Thinking Allowed: Merhaba Fethiye

Our arrival into Turkey was smooth and joyful. Fethiye is a peaceful town that very quickly welcomes outsiders into her folds. With snow-covered Babadang Mountain in the background and a long uninterrupted stretch of beach we feel right at home. While Turkish in location and culture Fethiye is home to a large expat community and an endless line up of sun seekers from more northern European countries giving the town an international vibe.

We're staying in Calis, an hour's walk north of town centre. It's got a lovely waterfront promenade, meaning the walk into town is almost completely car-free. While Rhodes was teeming with cats, Fethiye favours stray dogs - definitely less cute, but it's still endearing how they just lie in the street and block traffic, The muezzins' chants are microtonal and hauntingly beautiful (though loud, and the first two were at 4:08 and 5:51 am, rousing me, and the whole dog population, both times). People smile at each other and everyone seems quite laid-back.

Prices here are weird! You can get a cup of tasty Turkish tea for 1 lira (ten cents), and the same cup a few minutes away for 15 lira. Lunch can set you back two dollars or twenty. Produce is amazingly cheap (there seems to be a catastrophic glut of spinach, and you have to buy it in these kilogram-bags of sweaty, fibrous biomass.) Then a can of imported kidney beans is like 3 bucks, or 300 onions. Olives are everywhere, some char-grilled with cute little tong marks on their backs. You get to sample everything, even dishes in restaurants before you buy them. We splurged on these indescribably good nougat turkish-delight things, but then Tova's mouth suddenly turned tar-black, mine did too, much tooth-brushing ensued, and I might stick to chocolate for awhile. Was it licorice? Squid ink? Toxic waste? Tasted like licorice, unless toxic waste is salty (is it?)

The girls seem to like it here. Tova chirps, "Tesekkurler!" when people bring us baklava. Zadie is a cheerful consumer of lentil soup and chickpeas. Aurora has made friends with some other worldschoolers, and Sophia is sticking to her chinups and stretching like the keener she is. The seafront is lined with playgrounds and rusty exercise equipment. One park in particular is so ludicrously over-the-top that Tamar will have to write a whole separate post about it. We've done a few hikes, the highlight being Kayakkoy, a ghost town that was abruptly created in 1923 when Turkey swapped much of its Christian population for Moslems, increasing Greece's population by 25% in one go (how had I never heard of this?)

Meeting all these worldschooling families has been eye-opening, and deserves its own post, too. They're welcoming, relaxed, and much more laissez-faire about homeschooling. It's nice running into people we know around town, and almost makes us feel more at home than our travels around Australia.

Our walk into town passes by endless canals with moored pontoons

Our first market trip's haul, incl. freshly squeezed pomegranate juice and a Pepsi bottle full of milk that an old lady had squeezed out of her five cows that morning