and I set off for walkies up the hill. Mandy and I are both suckers for fuzzy creatures, so when we found a herd of cats hanging out under a picnic table we leapt in cooing and stroking - scabies, rabies and fleas notwithstanding. Shortly a very fat, sweaty man came jiggling up to us. “Hello ladies! You like cats, yes? This my cats!” He then grabbed Fi’s wrist and fastened a bracelet to it. “This help feed cat – I look after, you give me ten Turkish lira, I feed this cats!” Before we knew what had happened, we each had a bracelet around our wrist and found ourselves relieved of 10 lira. Luckily Mandy was on the ball:

“This money goes towards feeding these cats, is that right?”

“Yes, yes! See, I give them food, water, they happy cat!” (they did have food and water, and looked inarguably content)

“And you also de-sex them, so they’re not producing more strays?”

“Yes, yes! Why not!” (clearly skirting the language barrier)

“No, do you use the money to have them DE-SEXED?” (here Mandy performed an amazing mime of a cat getting its bits chopped off)

“Ah, of course! No kittens!”

At which point one of the ginger cats turned around to display a stunning set of feline testicles. The Cat Man was unperturbed:

“No no no, I only do lady cats!”

Mandy rolled her eyes and we all stormed up the road. Examining the bracelets later, we realised they were actually quite pretty and decided not to return in the morning to thrash Cat Man into liquid.   

It’s been precisely a month since I came back from Turkey, and the memories are fading distressingly fast. Somewhat like my ability to demolish an entire box of Whitman’s Samplers without it going straight to my thighs. Damn you, disappearing youth. Damn you to hell.

Anyway, Day 1 in Turkeyland began with an incessant yodelling at 5.30am. Bloody muslims. Don’t get me wrong, I believe people should be allowed to worship in whatever fashion and to whichever spiritual entity they please - so long as it doesn’t wake me at some ungodly hour when I’m already so confused, jetlagged and hungry that I think I’m a hummingbird. Fortunately my father had the presence of mind to text me shortly afterwards with “TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION YOURE IN TURKEY” (sure, he can fly a plane, build a house and design a hydro-electric generator, but he’s only capable of texting in capital letters. FFS.) After yelling some rather culturally insensitive abuse at the mosque next door, I dragged myself up to the terrace for a buffet breakfast.

Stupid loud worship rah

Terrace overlooking Mediterranean

‘Breakfast’ was fruit, cheese, olives, tomato, cucumber, boiled eggs, yoghurt, honeycomb and big hunks of bread. Now I like most of these items, just usually not prior to 10am and certainly not mixed together in one meal. Neither my brain nor my stomach could really fathom any sort of game plan for attacking the buffet, so I went back to my room and ate the Snakatas I’d smuggled in for emergencies.

A bit later on, two of the other five ‘Budgies’ arrived. We called ourselves Budgies because about three days into our stay someone referred to us as baçi, and explained it means ‘sister’ in the colloquial sense. It’s pronounced somewhat like budgie, so we adopted it and used it ad hoc, ad nauseum and ad misericordiam. We were overjoyed when we found out the Turkish for ‘five’ is beş, prounounced “besh”. Five Sistas = Beş Baçi’s...which sounds like Best Buddies! Check us out with our totally awesome multilingual play on words! Don’t worry, none of the Turks thought it was particularly spectacular either.

So Fi, Mandy and I hit the town. Kaş is a gorgeous little cobblestoned village – bear in mind I’ve never been anywhere near the European continent before, so I was fairly gobsmacked by the culture, the cute little houses and the general atmosphere. Inevitably, we wound up in a rug shop, owned by a bizarre fellow called Shonel – “Is like Chanel, but not Number 5 ok? Hahaha!” He completely fell in love with Fi, and proceeded to dress her up like a Turkish bride.

Uneasy Fi

 We got his entire life story, which included his short stint in Melbourne after marrying an Aussie girl purely for a visa. He gave us apple tea, chatted with us for a good hour, and became inordinately excited when we told him we had two more friends joining us later in the week, one of whom is blonde. It was immensely surreal for me, and it was the first time a sleazy wanker has filled me with such goodwill.

Feeling a bit hungry after the rug shop experience, we wandered into a quiet restaurant after the chef beckoned us in with a smile and some garbled English. This turned out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. Not only was the food brilliant and the chef gorgeous, they served us several dishes on the house. (Partly because Fi ordered dolmades, and landed us with domates instead – that is, an entire platter of sliced tomato. Travel tip: if you’re ever in Turkey wanting dolmades, ask for dolma). This was also where I discovered helva – a dessert which is basically just raw cookie dough. I must have visibly peed myself, because every time we returned the chef brought us several kilos to devour. The swooning, hugging and cleavage probably encouraged him too.

God I miss the days when I had time to blog at work. Or at home. Or even just in my head. Ever feel like somebody’s just pressed a NOS button in your brain and you’re rocketing through each day in a whorl of blue flame, burning rubber and bad movie cliches? Then you blow the welds on your intake manifold, fry your piston rings and realise you’ve seen Fast and the Furious waaaaay too many times. Mmm, Vin Diesel in an RX7.    

Anyway, today I snuck out of work early and skipped the gym in order to cook myself a proper meal and sit down and do sweet, sweeeet FA. Check me out with my fully mad culinary skilllz:

Fully mad skillet

That’s mushrooms, prawns, chilli, garlic, bok choy, corn and some other random vegetation.    

Please don’t tell my mother or my best mate that I can cook. For years, both of these wonderful ladies have taken every opportunity to cook me the most delicious, nourishing meals in the belief that I’m on the verge of dying from beriberi. Which I probably am, but the culprit is bone laziness rather than any real deficiency in the kitchen. I hate cooking from scratch, but sometimes the occasion calls for it – like when you’ve had a f***er of a week and need some antioxidants. But more on that another time.

Well I’m back from Turkeyland.

The stay was amaaaaaaazing, I can’t rave enough about how amaaaaaaazing Turkey is. There just aren’t enough aaaaa’s on my keyboard. But more on that later.

The actual travel part, however, was  f***ing awful. Excruciating. People who carry on about how much they love to travel are FRICKEN LUNATICS. It was 36 hours from Melbourne airport to the hotel in Turkey, and in that period I went from homicidal to suicidal to xenocidal about thirty times over.

The first mistake I made was straightening my hair. My curly haired sistas out there will understand precisely why I did this prior to a long haul flight, but apparently airport security do not. I was eyed up and down and greeted with “new hairstlyle?” at check-in, at the international terminal entry, at immigration, and finally as I boarded the bloody plane itself. No, my hair is not curly like my passport photo - get over it, shut the hell up and let me on the damn plane. Once I and my aberrant hair had boarded, I discovered I had the middle seat in a middle row. Joy. Eight hours to Kuala Lumpur with two people on either side of me and not a window in sight. I was scared to drink anything for eight hours in case it made me want to pee, and subsequently I had a stonking dehydration headache by the time I got to KL. With another 4 hours to kill before the next flight, I drank a litre of water, downed four Panadol, checked my ticket for my boarding gate number, found the boarding gate, then curled up in a nearby corner like a derelict and managed to nap for all of 15 minutes. I’m not sure what I did for the next 3 hours, but I assume I blacked out from chronic crankiness. About 10 minutes before departure time I realised no one was congregating near the departure gate. Hmm. I wandered over to the info monitor and found the departure gate had changed. To a different building. SHIT. I found a map and located the new departure gate, which had a cute little train icon next to it. Double shit. I bolted halfway through the building, found the ‘Air Train’, leapt on board and hurtled off again at what I hoped was the right stop. I threw my passport at the gate security guard, who gave me a cute smile and said “oh, new hair style?” - whereupon I clobbered him into a pulpy, oozing mess with my hand luggage. Safely on the plane, I found a Malaysian woman sitting in my window seat. “Sorry, I think you’re in my seat” I said. She feigned surprise. “Oh I’m sorry, I just wanted to sit next to my son”, and she gestured to a glowering, hirsute, obese slab of teenage angst slumped next to her. “But you can sit next to my daughter!” The said daughter smiled brightly and pointed to the aisle seat next to her. I looked at hairy-fat-angry-boy, looked at the aisle seat, thought about peeing anytime I wanted, then took the aisle seat. KL to Dubai was spectacularly uneventful due to the complete lack of in flight entertainment, unless you count the upholstery. Each seat was wrapped in what looked like a sarong, each seat in a different colour, with no discernible pattern. I felt like they should’ve been handing out joints instead of peanuts.

We had a brief stop in Dubai, but no one appeared to have forewarned Dubai. It was about 2.00am and everyone piled off the plane, only to find the gates were shut.  You’ve all heard that joke about the blonde getting stuck on an escalator – well I actually saw it happen in Dubai. Picture an entire Airbus A330 worth of people unloading themselves onto an escalator, only to find the people in front of them aren’t going anywhere...the whole crowd had to walk backwards while the escalator kept running underneath them. I was able to have a smug chuckle, because I’m one of those people who take the stairs whenever they’re available. Of course I was stuck too, but at least I didn’t have to walk backwards on the spot like a twit. Eventually, a pretty young thing in an official looking outfit came trotting into the crowd. At least, she was a pretty young thing until she opened her mouth, after which I realised she was a drill sergeant. “Du-BAI!!” she hollered, “Everyone leaving at Du-BAI! Please step forward! Passengers for Istanbul, step BACK! BAACK! Du-BAI, FORWARD! FORWAAARD!” About ten passengers shuffled meekly forward, while she glared at the rest of us like we were communists. “Anyone else for Du-BAI?” she roared. No one moved a muscle, whereupon her shoulders slumped and she gazed around with hurt amazement “but, but...why not?”

After landing at Istanbul, I had a three hour layover until my domestic Turkish Airlines flight. I bought something which I thought was chocolate, but it turned out to be figs. I couldn’t understand a single thing anyone said, even when it was in English. The paper towel holders in the toilet were motion activated, which took me an inordinately long time to figure out. I glared at everything that moved, and even stuff that didn’t.

The hour flight from Istanbul to Antalya was brightened considerably by the best tzaziki I’ve ever eaten. Also there was an elderly Muslim man next to me who couldn’t figure out how to do up his seat belt, so I fastened it for him, all the while expecting him to suddenly declare me a harlot and stone me to death (yes, like most Australians I’m completely ignorant about Muslim culture). Once in Antalya, I found a huge hairy Turk in a pink shirt holding a sign saying ‘Hello, Inga!”. He introduced himself as Mustafa, which appeared to be the entire extent of his English. Nonetheless, we had several Turglish conversations on the three hour drive to Kaş – at no point were we discussing the same thing, but it mattered not. Mustafa appeared to be a graduate of Snoop Dogg’s ‘drive it like it’s hot’ school – I’ve never experienced so much dodging, weaving, tailgating, and blatant disrespect for road markings and traffic lights. In Australia, red means stop. In Turkey, it means stop if you feel like it. The scenery from Antalya to Kaş is breathtaking; pointed rocky peaks lurching straight out of the ocean, and the highway lacing itself through them, stitching tunnels and then shouldering back onto the glittering blue sea. The majesty was marginally diminished by Mustafa’s hammering the Renault at 140km/hr round the bends, overtaking on blind corners and generally doing his best to kill the Aussie tourist. Fortunately he lost that little game, and I ended up safe, sound and slightly delirious at the hotel around 4.30pm – at which point I tucked myself into bed, pulled the cover up over my head and vowed never to leave Australia ever, EVER again.   

Metaphorical Inga

This is me today.

I’m so yayful I had to jump on the treadmill for an hour to squash a demonic urge to bounce around the house to Guy Sebastian’s new song. Shudder.

So, my raison d’yây?  

Yay #1 – In 3 sleeps I’ll be on a big scary plane on my way to sunny, happy Turkey. Work has been so shitty this week that against all my usual instincts, I’m actually embracing the concept of flying halfway around the world to wreak havoc in a conservative Muslim republic. It’s going to be balmy, culturally rich, and crawling with hordes of greased up Mediterranean spunks that totally dig my Aussie accent.

Yay #2 – I forgot I lodged an expense claim at work a couple of weeks ago, and suddenly found another $1500 in my account today. Fricken YAY.

Yay #3 – I’m going speed dating tomorrow night (italics added to highlight velocity), with a couple of girlfriends. I haven’t dated in about 7 months, as I’ve been going through a mild men-are-superfluous-to-my-existence-but-I’m-not-a-leso phase which appears to be lasting most of my adult life. However, with this trip to Turkey and the aforementioned greasy hordes, I’ve decided it’s time get back on the wagon. Also, I’m not getting any younger and my fabulous rack is starting to wilt. So tomorrow, at some trendy bar in the city, I’ll meet twelve men aged 24 – 32 from which to choose the next dickhead to add to Inga’s Almanac of Knobjockeys.

Yay #4 – I’ll be coming straight back from holidays and headfirst into my cousin’s Hen’s Night. It will involve a river cruise, limitless champagne, flight attendant outfits, a limo and strippers. Yep, I’m definitely back on the wagon.        

In the spirit of Father’s Day, I’m hereby re-hashing a blog from a few years back in a feeble attempt to express my appreciation for the inimitable, effervescent, and downright funky specimen of humanity that is My Old Man.  

Plus I’m going out for sushi and don’t have time to knock up anything new and poignant. Heh.

So, here’s a mere fraction of the wisdom Dad’s imparted to me over the years. Whatever dilemmas you currently face, I have no doubt you’ll find a cogent solution below:      

Biology
The bacteria which causes pulpy kidney in sheep is clostridium welchii type D. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve been thankful to know that.

Crime Scene Investigation

The ‘arrows’ in tractor tyre prints point the opposite direction to which the tractor was travelling when it made the prints. Unless, of course, the tractor was reversing at the time.

General knowledge
Tractor tyres are full of water. (Dad knows lots about tractors.)

Darwinism
Long toes are evolutionally preferable to short toes as they grip the planet to better effect, thus preventing one from being hurled off into space. Presumably, the dinosaurs had an insufficient toe-length to height ratio.

Road Safety
Keeping your eye on the white line on the edge of the road will stop you being blinded by oncoming headlights when driving at night.

Medicine
A quiet rum and coke on the beach will cure anything that ails you except the common cold, which can be cured with a handful of zinc tablets.

Self Improvement
You’re never too old to change your eating habits, to learn to fly a Boeing 747 or to watch Rage. However, you can be too old to tolerate idiots, children, tourists, doctors, neighbours, council workers, bad movies and trips interstate.

Life Coaching

Take responsibility for your mistakes. To a small degree, this encompasses shortcomings in one’s own offspring. A very, very small degree. Offspring may not claim alcoholism, drug abuse or mathematical incompetence as a genetic predisposition.

Cars
Never buy a Land Rover.

Repairs & maintenance
If it can’t be mended with Araldite or fish oil, it’s probably time to get rid of it. This includes one’s own anatomy.

State Law
The classification ‘protected species’ becomes null and void the instant said species ventures uninvited into a human dwelling.

Feminism
Generally, women fall into two categories: “She’d be no bloody good on a farm” or “Geez, she’d be good on a farm”. This goes a long way to explaining my skewed views about femininity.

Happy Father’s Day y’all!

In two weeks I shall be touching down in Antalya, Turkey, for a week or so of frolicsome feminine fun. I’m just about organised – all I have left is to investigate what foodstuffs I’m allowed to bring into the country as sustenance for when I spend the first 24 hours locked in my hotel room huddled in terror under the bed. I’m still not thrilled about this ‘foreign country’ concept, but I expect I’ll have a different outlook when I get back. And I have travel insurance, so when the drug lords abduct me and infect me with chlamydia at least I won’t be stung for the hospital fees.

To be honest I’m not as cripplingly anxious about the whole endeavour as I was a few weeks ago. Because, as so frequently happens when I start worrying about stupid things, fate stepped in and gave me something proper to fret about.

In this case, it’s moving to Western Australia.

I’ll be leaving my beloved Melbourne to start a new life and new job in the new year. It will mean more money and better weather, but also entails uprooting myself from the rather comfortable existence eight years as a Victorian has afforded me. Not to mention hauling myself, all my possessions and two cats 2700 kilometres down the road. For those of you playing at home, allow me to illustrate cartographically:  

Cartographic_genius

Now if that’s not cause for concern then I''m not bloody well sure what is.    

I have a beautiful circle of girlfriends from high school with whom I’ve been sporadically exchanging snail mail for the last decade. I have a box full of fridge magnets, random newspaper clippings and a fairly unambiguous postcard with “Never sleep with workmates” printed 17 times on its reverse (the author later went on to have children with said workmate, so perhaps her opinion has changed somewhat). I have 10 years worth of photos, houseplans of rented apartments, and of course rants about Bloody Useless Men. Sometimes when I find myself wondering what the hell I've done with my life, it's comforting to read over some old letters and remind myself I'm no longer earning $200 a fortnight, chasing stupid-ass 20 year olds and and starting every sentence with 'like, OMG!'    

My parents are also wont to send some rather esoteric crap, and the other day I unearthed this epistle from circa 2004:   

Dear Globet,

Here comes your little fishy. It’s a bit dirty. It’s been sitting outside drying for ages after you left it. I brought it in and it dried out some more. Now it is small enough to put in an envelope so here it is.

~Love Mum~

 Like omg, WTF.

Why wasn't this as hilarious 20 years ago?

...apparently nobody bothered to tell me that Turkey is a Muslim country and I’m neither supposed to smile at unfamiliar men nor flash inappropriate décolletage.

Bah.

What’s the point of going to a foreign country if I can’t belt around the Mediterranean in my nekkids?