Well, the last two weeks certainly have been busy!

After deciding the appliances we wanted, we headed back into town to the spot shop, and chatted to Bekir who runs the place. One of the items, the hob, we’d found in the Ariston catalogue he gave us. The other two – oven and extractor were Beko but we asked if he could get those too. He got on the phone to his suppliers and secured all three, with a sizeable saving on the prices we’d been quoted. He told us they’d be here in a week, and to pay him later – after they’d arrived. Great.

Don’s 65^th Birthday is coming up this year, and he and Ann will be abroad, so they were having a pre-birthday party this coming weekend (3 Feb), so we next called into a lady who makes cards to see if she could do something for us. We agreed that I’d do the art work and email it over, and she’d print it up, ready for Saturday, magic.

Time for a well earned G&T, so we headed for the Kizmet, where we ran into Ronnie, an ex-diver and now local estate agent, to find him there with his family, excited about the prospect of running their own new venture – an Irish pub in Calis.

In the morning we awoke to discover that Ferit and Omur, our neighbours who live below us, had returned from Izmir, with their new baby daughter, Omay.

Having decided on and ordered the kitchen appliances, we drove down to Saban’s workshop in the Sanayii, to give them the dimensions. Work on the carcasses was nearly finished and the doors had arrived. They were all set to start the installation on Monday.

The weather turned really cold, and a rainy day in Fethiye, produced snow capped mountains the following morning, and a bracing northerly wind. It appeared Ann and Don had picked what was probably going to be the coldest night for their party. They’d invited about 20 people, and I loaned Ann my slow cooker so she could make a large batch of chilli to go with jacket spuds to feed everyone. She also made a couple of lovely trifles and chicken liver pate. A very pleasant evening was had, and we were able to catch up with Denise, who’d been living in Fethiye when we were out for the year, and we’d met while walking.

She had a sad tale to tell. She’d sold her house in Ovacik, and bought a troglodyte cave in Cappadocia with a view to converting it into a pansiyon (like a B&B). Foreigners can’t actually buy the caves in their own name, but she’d fallen in love with a Turkish man, and they agreed to take on the project together. Work had gone well, but the relationship broke down, and it now seemed she’d have a battle on her hands to get her money back.

Sunday morning, saw Euyp come over to ‘sort out the plumbing’. I wanted to move the sink to a position under the window where currently resided a radiator. Within 40 minutes the entire old kitchen was taken down and relocated on the balcony. Eyup reckoned that the plumbing would be easy to do later, so sealed up and removed the radiator ready for us to give to Ramazan.

We have a problem with our telephone line, and in order to make it work, Iain has joined a cable directly to the junction box downstairs and run the line up the outside of the building and in through the window. Not ideal, but it works. Iain had spent ages one day trying to figure out where the wires came into the house, but concluded that the connections must be broken. Adem had told us that Eyup was an electrician and could sort our phone line out. So, he and Iain spent about 2 hours trying to locate the wires and make it work, but to no avail.

That evening we had been invited to dinner by Stuart and Dilek so we got washed and changed and headed out in the last of the afternoon sun to walk into town. Stuart and Dilek have a lovely house in the old part of Fethiye, with an amazing view over the harbour. They’d just bought a new wood burner, which had an integral oven space and the whole meal was busily bubbling away while heating the room up. Dilek is pregnant with her first child, which is expected in March and it was good to catch up on all the news. We were delighted to discover that they’d also invited Gordon and Clarissa, who we didn’t know were over. Clarissa has been unwell since the middle of last year, when she was diagnosed with cancer, and we hadn’t seen then since before then.

Dinner was excellent, lentil soup, followed by slow roasted chicken with Mediterranean vegetables. We had a busy day ahead of us, as on Monday the guys were coming to install the kitchen, so we said our goodnights and walked back home.