Autumn sun

Today we took a drive to Şile to breathe fresh air, sip tea, buy fresh fish and feel the autumn sun on our backs. Perfection.

Parking Istanbul style

Weird weather

It feels really strange to read that in the north part of Turkey, Trabzon, snow has fallen and the temperature has dropped to -2 while in the south, people are swimming in the warm waters of Antalya and enjoying temperatures up around 36 degrees. What is going on???

Pictures from Today Zaman online

Yummy courgette carbonara

As you know, I just love Jamie Oliver and his recipes. The other night on his show he made a delicious and easy to prepare courgette carbonara. Given I had a large courgette from my mother in laws organic garden, I decided tonight was the night to give it a whirl. I was a bit worried about carbonara as I always fear ending up with a plate of scrambled egg pasta, but I surprised myself!

I have written the original recipe below, but you can also find it here . I halved the recipe as I was cooking for myself, with a bit left over, and replaced bacon with pastirma as I don't like bacon but wanted to have that smokey meat flavour. For those of you who don't know, pastirma is a highly seasoned, air cured dried beef. So it's not exactly the same as bacon but it had the desired effect for this meal.

Ingredients

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

6 medium green and yellow courgettes

500g penne

4 large free-range or organic egg yolks

100ml double cream

2 good handfuls of freshly grated Parmesan cheese

olive oil

12 thick slices of pancetta or smoked streaky bacon, cut into chunks

small bunch of fresh thyme, leaves picked and chopped

Method

Put onto boil a large pan of salted water. Halve and quarter any large courgettes length ways. Cut out and discard any fluffy middle bits and slice the courgettes at an angle into pieces roughly the same size and shape as the penne. The water should now be boiling so add the penne to the water and cook in accordance with the instructions.

To make your creamy carbonara, put the egg yolks into a bowl, add the cream and half the Parmesan and mix together with a fork. Season with s&p and set aside.

Heat a large frying pan and add a good splash of olive oil and fry the pancetta or bacon or pastirma until dark and crisp. Add the courgette slices and a few cracks of pepper. Throw in the thyme leaves and stir everything together so the courgettes become coated in all the flavours and fry until lightly golden and have softened.

The next bit is the challenge. You need to work fast. When the pasta is cooked, drain it, reserving a little of the cooking water. Immediately toss the pasta in the pan with the courgettes, bacon and tasty flavours, then remove from the heat and add a ladleful of the reserved cooking water and your creamy sauce. Stir together quickly and do not return to the heat or you will scramble your eggs!

You should serve immediately. Sprinkle the remainder of your Parmesan over your pasta and and add a little more cooking water if needed in order for the sauce to have a silky consistency over the pasta.

Eat and enjoy!!

*picture care of Jamie website / David Loftus

Hospitals; a pain in the back

The hospital system in Turkey is different to Australia. In fact, in Australia I would not visit a hospital for an illness other than in the case of an emergency. Here, most people attend at a hospital in the first instance.

When you talk about public and private hospitals in Turkey, people tend to be fairly negative and do not speak highly of the public system. They say they are unclean, crowded, and I have heard stories of people having to care for their own family members by bringing meals and changing sheets. I have visited one once to see a relative of my husband's and I was shocked to see a drainage bag draining blood was wrapped up in a white plastic shopping bag sitting on the bed.

When people talk of private hospitals though, I some of them are referred to as "commercial hospitals", money big making for doctors who order unnecessary tests and operations knowing for patients knowing they can bill the private health insurer and be paid for it without question. I have also heard people question what doctors tell them and my friends always advise in obtaining a second and third opinion for any diagnosis given as people tend to be skeptical about what doctors tell them. Other people have told me to "see someone you know" in order not to get ripped off and to also get a proper diagnosis. At first, I didn't really buy into this that much as I would hear people say that the hospitals are on par with those in other major European cities and that most of the doctors have trained abroad and are very well educated.

This week however, I have had my own taste of the private hospital system which has made me question the system just a little. I spent the last 10 days laid up at home trying to deal with the pain from two degenerative discs I have in my lower back. I have spent much of that time in a drug induced stupor which has caused insomnia, loss of appetite, night sweats, lack of concentration as well as general mind numbing boredom, among other things. I have had trips back and forward to the hospital to administer various pain injections, and to undertake scans and x-rays and doctor appointments. Dealing with a hospital system is never easy, particularly one in a foreign country where you never really know how it works. I am thankful, however, that my private health insurance was in place to help cover the cost of the various scans and doctors visits as well as drugs and injections, otherwise we would have seen the cost go into the thousands.

When I moaning in pain last week I decided that I really did need to get the hospital. When we reached the consulting rooms my husband had the following conversation with the receptionist:

Receptionist: Welcome. How can I help you?

Husband: My wife has hurt her back and needs to see a doctor

Receptionist: Do you have insurance?

Husband: Yes.

Receptionist: Which kind (which fund?): Husband gave the name.

Receptionist: At 10:20am Dr. X is available for TL 175 or in 5 minutes at 9:30 Dr. Y is available for TL 375. Which one would you like to see?

Husband: (turning to me to ask what I want to do)

Me: Not sure I can wait an hour, so lets see the one in 5 minutes.

I wondered to myself it it was normal to have a conversation about money so early on in the piece? I guess it was. So, we waited and after a couple of minutes an orthopedic doctor (professor) greets us and shows us to his rooms. I tell him that the night before I had a sudden acute pain in my lower back which almost caused me to lose feeling in my legs and as a result I nearly fell to the floor. He proceeded to ask me three questions; my age, do I smoke and has this happened before. Once I answered these questions he advised I should have an MRI and x-ray. So off I went. While I was having the MRI, the doctor spoke with my husband and reported what he saw on the screen. He told my husband he had to leave to conduct a surgery but would be in touch with us.

He wrote me up for some pain killers, advised that I not run or power walk on the treadmill anymore, take up swimming and consult a neurologist if the same things happens again with the view to having surgery as this is the only thing that can fix the problem. And that was it.

The suggestion of surgery was a little bit frightening and was enough to prompt me to call the doctors office to chat about this and ask some other questions. However, after leaving a couple of messages for the good doctor, it became clear that he was not going to respond. Not only was I annoyed, I was disappointed at the level of follow up given he so loosely talked about surgery and consulting a neurologist.

A couple of days later, I returned and saw another doctor who suggested I visit the physio for a minimum of 15 sessions. He advised that the only fix for my back was surgery (surprise, surprise!)but I could try physio. But why didn't the last doctor advise physio, I wondered?

Today, by co-incidence as I read through the Hurriyet online, I came across this article about a job advertisement for a cardiology expert that featured in last weeks paper. The article talks about the advert as well as the private hospital system and makes claims of corruption amongst some private hospitals. The article "slammed doctors in private hospitals for performing unnecessary procedures for extra cash, calling into question the reliability of the country's health sector".

The article goes on and quotes the head cardiologist at the German Hospital as saying "All private hospitals are not like this,” Soylu said. “Some patients who consulted our hospitals after they were told at another hospital that they needed to have an operation turned out to be wrongly diagnosed. In some cases, they actually did not need any operation, and we tell them the truth. These people can sue those hospitals.”

Well, well, I though to myself. Interesting.

I guess statements such as these support the truth behind the fact that private health insurance is the country's fastest developing form of insurance and because of that, people are offered the false sense of security in the fact that if they have insurance, they are therefore offered only the best service, treatments and advice money can buy, even if the doctors are earning an extra few husband or thousand lira from ordering lots of tests and writing you up for a handful of drugs you don't really need.

So I guess I should follow my friends advice - it always pays to get that second and third opinion to avoid any potential unwanted surgery or procedures.

May we all have good health!

Travel history

I love looking back on photos of trips taken, holidays had and journeys away. Another thing I like to look at are peoples passports. I think a passport can say a lot about someone but it's also a personal history and each journey represents a trip taken for a reason whether it be for pleasure, work or otherwise.

I've been so fortunate to have travelled to many places around the world from a young age and to have had some of the most amazing and unforgettable experiences; sailing the Nile, working at the Athens Olympic games in 2004, and visiting many unspoilt beaches and villages in Greece, Turkey and The Philippines. I regularly need to present my passport as a form of identification or have it on hand so that my office can deal with the rigmarole of residence and work permit updates.

Recently, I discovered that in less than a year, my passport will expire and the thought of a clean fresh one saddens me a little as I won't be able to look back at the one I have with its crinkled frayed edges, tattered and water marked pages, and happily reminisce on all those journeys I have taken over the last ten years.

Interestingly, I was talking about this with my sister a while back who posted about her passport and travel history, which in her past life as a flight attendant, took her to far away and exciting places which filled her passport full of stamps to amazing places like Dhaka, Trivandrum and Oman, to name a few.


When I started composing this post and tracking my trips by year and date, an idea to google the words "passport tells a story" popped into my head. To my surprise, I came across this blog post by Mr Bojangles which is entitled with those exact words writing pretty much exactly the same thing about his passport.

So I decided that I would attempt, through the water marked and stained pages, to trace my steps back over the last ten years and list all the borders I have crossed and when.

5 July 2000 - Bahrain International Airport, Bahrain
9 July 2000 - London, UK
22 October 2000 - Nadi, Fiji
29 October 2000 - Melbourne, Australia

24 July 2004 - Istanbul, Turkey
10 August 2004 - Athens, Greece
28 August 2004 - Istanbul, Turkey
5 September 2004 - Melbourne, Australia

14 August 2005 - Athens, Greece
16 September 2005 - Istanbul, Turkey
26 September 2005 - Athens Airport, Greece
7 October 2005 - London, UK
16 November 2005 - Istanbul, Turkey
25 November 2005 - Cairo, Egypt
10 December 2005 - Istanbul, Turkey
12 December 2005 - London, UK

18 March 2006 - Athens, Greece
25 March 2006 - Melbourne, Australia
8 April 2006 - London, UK
5 May 2006 - Istanbul, Turkey
8 May 2006- London, UK
16 June 2006 - Amsterdam, The Netherlands
18 June 2006 - Luton, UK
6 July 2006 - Rimini, Italy
7 July 2006 - Republic of San Marino, Italy
9 July 2006 - Luton, UK
8 August 2006 - Samos, Greece
9 August 2006 - Kuşadası, Turkey
14 August 2006 - Rhodes, Greece
23 August 2006 - London, UK
15 September 2006 - Berlin, Germany
17 September 2006 - Stanstead, UK
21 September 2006 - Istanbul, Turkey
24 September 2006 - London, UK
20 October 2006 - Paris, France
15 November 2006 - New York, USA
21 November 2006 - London, UK
23 November 2006 - Istanbul, Turkey
26 November 2006 - London, UK
8 December 2006 - Melbourne, Australia

28 April 2007 - Istanbul, Turkey
14 July 2007 - Edirne, Kapıkule, Turkey
29 August 2007 - Kos, Greece
3 September 2007 - Bodrum, Turkey
19 December 2007 - Melbourne, Australia

14 August 2008 - Melbourne, Australia
27 August 2008 - Istanbul, Turkey
17 October 2008 - Lyon, France
19 October 2008 - Istanbul, Turkey

26 January 2009 - Melbourne, Australia
6 February 2009 - Singapore
15 May 2009 - London, UK

Back to the grind

I know. It's been a while since I last posted. I'm back into normal life after a fantastic week away. We took a road trip and went to the south of Turkey and drove along the Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines spending nights in Fethiye and Kaş and we also visited some other spots along the way like Kalkan, Antalya and a short stop in Konya on the way back.

It was great to experience summer properly. I forgot what it was like to go to the beach and swim in the sea and really feel the heat. The last time I was at the beach was in 2007 in Greece. It was a long time between dips in the ocean.

We did the trip with another couple, friends of my husband, and their nearly six year old daughter. It was great to have them around and it was nice to go off with another female and look at shops and sunbathe and chat while the men shaded themselves from the afternoon heat playing tavla (backgammon) and drinking tea and smoking endless cigarettes.

The weather in both Fethiye and Kaş was very hot, up around 45 degrees celsius. In Kaş though, there was little fresh air from a breeze unlike in Fethiye, which made jumping into the freezing Mediterranean even more worthwhile.

It's a shame that my camera is not working and therefore I couldn't snap away and share the pictures here.

I did manage to find this picture above care of google of a beach we stopped at for a swim en route to Kaş. I believe the spot is called "Kaputaş plajı" (Kaputash Beach) and it's on the sea side road as you head into Kaş from Kalkan. It was lovely with some small swell and reminded me a little of beaches at home. The sound echoing from the beach was that of the squeals of people as the waves rolled in and people got swept up or dumped in them. It was a perfect spot.

Family and vacations, or family vacations?

It's that time of year again on this side of the globe.

The weather is warm, business is slowing down and Istanbul seems to contain less people and traffic than normal.

Throughout June, July and August people take off out of the city for their summer homes or on vacation to the more sandier parts of Turkey, like Bodrum, Antalya and Fethiye.

It's our turn to take off next week. We were planning a road trip to the Black Sea. There has been some wild weather there over the last week which could prevent us from visiting some places, or if the weather continues, prevent us all together going. We will see how the weather pans out towards the end of the week. But it's looking ok for now.

The decision to go on holiday seems to bring up some interesting issues, well, for us anyway. My vacation allowance from work is fairly limited, in contrast to what you get in Australian standards. I generally find I have to use days from the following years entitlement in order to just go home to Australia once per year and to have a short break in between.

Recently, my husband went away for a couple of weeks. Since returning, his parents, especially his father, has indicated that he would like to see us and has on several occasions asked my husband when we are coming to see them. My husband is busy at work and along with this trip we will take next week; his sister will visit in early August; my father will visit shortly thereafter; and some other friends of mine will come to town in mid August, so finding time to make the five hour drive to Ankara or eight hours to Konya is a lot to ask, in my opinion anyway.

My husband told his father that I would not be able to join him for a visit he may make to see them in early August. He told him it's because I cannot afford to take one or two days of holiday to go and see them for a long weekend. I asked my husband if he had told them that we would be going away next week to the Black Sea. My husband proceeded to tell me that he hadn't told them and that he wouldn't, as he told them I couldn't even take one day holiday to go and see them. He said that he would go and visit them and probably go from a Thursday to Sunday when we return from our holiday.

I didn't really probe him about this but as I began to think about what he said, I realised or concluded rather, that his family would be upset or offended if we took a vacation, on our own, without paying them a visit or instead of visiting them.

Sometimes I get upset with the fact that they never visit us. My husband works long hours, five, sometimes, six days a week. The business is relatively new and therefore requires endless visits to customers, long phone calls sometimes at 10 and 11 at night, and patience in dealing with his Chinese distributors. He drives long distances all week and endures all the stresses that come with running your own business. A holiday for us is to go somewhere and not have to do much; to relax and unwind. But when we go to visit his family, invariably, other family members come over (which in always more than 3 or 4 people) and neighbours pop by, and if we go to Konya, he should visit his grandparents, aunts, uncles and neighbours. If he doesn't see someone during that visit or spend a decent amount of time with his family, people will be upset or offended, so he has to ensure he sees everyone. How is this a holiday or a chance for him to relax and unwind?

Before I go any further, I will say that maybe this is a cultural thing whereby families like or expect that they will be visited by their children when they have free time, which I fully understand. I will also say that I am not at all against seeing my in-laws. We get along very well and I love them very much as they love me like their own daughter. What I find difficult is the fact that I now feel guilty about taking a much needed break with my husband which we have not yet done (alone, without visiting each others families) since I moved here. Most, if not all trips that we have had since I moved here have been to visit his family in Ankara or Konya, and my family in Australia, both of which we have done together and separately. The only time we have had together on holiday has been two days in Singapore in January.

As much as I am looking forward to this time, a part of me now feels guilty for not factoring in my husbands family into our limited holiday time, but on the other hand, should I? I mean, should I feel guilty and should I factor them into our plans so they can get happy? What about our happiness?

It's so hard to please everyone. But what about us and what we want to do? Is there ever a balance that can be perceived by both parties in these situations?

Grumpy

I had a shocking sleep last night for which I am paying the price for today.

It was hot, then became cool and a massive downpour hit at around 4am so I woke up. I thought our block of flats might float away, it was that heavy. Husband had only just gone to bed and got up again and ate a tomato and surfed the internet. I got up too and sat on the couch and watched some BBC News for a while.

I knew I would feel horrible when the alarm would go off at 7.30, but I just couldn't get to sleep and the more I couldn't sleep, the more stressed I was getting about the situation. The vicious circle continued.

So here I am almost 12 hours later, tired and grumpy with heavy eyes and in need of a serious caffeine hit.

Help.

Update: No longer lost in translation

After posting about my oregano and thyme translation drama yesterday, I sought out the help of the Expat world in Turkey and posted on one of the expat pages.

I was informed that in fact that correct translation for oregano is "güveyotu".

Oregano is not very common in Turkey and Wikipedia even reports that thyme is most commonly used in Turkish cuisine.

If you are in search of it, I believe you can find it possibly at Mısır Çarşı, the Egyptian Spice Market, in Eminönü.