I thought it was amusing, and it certainly shut him up, when I gave him a serious ‘FD Stare’ with added double-handed ’bird’ gestures. It has since been pointed out to me that there is more than an even chance of them being sat in the same seats on the return flight. That being the case I will deal with any conflict in the same robust way I intervened to stop the behaviour that was causing so much stress to my 4 travelling companions, namely stick the Foo Fighters on loud on the iPhone, and pretend to be asleep ! Works every time !

The day had gone pretty much to script, with talk of saving money, not drinking, not splashing out on duty-free etc, and getting the kids maybe some fruit and bottles of water etc. for the journey. We touched down in Bodrum at 1.45 am, laden with scent, cigarettes for Mrs.FD, a tad blurry on account of the Stella /JD combo, and with the kids wide-eyed on account of the industrial amounts of sugar they had consumed over the past 6 hours. The travel diet came back to haunt us around 15 kms before the end of our bleary eyed transfer, with a minibus full of strangers, as the youngest tipped the contents of the duty-free carrier bag onto the floor, and then tipped the contents of her stomach into the bag. I leapt into action with a fluent Turkish instruction to the driver, ‘We need to stop !’ ( it was more slow motion English, than fluent Turkish, but you get the drift). And so after a 5 minute stumble in the darkness of a Turkish wood, we resumed our journey with me holding a knotted carrier bag at arm’s length in the front seat, and the driver, still smiling politely, holding his head out of the window on account of the strange smell !

We are here now though! We have caught up with all our Turkish friends, Berrin, Nisam, Enver, Dennis, Sinam, and Yilmaz, all of whom you will hopefully meet over the coming days. Unless of course no-one is reading this, in which case, you wont!

Keep checking @Floydsdad on Twitter, and check out the Floydsdad page on Facebook, if for no other reason than it will really, really annoy the kids !

Wednesday 27th July

Sorry about the delay updating this page, we have had a relatively quiet couple of ‘pool days’ here. We will be venturing out though so not to worry.

I took a stroll into Didim town the other day which twitter watchers will be aware of. It hit a ridiculous 42F whilst I was out and about, and so it won’t be something I repeat in a hurry. I must do a bit of digging into Kemel Ataturk, the ‘father’ of modern Turkey. His picture is everywhere, and you can’t go more than a minute without seeing something named after him, so he clearly had the marketing thing sorted.

Today was the first morning I didn’t hear the 5 am call to prayer from the mosque in town. There is probably a good reason why this was the case, and it probably involves a tad too much Efes!  As I sit hear typing, the speakers have just cranked into life and a steady trickle of Turkish chaps have started to make their way into town to pray.

We had a nice little roof top BBQ the other evening, with a platter of ‘Tavuk Shish’,(grilled chicken kebabs) some flatbreads, and fresh salad. The quality of the food here is really top drawer, the tomatoes especially, they are generally huge, and the flesh is almost like water melon. In terms of food, I have played it safe so far with Kuzu Pirzola,(lamb chops) and a cracking grilled Mackerel fillet at Ikbal’s on the sea front. The safe option will be out of the window over the next couple of days as Nizam has kindly offered to take me to the Corbalar Salonu just up the road.

It’s a restaurant which is open 24hrs a day, and specialises in soup, which the guys seem to love. So I can chose between ’Iskember’ (tripe) or ’Beyin’(sheeps brain) … the things I agree to when I have a beer in hand !  In the spirit of interaction, I will let you decide, I will pop a poll on the facebook page, or you can leave a comment here, and whichever gets the most votes will be my soup of choice !  My collection of flyers and menus is growing which will form the backbone of the first blog post I do when I get home.

As predicted earlier, the family from hell made an appearance last night, we heard them coming before we saw them, and I was right, they exist in a ‘bubble’ of chaos which must just move around with them wherever they go ! Thankfully I hadn’t reach the stage where I want to be everyones friend, and so didn’t invite them round to tea. They said ‘Hi’ as they battled past us, the youngest two were still ripping chunks out of each other, and getting a crack off dad for their troubles.

We are eating at ‘Kenny’s’ tonight, I am sure he isn’t really called Kenny, but the food is superb, and he is a nice chap.  I am pretty sure the 5 bay boat trip is coming up soon which will be nice, and there is talk of Aqua Parks and Horse riding,(both thing which have the propensity to cause pain to my backside, so I will try and avoid both!)

I will check in again in a day or so. Get voting on the soup !

Saturday 30th July.

Hello again from an increasingly hot Turkey. We have been up at around a steady 40c now for the last few days, and I am now starting to resemble something from a nuclear incident.

In the time we have been apart, we essentially spent our days around the pool, and ventured out for meals in the late evening. With the exception of last night, which as those of you who were kind enough to vote on the issue know, was a journey into the ‘food unknown’.

I have developed a habit which the girls find most annoying, namely I am now constantly on the look out for material for the first ‘proper’ blog post I will write when I get home. Essentially it involves taking pictures of menus, and collecting flyers with the most outlandish translations to English you can imagine, but I’ll leave that for later.

Rather than bore you with mundane chat about ‘bog standard general fayre’, I will bore you with last nights trip instead. My good friend Nizam, who we have known for 3 years now has been asking me for ages to join him at the ‘Alintdag 24 hr Corbalar Salonu’ for a traditional Turkish meal, and as you probably know, last night was the night. I behaved impecably right up to the departure time of  2am, (which rapidly moved towards 3am due to stragglers at the bar, and the fact that I was presented with what seemed like a Magnum of Raki !)

It had already been decided by you good people, that I was to feast on a bowl of Sheep’s Brain Soup, and you can imagine the tangiable sense of dissapointment when I was told the last of it had just been served. I needn’t have feared, as Nizam soon leapt in with the alternative ‘Boiled Sheeps Head and Trotters’, or as the menu had it ‘Speeps Head and Troiters’(it mattered not!). Within a short time our food arrived and I have to say it was top drawer. A spicy Lamachun, which is a really thin crispy pizza with ground lamb, chillies and parsley; a plate of ridiculously hot ‘mixed chilli salad’, some local bread, and of course our soup.

I had no problem with the Lamachun, I knew they were always superb, the first person to start selling those in the U.K. as late night fast food will make millions. (which will of course now be sombody other than me !). I also knew, just by looking at the tears in Nizam’s eyes that the chilli salad would beat me, and it did,(I know I am a lightweight!).

And so onto the soup. I had a plan in my head just to swallow any ‘bits’ whole and pray I didn’t show myself up by regurgitating everything onto the table. The soup was so hot however, that it was impossible to do that so I had to eat it ‘conventionally’. It was, I have to say superb!  The broth was light, yet creamy and superbly flavoured, with a swirl of Paprika infused olive oil on the surface. The chef explained (via Nizam) that the whole head had been slow cooked with the ‘troiters’ and then finely chopped. That explained the fact that in the mix were pieces of what was clearly brain, cheek, maybe even a hint of eye, ( I turned slightly in my chair at that point in case a hasty exit was required, but it wasn’t).

They go mad for the soups out here, the menu had a good half a dozen varieties, and everyone who came in was ordering it. It was a bizzare experience, the place was packed when we left at 4.20am, and Nizam explained that the family that run the place work 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, so it never closes. The whole thing came to 27 Lira, which at the minute is a touch under £9 so even I didn’t have an issue paying for that ! One more gargantuan glass of Raki later, courtesy of the owners son, and we, (well, I) swayed happily in the cool early morning breeze back to the flat. I climed into bed just as the first light peeped over the mountains, and the Mosque in town cranked into life. I have if you ever come to Turkey you have to try this sort of thing. If you ever come to Altinkum, you simply have to go to the ‘Alitindag’, (mainly because there isn’t anywhere else open !) and if you do, and you can explain what ‘Advent Bingo’ is in Turkish, you are better than me !

See you soon !

Sunday 31st July.

I have to say I was a little sceptical when I was told of our plans for today. Last week, all the girls went with our chum Bernice and her family to visit the evening market at Maveshir, which is about 30 minutes away by Dolmus. They came back with tales of having seen the most spectacular sunset. I can assure you, that Mrs FD is not one for waxing lyrical about anyhting other than Peter Andre and any other celebrity chaff, so for her to be so taken by what she had seen, I figured it must be worth a look.

Now, if you have never been on a Dolmus before, you have been missing a treat. There is a fleet of them trawling round on set routes, and the sole aim of the driver, aided by his young conductor, is to get as many people as possible on board, to maximise their takings. They have, (I know because I have counted), 18 seats on board. As we travelled to Maveshir on a hot sticky late afternoon, ours had at one point, (and again, I counted) 31 people on board, with the young conductor spreading himself across the open doorway, to hold people in.

The driver will beep the horn on average every 15 seconds. They beep at every pedestrian they pass, to see if they want a lift. They beep at people walking in the opposite direction to see if they can change their mind about where they are going. They beep at cars to let them know they have seen them and will give way. They beep to say they have seen them and won’t give way. They beep randomly in case there is a car which they haven’t seen. They beep to join a roundabout in an orderly fashion, and in the case of our driver, they beep to justify the fact that we have just carved up 3 lanes of traffic, popped a red light and driven the wrong side of a set of roadworks to beat another car to that roundabout!

Having recovered from the journey, we began by taking a stroll around Maveshir Market. As much as I love any food market, this was a little bit of a let down, as pretty much every stall was selling the same selection of fruit, veg, nuts and spices. Having said that, the produce was all grown within a mile or so of the market, and the quality was superb. I know it has been said by many others, but there are none of the EU approved ‘standard size’ tomatoes and ‘uniformly shaped’ peppers. Instead you have a selection of twisted, gnarled and mis-shaped produce, all of which tastes sublime.

After sampling the vendors nuts,(sorry, couldn’t resist it!) we made our way to the seafront cafe, where the locals were all tucking into ‘Gozelme,’ which are like savoury pancakes stuffed with cheese, spinach or meat, and then folded over and cooked until they balloon up like pillows. Mrs FD said we had to be seated by half past 6, which we duly were, and just as well as within 15 minutes the whole place was packed, I would guess over 100 people, mainly Turks, taking their seats for the sunset.  I have to say the location was perfect, we had a table within 5 metres of the sea, overlooking the horseshoe bay, with just a few small fishing boats, bobbing on the evening waves. The only thing that was pretty ordinary, was the sunset itself. It looked, well like a sunset.

 

I didn’t want to dampen the enthusiasm of the girls who were insisting that this was going to be spectacular, but it was difficult as I had chosen completely the wrong dish for the location. Like every coastal area in the region there is a constant, at times brisk breeze. This is great if you want to keep cool, but if you order ‘Iskember’ which is shredded lamb topped with a tomato sauce and fresh yoghurt, it will blow your meal into a cold slop quite quickly. But then something strange began to happen in the sky. The sun began to grow, quite quickly, the colour changed into an ever deepening red, and the speed at which it made towards the horizon increased. Almost to a man, everyone stopped eating and talking, and just stood or sat watching this bizzare fast foward of a sunset.

Then it began to stretch and change shape, before rapidly shrinking back to a normal size and dropping behind the horizon. It was as promised, spectacular! There must have been 50 or so people who had made their way to the edge of the water to stand and stare at the event, it reminded me of that scene in ‘Close Encounters’ where all the crowd just stand in silence looking up to the sky. So there you go, another ‘must do’ moment to go with the 24hr Soup joint.

 

Wednesday 3rd August.

Time for the last full day. It’s always a puzzle to me why the first 12 days of any holiday tick along nicely, and the last 2 go like a rocket, but hey ho ! Time for the 5-bay boat trip. We do this every year, and the boats go to 5 of the same 7 or so bays, and the food is always the same simple fare, and the music is always the same thumping Turkish dance music, but there is just something about it that means the holiday wouldn’t be the same without it. This year, the 5 of us joined one of our friends Urdal from Ikbal’s Restaurant on the sea front at Altinkum. We climbed aboard the ‘Siesta’ and set to sea.

For the first time this year, I was persuaded to join the graceful and fearless young bucks, and leap off the top deck. Admittedly I was more fearful and graceless, as I crept over the safety rail and peered down to the sea some 20 feet or so below. I prepared to leap, I had planned to give a ‘Tarzan-like’ wail as I cruised towards the water like a missile, entering without so much as a splash. The plan didn’t work.

Instead, I let out a shameful squeal as I span towards the water in a starfish formation which on impact instantly transformed my ‘Superdry Boarders’ into a ’Sup..’ thong. Thirty-one years of adulthood were sent skywards through my body and joined the contents of my skull. The crowd loved it ! I stayed where I was, treading water to milk the applause, and because I didn’t want to swim and leave bits of me behind.

And so to the final night ! As promised we booked into the Meandros Bedouin village, which is a 5 minute taxi ride from Europlaza. It is a wonderful place, nothing like anywhere else in the area. It is peaceful, and laid back. It is actually a small holding, which if you visit during the day will have the butcher jointing whole sheep  carcasses, and the old ladies preparing the dough for that evenings bread. We arrived around 8pm and watched the chap working at the wood fired oven, churning out piping hot pillows of sesame seed encrusted flatbreads, which are served with the spicy tomato and chilli  ‘Acili Ezme’ and a cooling yoghurt and mint dip.

The whole village is spread out over an area about the size of a football pitch, so there is plenty of room. The food is prepered in an open kitchen, and is without doubt some of the best we have found in 4 years of visiting the area. I feasted on Meandros style lamb chops, 5 of the beauties, in a rich tomato, pepper and aubergine sauce, with a sprinkling of home produced cheese, finished under the grill. The best bit about the whole experience however comes after the meal. The perimeter of the grounds are surrounded by ’Bedouin Style’ tents, built on wooden stilts, and you finish your night in your own private low level tent, shoes outside, smiles inside.

Thursday 4th July.

Well folks, that is it ! Our trip to Turkey is done. Myself and Mrs FD  spent most of the day pottering round the flat, sweeping and mopping and getting it ready for Karen, the owner who  came out the day after we left.  The girls  spent their last day much as they did the previous 13, around the pool, laughing, constantly. it was good to see the 14 yr old lads strutting their stuff in a vain attempt to impress the eldest and her mate, ( and I promise, there were no ‘Meet the Focker’ dad antics from me…. ish). After the usual tearful farewell from Berin, Nizam, Enver and all the gang at La Plaza we endured the torture of Bodrum Airport, and eventually at a bleary-eyed 2.45am, lifted off for Manchester. It was raining when we landed …….. what did you expect ?

I hope you have enjoyed this trip away, hey let’s face it , first of all I hope you have at least read about it ! Otherwise my kids are right when they say…

” Why do you waste your time doing that geeky thing that nobody even looks at ?”

At least they don’t sit on the fence !

Leave a comment, its always nice to know that these 4135 words haven’t been in vain!

See you next time,

Floydsdad.