Hamam

All the store fronts and businesses around here have a couple guys hanging out, offering to sale whatever goods or services they provide.  The other night when we were out for dinner, the guy next door wanted us to try a new Spa that just opened up.  Instead of paying 100 Euros ($150) for a two hour treatment, he was offering the deal for 20 Euros ($30).  Kory and I had such a wonderful experience the first time we did the whole Turkish Bath thing, we decided we shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to do it again before we leave.  So this morning, at 9am, before anyone else in the house was up, we walked down the street to get another “Hamam” (Turkish Bath.)

The environment in this new spa was pretty high class, since it’s a destination place, rather than just a spa in the basement of a hotel, like the first one we went to.  The reason I wanted to go to this one is because they had a sauna, salt room and steam room, which the other Hamam didn’t offer.  We spent 15 minutes first in the dry sauna, we went into the salt room, which was much cooler and supposedly good for breathing problems.  I was breathing deeply as I’ve been told I have seasonal asthma.  I don’t believe it, but I do wheeze from time to time, so I thought I’d see if breathing in salt had any merits. Huge rocks of salt were anchored to the walls and ceiling and fine grain salt covered the floor.  Because the salt is fairly transparent, lights were set behind the rocks which changed colors every minute or so.  The mood in the room changed as it rotated through the colors of the rainbow.  It was pretty surreal.

I didn’t notice much improvement with my wheezing after deep breathing in that room for 15 minutes, but we then went into the steam room where I really felt a difference with my sinuses, which are often kinda cruddy.  When we first walked in, we couldn’t even see our hands or feet it was so steamy.  We soon discovered there were other people in the room as we tried to find a place to sit down.  That room sure gave us a good sweat.  I don’t think we made it the full 15 minutes in there because we couldn’t see the timer.  We then moved on to the Hamam room, where the attendants were waiting to bathe us like our mothers did when we were young – pouring water over our heads and body parts and scrubbing us down but good.  We were spread out on the altar again and covered in bubbles.  This new place didn’t have the same attentive feel as the first place we tried, so it wasn’t nearly as relaxing, even though it was still quite pleasant. 

After we were bubbled, scrubbed and rinsed, we were sent to a “relaxing” room where we waited for our oil massage.  Kory really liked his massage but I thought the guy that did mine, did it in too big of a hurry and it was more like an application of oil all over my body than any kind of massage.  He still stopped on my problem spots and said, “Problem,” though, then went and got a guy who could speak English.  The guy told me I needed a “medical massage.”  I didn’t want to tell him I already had one scheduled for tomorrow in another spa, so I just told him I didn’t have time, but yes, I knew I had a problem.  He sold me some medical cream, which works kind of like Ben-gay only it’s all natural and brings relief from the pain in my problem spots.  I really like that cream, so it’s nice to have that now, when and if the pain gets bad again.  I guess I never knew how much pain I was living with everyday until I stopped feeling it.

We got home before noon from our Hamam and then went with Kaleb and Tobias up to the local farmer’s market that only comes to this town on Saturdays.  It took a while to walk through all the booths and negotiate some prices, but we ended up with some very nice cotton pants and tops, a beach towel and a few souvenirs.  Kory didn’t approve of my bartering skills (he said I have none), but I was happy with the prices we paid (and I’m a cheap-skate) so I didn’t see any reason to pay less.   He said I was insulting them by not bartering.  Right.

Everyone was lying around the pool when we got back and Bjørn was working on yet another hand railing.  I think he must be like Kory – always needing something to do.  I would have never thought those handrails needed repainting, but he did.  They certainly look better now but I would have told myself they could wait another year. 

Tobias made us tomato soup for lunch and Bjørn went and bought some fresh pita bread and taziki dip to go with it.  Yum.  We ate at home for once, which went much quicker than going to a restaurant.  It was almost like a dinner theatre performance too with the twins acting up (like they often do) during the meal.  Markus couldn’t stop himself from jumping up on his chair and not just shouting HALLELUJAH, but singing it out, with his head tilted back, arms outstretched toward heaven and holding the notes like he was singing an opera.  What a character.  I don’t know where he comes up with this stuff, but he is one funny kid.  His parents don’t appreciate his humor as much as I do, but they were even laughing at him today.  I had to get out the video camera just so I will never forget his precious little voice shouting HALLELUJAH with an occasional PRICE THE LORD thrown in there (I told him what Hallelujah means and he does his best to say it in English but he doesn’t have his words quite right, yet.)  His mother is sure now he will become a priest.  He had to ask what that was.

After lunch we went into downtown Side and walked around the main shopping area for a little while and visited some streets we’d previously missed.  I bought a few more souvenirs and insulted a few more shop owners by not bargaining.  I’m happy with what I got, but now am wondering how we’ll get it all home.  Uff.  The twins kept chanting “Ut paa tur, aldri sur,” which is a Norwegian rhyming phrase that literally means “Out on a walk, never sour,” meaning one’s attitude can change from sour to sweet just by getting some fresh air.  True enough. 

Dinner tonight was Norwegian waffles and a special chocolate caramel cake I bought at a local bakery.  It was a good choice.  Afterwards the hand-held electronics broke out and the evening got pretty quite.  We’ve yet to decide what tomorrow will bring but it’s our last full day here in Turkey.  The time has gone far too quickly.

Over the Hump

We are more settled than NOT right now so that feels good. We’ve had such fantastic weather these past few days, I’ve hated that I needed to be inside all the time packing up Ruth’s things, cleaning and unpacking our stuff, but such is life. We woke up on Tuesday morning to winter, with an inch of snow on the ground, but by afternoon it was mid-summer around here and I had to change into a short sleeved shirt and shorts, it was so hot. Weird. Today I even managed to sun myself out on our deck for a few minutes when I needed a little break, but it was so hot I had to go back inside. I can’t stand how much I love being here. The view from our deck is inspiring (see photo taken at 10:30pm tonight with the sun still shining on the mountain peaks – it trumped the photo I was going to post of our new curtains – that will come later.)



Today was the first day I tried to get Kaleb back on some kind of school schedule. Boy does that kid know how to drag his feet. He did pretty well on his grammar assignments, he skipped piano altogether and he nearly flunked out of his on-line science course. We had to go to the library so he could use their computer (it is so close I really could hit it with a rock from our balcony). The headphones on the computer didn’t work so he couldn’t hear the lecture. He tried to read the words at the bottom of every screen, but he just couldn’t concentrate enough for that. The library has a one hour time limit and it wasn’t until he’d used up 33 minutes that he let me know he wasn’t learning anything. I wasn’t too happy about that. He switched to a different computer, which worked, so he finished up the lecture then had to take the quiz using my laptop because his minutes had run out. He was over two hours late to go play with his friends after they got out of school because I told him he couldn’t go until he passed his science quiz. He decided to listen to the lecture a second time to be on the safe side and he got 88%, so that wasn’t too bad – considering the subject matter was pretty foreign to him (it was on heredity and genomes, etc. I never would have passed it no matter how many times I watched the lecture.)


We didn’t bring up a single box from the basement today as we decided to just keep unpacking the boxes we had in the condo. I got the kitchen totally clean, decorated and things organized. I didn’t realized until I was done that I had used every single cupboard for dishes and kitchen things and didn’t have any place to put food. Since we had only purchased things we ate right away, we didn’t have any food inventory around for me to even think of it, until Kory brought it up. I had a little reorganizing to do after that. Aunt Ruth had a lot of different kinds of dishes, and Kory didn’t want to get rid of any of them. He used a very cool plate to set his lunch on, and he accidentally bumped it off the bread board, so it went crashing to the floor along with his slice of bread and stack of sardines on top. I told him I liked that plate a lot so I was sorry it broke. He told me, “I liked that plate too, but what I liked best about it was that it had food on it!” He was pretty hungry so he had to make his lunch all over again. Kaleb thought that was pretty funny.


I love setting up house and decorating things to make our place feel homey. After having done it in the recent past here, and now doing it again, I feel like those people who have affairs just because they like the newness in relationships – I somehow feel like I’m cheating on our house back home.


There’s been a non-stop parade of relatives coming through our condo since we got here. I totally love that. Once the word got out we put up new curtains, everyone had to come see them. They all agreed they let in more light and they love them. When we moved the furniture around from the way Aunt Ruth had it – they all had to come take a look at that, too. There isn’t a thing we do that they don’t gush over. Tante Kari even asked me today if I’d come over to her place when I have time to help her redecorate – she thinks I have a gift. Not really, but it’s nice she thinks so.


I’ve debated heavily about what to do with the toaster cover Tante Ruth left behind. It’s sort of a white plastic fabric with the silhouette of two dancing black poodles on the side. It’s so out, I’m sure it’s in. I’m keeping it for the time being, but it’s certainly not my style. But either is the elephant lamp that we ended up with because no one else wanted it (it was the last choice on the lamp selecting process the other day). I like the shade on the lamp, but the black elephant figurine is just too much. I can’t imagine where it came from, but I’ll be sure to ask. Lord only knows it’s probably worth a fortune in the US antique market.



I haven’t even touched the bathroom, so that’s tomorrow’s focus, as well as putting away the rest of our clothes and getting the bedroom and "my office" (i.e., desk) finished. We haven’t unpacked the boxes with all our wall decorations yet so by the end of tomorrow we should be looking rather complete, once we finish up with those things. We retrieved out BBQ tonight from a cousin that babysat it for us while we were gone – can’t wait to enjoy our deck with a little shrimp and salmon on the “barbie.”


I got a great night’s sleep last night – good bed and totally over jet lag. My camera is back in action now that I found the battery charger for it (the battery went dead on the flight over here). My computer can now get charged up since I found the power converter, and there is clean underwear in my drawer. All is pretty great in my world right now. It’s amazing how good a simple life can be.

A Fairly Normal Day

We had good spring weather today – pouring down rain one minute and beautiful blue skies and sunshine the next. It was like playing the lottery when I went outside as to whether I’d make it to my destination without getting wet – even if there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. All day long it was like rolling dice – the clouds would come and they would go and when they came there were as dark as could be and I couldn’t even see the buildings next door for all the rain coming down. It was pretty exciting. There was a rainbow in the sky nearly every time I looked. I loved it.

I left school early today to attend The Praying Women’s group. It gives me a great opportunity to talk in Norwegian and also more practice listening to it being spoken. Those women talk fast and I’m getting pretty good at following along. Often I understand all the words, but the meaning is lost on me so I need to ask for clarification, but for the most part, I’m holding my own. The Good Teacher Inga says I shouldn’t be so hard on myself – that I’m doing very well and even if I don’t speak properly, people are able to understand what I mean, and that’s all that matters. And my good friend Paula even wrote me an e-mail and said she was impressed when she was here visiting that I was able to talk to everyone and understand them when they talked back – so I guess that’s something. I just know I sound like a two year old when I talk so it’s embarrassing for me, but it certainly doesn’t keep me from talking. That would be a downright shame if I couldn’t talk! But even My Pal Vestina said I need to knock off the complaining. Okay, already….

Hearing a language being spoken is so important so that’s why I keep going to school. I have so much yet to learn. Kaleb doesn’t hear much English now and it’s starting to show. That kid reads a lot – so often he learns a new word without hearing it spoken first and it’s always funny when I hear him use that word for the first time and he doesn’t really know how to pronounce it. Yesterday when we were talking about discrimination and people’s prejudices against each other, I told him wars are started sometimes because one group of people think they are better than another group - for the silliest reasons. He said, “You mean like the protest –ants and the Cath-a-holics in Northern Ireland?” I totally cracked up over that one. He might have coined a new phrase “Cath-a-holic” – gotta love that. And what about those protest-ants? But he was nearly crying the other day when he realized he now uses both English and Norwegian in a sentence without even thinking. He’s worried no one will understand him when we get home if he says something in Norwegian accidentally. I told him they would just say, “What?” But all three of us are guilty of using the easiest words in both languages so we often talk a mixed sentence - but we all understand each other so it’s our own version of “Nor-lish”, a secret language used only in our household. (It sounds better than “Eng-wegian.”)

A few days ago I realized Kaleb’s hair looked kinda funny. His bangs seemed to be off for some reason so I tried to straighten them out and there wasn’t enough hair to cover his forehead. I asked what the problem was and he said he cut his bangs at school. He was playing with some kind of putty the teacher uses to hang papers up on the wall and he got it tangled up in his hair and couldn’t get it out so he just cut it off. I was thinking he looked kinda dorky these past few weeks but I couldn’t believe it took me so long to ask why. So much for being an attentive mother. (See photo of him “playing” with other boys and check out those bangs.)

Kory rested his back a little this morning but then got up and cleaned house before I got home from the prayer meeting. He was walking kinda funny when he went over to cousin Odd’s house to help him on his bedroom expansion. Odd said his mom, Tante Kari, isn’t doing too well. We’d hoped to go visit her tonight in the hospital because she had her hip replacement surgery yesterday, but she’s feeling terrible and doesn’t want any company. She needs prayer, and lots of it. Poor thing.

The days are getting so long now it’s hard to get to sleep. I have been up until after midnight the last several nights and the sky is still a nice shade of blue when I go to bed. The sun is up before 5am - so summer is fast approaching. I love how the seasons are so defined and the days change so dramatically from summer to winter. The tulips are all in bloom now but the hard rain has taken its toll and breaking off the pedals. Isn’t it interesting how our lives are sometimes reflected in nature?