Jeff and I are in Paris this week celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary, and while we're gone, I've got a few guest posts on people's favorite thing about Turkey lined up for you to enjoy! Today we're kicking things off with a guest post from Deniz Bevan.
My favorite thing about Turkey... besides the food, the weather, the SEA... is the neighborhoods!
Whether you're in a small village where everyone's trying to feed you köy yemekleri (and how can you resist?), a tourist-crowded resort town, or in sprawling Istanbul, every place in Turkey feels delightfully small, and hidden treasures abound.
I still remember my surprise at stumbling across Cezayir Sokaği in the Taksim neighbourhood, that street of lovely multi-coloured restaurants and cafés. The layers of history are equally astounding – scratch a little in the sand and you uncover civilizations that go back thousands of years. You might even find a Greek statue or Mycenaean pottery on a snorkeling expedition, as my uncle often does.
There’s also the friendly stray cats, the sunshine – and the language that, despite many borrowed words, still sounds like hardly any other language on earth and is so terribly useful for even the simplest of phrases, especially with repeated words: mışıl mışıl uyuduk, hayal meyal hatırlıyorum...
Something indescribable gets into your bones when you’re in Turkey, so that months away feel like years, and if more than a few years have gone by since your last trip there, you begin to feel a certain ache. A longing... And sights like this one, with the mountains in the distance, leave you gazing wistfully into space, dreaming of sun baked roads and low green hills, rolling toward the horizon.
About the author: Deniz Bevan is a writer who has recently returned to romance after a foray into young adult and middle grade novels. She is currently editing her latest romance, "Out of the Water", set in Spain and Turkey in 1492. Her non-fiction work, including travel articles and book reviews, has most recently appeared in the trilingual newspaper Bizim Anadolu. Deniz blogs at The Girdle of Melian.
