Turkish Delight

Welcome to the annual way-too-long and way-too-illustrated summer vacation post.

Before we dive into the pictures, there are just two things to keep in mind as we proceed.

The first is that this was the driest, warmest summer in Danmark since they began keeping records in the 1870s. We’ve had drought conditions that have killed our lawns, harried our farmers, and made Denmark one big fire hazard. We loved it. But I notice I have a tendency to emphasize meteorological matters in these posts–it’s the Nagan way, after all–and I’m going to try not to dwell too much on it this time. The pictures ought to be enough to convey that it’s sunny and hot; you don’t need me piling Pelion on Ossa by talking about it.

Secondly, I have a lot of projects I need to get to, so I’m determined to get this blog post out of the way tonight so I can focus on them starting tomorrow (which also happens to be the girls’ first day of school). I may therefore be more sparing than usual in my exposition. That much said, there are about 250 pictures queued up below, so if the maxim about words and pictures holds true then I’m giving you the equivalent of a quarter million words without even writing a sentence.

So: let’s go!

We wrapped things up in the last post a day or two after Molli Malou’s 14th birthday. That was the first week of July, and Trine and I were still working that week. Once Friday rolled around, however, we were finally all four on vacation.

While I threw myself into some ambitious yardwork, and the completion of my novel, Trine took the girls for a day-trip with Mormor up in Rørvig. Mormor put together the collage you see here. (Molli’s friend Freja tagged along.)

You may recall Maddie had written a song for Molli’s birthday: I finally got my hands on the original lyrics!

(“First verse: There is nothing better than the Danish summer / when the sun pours down from the sky / and when there comes a frightful mass of plums / and I’m sitting here and eating a Gajol [Danish candy]. Chorus: Summmerrr / summer and sun (4x). Second verse: There is nothing better than the Danish summer / this here really lovely warm / and there comes a frightful mass of plums / and I hear the noise of the water sprinkler. . . ” etc)

Translation may suffer from my impatience. Let’s move on.

Here are Maddie and her friend Josephine enjoying some treats courtesy of Mormor:

One of my yardwork projects was trimming down the walnut trees to the level you saw described in a “note to self” photo in a previous post. I got some help from Morfar and Maddie getting the walnuts off the felled branches.

I’d love to put the picture below side by side with the photo from the aforementioned post to see whether I cut them down to the level we were aiming for, but we’re all pleased with the results so it doesn’t really matter.

And man, were there a lot of (very unripe) walnuts from those felled branches!

We put about twenty of them to good use:

Come Christmas, that’s going to be some damn fine walnut snaps! (They’re quartered and immersed in cheap vodka.)

On our first full day of Staycation we celebrated Molli’s birthday.

(At the guest of honor’s request, those are age-dried beef patties and brioche buns.)

(That’s Freja beside Molli and yes, that’s her glass of wine.)

The girls like having to meet challenges to open their gifts — I blame Santa’s history of Christmas treasure hunts for that — so Molli had a number of soccer and handball oriented challenges to open her birthday presents. Here she is trying to score a goal against Morfar, who really made her sweat!

And look what came in the mail:

A Danish passport! For me!

Hey everyone, look at me, I’m an international man of mystery! I have two passports! Woo-hoo!

One staycation afternoon we wandered up to Hillerød for no real reason beyond getting out of Værløse and having some ice cream.

Meanwhile, I was making tremendous headway not just pruning but actually eliminating much of the forest that had been surrounding the house.

The light it let into the evening terrace was astonishing. The little dark hidey hole on the northwest corner of the property was transformed into a lovely, sunny nook.

The great weather had warmed Søndersø considerably, and the photo below is from day one of Maddie’s eventual 25-day streak of swimming every day. (Including seven days in Turkey.)

I love my evening terrace!

Some shots from day two of the streak:

I love the next three photos. I think you will too.

How about that middle one? Who knew Maddie could walk on water?!

Aunt Deb sent me the following photo that she stumbled across while helping Nana and Pop-Pop with their packing for Florida. It’s me at almost the exact same age as Molli:

And here’s a photo Mormor sent of Molli watching a puppet show in the royal garden (kongens have), which Mormor entitled “…and finally no longer ‘too old’ after all.” I cannot improve on that title.

Scenes from a summer walk with Didi — I’m still astonished sometimes that I live somewhere where walking the dog takes me across such scenery.

I can’t tell if that’s a cow or a goat in the picture above, but we had a very crazy experience on this walk with some goats we thought seemed friendly. They may have been, but they intimidated the hell out of us (and Didi — especially Didi) so we ended up having to hurry out of their pasture before something horrible happened. Funny story, remind us to share it with you sometime.

And speaking of Didi:

Why does she look so forlorn in the picture above?

Probably because she can’t figure out why I gave her a walk at four in the morning — and all of us except her were leaving the house at 4:30.

We were finally on our way to the airport! Staycation was over, and it was time for our Turkish adventure!

The flight was a little bumpy: the Taurus mountains apparently make that inevitable.

The Antalya airport had the most creative baggage claim feeder I’ve ever seen.

As warm as it had been in Denmark, Turkey had it beat. In spades. It was a long, hot bus ride from the airport to Waterworld.

Really long, really hot.

From Wikipedia: “The Turkish Riviera (Turkish: Türk Rivierası), also known popularly as the Turquoise Coast, is an area of southwest Turkey encompassing the provinces of Antalya and Muğla, and to a lesser extent Aydın, southern İzmir and western Mersin. The combination of a favorable climate, warm sea, mountainous scenery, fine beaches along more than a thousand kilometers of shoreline along the Aegean and Mediterranean waters, and abundant natural and archaeological points of interest makes this stretch of Turkey’s coastline a popular national and international tourist destination.”

Which is apparently why in southern Turkey you see things like this:

Here we are finally driving into Waterworld:

Now, rather than bore you (and waste valuable writing time) with a lengthy description of the resort’s layout, here’s their own map. Not sure it’ll play at this resolution, but I’ll give it a go. (Our rooms were in the “Mimosa” building — #18.)

I quoted from Wikipedia above deliberately. It’s something I can do here in Denmark. Or when I’m in the states. Or pretty much any other place I’ve been to.

Turkey’s different that way:

Notice they don’t say, “This fucking country has blocked Wikipedia because it said some critical things about its government.” No. They make it sound like it’s for your own protection. Because of course. (Google “Wikipedia in Turkey” for the whole story.)

Anyway, who cares about Wikipedia? We were finally on our dream vacation!

We approached that water cautiously, by the way, as Danes do: the air was so damn hot, and the pool water had been so damn hot, we were afraid the cold shock of seawater would be devastating. But there was no shock of seawater. It was almost as warm as the air. It was magnificent.

You can’t really tell, but the date in the photo below is “written” with flowers. It was the first “organic calendar” I’d ever seen:

I only left Waterworld three times during our stay. Trine left twice. The girls left once.

Here’s a shot of Trine in the town of Belek on our one journey alone together into town.

(It was a quick trip to get new bathing suits for Maddie and me, and to get some lira from an ATM.)

Now we’re back at Waterworld:

This is how Molli spent most of her time: working on her tan (and scowling at Daddy).

Here’s how Maddie spent most of her time: being exuberant in any one of the eleven pools available to us.

The photo above, by the way, needs to be set side by side with a photo Jørgen took of Trine when she was just a little older than Maddie is here. They’re almost identical.

Here’s the view out the terrace of Trine’s and my room:

Because I have no video for you (yet), you cannot possibly realize how loud the heat of Belek was. When we were in southern France in 2016, we were driving with the windows down and one of us said, “My god, you can actually hear how hot it is!” And in fact that’s true: cicadas and crickets can be used to calculate the temperature.

Waterworld was swarming with cicadas, and their chirping was so loud we often had to raise our voices to hold simple conversations in areas with a lot of trees.

And usually the cicadas remained up in the trees, but now and then you came across one here and there:

Here’s a hot of the vegetarian booth at the Magico buffet:

(I kid, I kid.)

As usual, there aren’t many pictures of Trine and me together, so I have to milk the few I have. Here are two Molli took at one of our dinners, one with flash and one without. (Unfortunately the flash pic makes it look like I have a tanline below my nose. I do not have a tanline beneath my nose.)

Waterworld was all-inclusive, but there were some little amusements and extras that cost extra. The girls were particularly in love with the bungee jumping concession, which cost 25 lira (or 5 euros, or 5½ bucks — our timing was bad, since the lira totally crashed the week after we got home).

We spent every night at the outdoor nightclub, and the girls loved it.

Right beside our building was “Basta Pasta,” a little restaurant that served pasta lunches. We loved it.

The photo below was taken early in our trip. I saw that hammock and thought: “Oh, man, when I need some time to myself to unwind, I hope that hammock in this isolated spot on top of a hill in the middle of the resort is available!”

But the remarkable thing is, for one whole week I never needed time by myself to unwind. That’s a personal best.

Here are some shots of the lone family outing of the whole trip: our excursion to the Belek Bazaar, which is held every Saturday.

It was a little over 39 degrees Celsius — about 103 Fahrenheit.

The bazaar was just an endless series of booths selling cheap crap under sheets drawn across the streets of Belek to provide shade. They were inadequate: we were boiling.

I include the picture above because as the girls are inspecting those bathing suits (trying to find a nice one for Maddie, since we hadn’t bought one on our previous trip into town), we’re all speaking Danish and talking about what cheap shit everything is. Billigt lort. We used that phrase repeatedly. It’s literally Danish for “cheap shit.” Eventually we bought Maddie a cheap shit bathing suit, and she acknowledged that it was cheap shit that would probably not outlast the vacatioon, and as we took our leave of the stall the merchant said to us, in pretty clear Danish, “Ses næste gang.”

That means, “See ya next time.”

Oops.

I couldn’t pick which of the following pictures to keep, then I remembered there’s no per-picture cost to worry about. So I include the whole series, which, taken together, is kind of fun.

Sorry, I have no idea what got their attention. I really don’t.

Doesn’t it look like the girls (lower left) are having fun at the nightclub?

If you said yes, you were wrong. Because they’re only happy in the photo below:

And look! Another picture of me! Dancing with Maddie!

Earlier you saw a shot looking out from our terrace. Here’s a shot from the “out” looking in (we’re the third room in on the ground floor).

And here’s a shot of the atrium off of which the girls’ room was situated:

Besides the outdoor nightclub there was also an ampitheatre. One night there was a show there, and the theme was “Route 66.”

It may look like total engagement in the photo above: it’s actually stupefaction. There were one or two solid performers in the cast of the musical, but most of it was so awful that the highlight of the whole performance was when two unattended kids wandered up to the lip of the stage.

Back to the bungee:

…and back to the nightclub.

The beach was really fantastic.

As were the grounds, even early in the morning.

I have to admit the trip did nothing to make me a convert to Turkish cuisine, but I did become a big fan of something called Gozeleme.

It’s basically a square Turkish tortilla that gets filled with cheese and spinach and folded over.

On Waterworld’s big “Turkish night,” a woman sat making them by hand in the middle of the big buffet dining area.

Maddie: “Daddy, take a picture of me doing this.”

Me: “Okay.”

Photo: Maddie doing “this.” (I think she’d done a cartwheel off the ground into the pool.)

Here’s Maddie with Josephine, a Danish girl she befriended. (There were not many Danes at Waterworld, and no Americans at all. It was about 80% Germans and Russians, 10% Turks, and then a big mix of mostly Europeans for the last 10%.)

The third trip outside of Waterworld was one I had to take by myself. I couldn’t interest anyone else in taking a little day trip to nearby Aspendos, the site of ancient Roman ruins, but based on a recommendation from John McConnico I was determined to see it.

The following screenshot from my phone was taken about halfway through my 45 minute taxi ride there:

…but the real fun had happened about a third of the way through the trip. I’ll paste in the account I wrote to a friend:

On the way there, the taxi driver had taken a left off the highway into some weird little side street well short of our destination.

I’d been using Google Maps and could see we were only about a third of the way to Aspendos.

The cabbie drove us around a few dusty streets and then under the portico of a big white building.

I glanced out at the glass doors opening into the building; above them was lettered, in English, the word: EMERGENCY.

I thought: oh, poor guy, he probably has some family member in the hospital and just wants to check on them or something.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

I expected him to get out.

He didn’t move.

“Hospital,” he said. “Reception.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay, I wait here.”

“You wait here?” I asked. “Not go in?”

He seemed confused.

“You want hospital, reception,” he said. “ Is here.”

“Me? No hospital. I want go Aspendos,” I said. “Aspendos. Big theatre. Ruins.”

“Ah!” he said, laughing, “Aspendos! I thought you say, Aspendos.”

He pulled out of the hospital and we resumed our way north.

…and half an hour later, there we were:

The front of the theatre wasn’t actually that impressive:

But inside…!

(Yeah, traveling solo you have to do selfies or no one will ever believe you were actually there.)

To save time on exposition, I’ll let the ruin speak for itself.

In fact, let all of “Pamphylia” speak for itself:

If you know how to read a map, you can see (as I did) that the theatre was just one minor feature of a whole huge set of ruins. I was determined to see them all. That it was close to 40 degrees celsius, and that the journey obviously involved hiking up a hilly trail, did not daunt me.

That’s the back of the ampitheatre. As you can see, it was built into the back of a hill. A hill that went much further up. Much further up. But hey, who doesn’t want a little hike up a little hill in a shadeless 40-degrees?

This smiling fellow is all in!

…although the smile is fading as the heat begins to get to him…

…but he reaches his destination and is awed. Truly awed. The ruins of an 1800-year-old acropolis, and he’s got it all to himself!

You can’t see the heat, but you can damn sure see the growing sweat stain….

Yeah, I’m smiling, but I’m pretty sure this was about the time I realized I was going to die of dehydration in the middle of some ancient Roman ruins in the middle of southern Turkey.

That’s a hole in the ground. I don’t know why it’s there: it was just one of many ways, I thought at the time, that Turkey had line up to try and kill me. If the sun failed. And the snakes (one of which I stepped on, unless that was a scorpion) failed.

On the other hand, at least Turkey did try and protect me from the really big holes:

Even 1800 years ago they had water runoffs in their paved streets.

Awe-inspiring, really, if you can around the fact that you’re probably going to die there:

In any event, I did in fact survive, and was grateful to return to a place called Waterworld.

I haven’t even mentioned the Aquapark: it was the whole reason we’d chosen Waterworld out of all the other resorts. We’re a watery family, and we love us some waterparking.