April 1st makes my 4th day of laying low in Antalya. We've entrenched ourselves in a tourist trap, but during the off season. So the costs are low and the crowd is thin.
Most of the whiteys we've seen are of the German or Swiss persuasion. When we passed by the shops the hawkers were more likey to yell at us in German than in English. Which made it nice and easy to shuffle obliviously past them.
We spent most of the day walking around the city. The sun was out all day and the foot traffic was minimal, so it felt like we had the place to ourselves.
We purchased some decent, name-brand sunscreen. We discovered the hard way that the cheap stuff we bought the other day couldn't keep us from being sunburned by a flashlight at extremely long-range. I think it's just a bottle of some weird food condiment.
So now that we're both lobsters we invested in an bottle of something with English writing on it. Better later than never. We're eager to get back to the beach after we heal.
We took a trip to the local museum, only to discover that the entry fee was more than we wanted to pay. But we managed to eat a great slice of cake on the walk there and we discovered a restaurant with a gorgeous view of the Mediterranean on our walk back; nice bonuses.
In Ankara if you decided to walk to the grocery store and it was closed when you arrived the only 'bonuses' would have been that you managed to avoid being hit by a taxi on the walk there and discovered an especially depressing view of the landfill on the walk back.
Fresh as this memory is in my mind, it's hard not to feel mightily pleased with our upgrade in environment.
Also, Turkish advertising never stops being awesomely bizarre no matter where you are in Turkey:
Um, what are you selling me here? A family of badly injured mannequins with two decapitated uncles? Maybe the various styles and colors of injury care products are on offer here. But I have to think that if I was one of the rare passers-by who was currently on the market for a 'crotch sling' or whatever those weird shorts are, I might feel a little overwhelmed by such a wide array of unrelated and disturbing products.
Not to mention how mismatched the wheelchair is to the toddler inside of it. I understand buying for the future, and I'll grant them that she will grow into eventually. I just can't tell if the ad is cautioning me that, "our shop doesn't stock children's wheelchairs," or proudly asserting that "our shop specializes in novelty clown wheelchairs."
Hit the link for photos and videos of us tooling around town, including me shirtless. Selling point or scare tactic? You decide.
Tuesday and Wednesday in Antalya
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