On this day John was looking forward to locating the English book store he had read about in Lonely Planet. He was hoping to purchase works by Turkish authors that had been translated into English. His search resulted in futility,  as all the English  language books in the store were American potboilers.

Disappointed we took the tram to end of the line and walked down to the local beach  which revived his spirits.

+28 today so we headed to Lara Beach.  By local bus it was a 20 minute trip. Always fun trying to find the right bus to get on with the language barrier. Lara beach is 17km long and on this day we probably saw 6 people. Nevertheless we had plenty of company.

Our outing today was to the Ataturk Museum.  It is the home he stayed in when he visited Antalya.  Kemal Ataturk is seen as the Father of Modern Turkey and is revered by all. The 80th anniversary of his death was commemorated when we were in Istanbul.

 

 

Nov 4. Temperature 28.  It is very interesting to see how this culture embraces and cares for the cats living on the street. You see little houses everywhere and piles of cat food and water bins as well as little cat houses. People sitting out in the evenings have cats on their laps petting them and smiling. Maha,  who we met in Istanbul,  said she has five cats she feeds every night on her way home from work. She said she would give some a home but working for the UN she travels too much so is not able to.

We spent our lovely warm evenings people watching and listening to street music.

The public affection is wonderful to watch here.  Men greet each other by touching both  sides of their forehead to the other. Young people greet elders by first kissing their hand pressing that kissed hand to their own forehead and then kissing both cheeks. And of course the cheek to cheek kissing you see in France is seen all over . Then you have the children holding their parents hands as they walk. So wonderful to see.

 

 

On the 3rd we went by tram to the Antalya Museum. The horse carriages shared the tram spot and had to move each time the tram arrived.

The museum contained artifacts from southwest Turkey from stone age times through to the Byzantine Empire. Fantastic museum.

Much of the  wealth we saw was collected from grave sites where the people were placed in the fetal position with their precious belongings.

A section of this Hercules statue was at the British Museum. It  was recently discovered belonging to this statue and brought back and reattached.

The detail on and the number of sarcophagi in the museum was amazing.

On Nov 2 we traveled by plane to Antalya and took a room in a hotel in Old Town for relatively the same price as an Airbnb.

The buildings surrounding our hotel.

Hotels aren’t conducive to cooking your meals so we moved to an Airbnb around the corner for another week.

Our daily visitor.

Our neighbour across the street.