Back in Paradise – Our Return to Islamlar, Turkey – Part IV

We have had quite a few good laughs so far…while my wife seems determined to become one of the local villagers.

Last evening while at Place of Huseyin, we let the kids play with our bug zappers (they look like mini-tennis rackets, but have an electrically charged grid that electrocutes mosquitoes and midges). My wife explained to them that she hates bugs. So what does a young boy do? He finds a giant green grasshopper and brings it to her!

But me being me, I reach into my pocket and pull out a 10 Turkish Lira note (about $7.00) and dare him to eat it (using sign language because my Turkish is worse than his English). Ali struggles because 10TL is a lot of money. He thinks. Then he pulls the antennae off and gulps. Then he starts pulling the poor grasshopper’s legs off…one by one…and then gulps again. Then he takes a deep breath and shoves it into his mouth. But I see his tongue is curled under. He insists he ate it, but eventually showed it was still in his mouth…ALIVE! Yuk! He earned that 10TL.

You may remember I spoke of our $5.99 floating chairs from Leslie’s Pools. Well, the other day my mate was floating away and says, “Eric, I think I have a leak.” As he looks it the bubbles got bigger and then he looks at me like a cartoon character and says, “Oh *(^%!” and the chair collapses sending him to the bottom of the pool. I could not stop laughing…as I floated along in my chair.

Fortunately I brought along two spare floating chairs. Sure enough yesterday the same thing happened, but this time it was like a Wyle E. Coyote look of “Here we go again.” I was crying I was laughing so hard.

But why did this happen? It comes down to what we call “Birdy Porn”. What is “Birdy Porn”? You see with all of this relaxation time, we watch the birds. There is this one scruffy little house sparrow that has only one thing on his mind: Sex. While the other birds take the time to preen themselves, he just spends his time call out to females and then having his way. My mate and I watch this hour after hour, day after day. (We have even started to watch “Butterfly Porn” as yellow butterflies are, apparently, excited by the bright yellow color of the house. In fact, yesterday we thought one of “our” butterflies got picked off by a swallow, but he didn’t.)

So as we watched the scruffy male bird calling out to all of the female sparrows, we observed one of the females pecking at…the floating chairs. Mystery, if not problem, solved. But as we are pulling for our little scruffy male sparrow we have left our remaining floating chairs available to assist him in his constant…and I mean constant…endeavors.

Just an FYI, somehow my wife got us invited to a Huseyin family gathering on Saturday further up in the mountain (and we are pretty far up). From a drive I took the other day, I discovered that just above us there is a beautiful, and cooler, pine forest and some ancient Lycian tombs. It is going to be interesting, but, of course, it is truly a compliment and shows that even if you don’t know the language, just being yourself can lead to some pretty fantastic experiences.