Selçuk, Turkey

When we finally got to Turkey I didn‚t really know what to expect.  I had never been in a Muslim country before.  We were in a bit of a daze from our happy sojourn with the Greeks and not getting nearly enough sleep.  I noticed September was in shorts, and started to worry that a lynch mob might find us because she wasn‚t wearing a burqa.  How very wrong I was.

Fresh off the boat in Ceşme, Turkey, and with no local currency it was, of course, time to feed the troops.  I had a hunch the corner shop by the dock would accept my Euros, but I had no idea what the exchange rate was.  I just handed the guy a 20 Euro note for about 6 Euros worth of food and acted like I knew what I was doing and this was a perfectly normal transaction. To my relief, he did the same and handed me a bunch of change.  I figured the worst that could happen was that I get taken for about 14 Euros worth of change, but again I was wrong.

When I got out of the store, I looked at what the clerk had handed me as change, eager to get an idea what the exchange rate was.  To my extreme befuddlement I counted two 5-lira notes, three 1-lira coins, and a one MILLION lira note.

How's that work?  Being an engineer, I can only work with two, sometimes three, significant digits.  So, I stood looking at my one million lira change and wondered why I cared about the 5's and the 1's.

Google came to my rescue.  I found that Turkey recently devalued their currency, so there are both new and old flavors of lira in circulation, with a ratio of a whopping million to one between them.

This difference between the "new" and the "old" money is lost on Jordan.  He thinks that store clerks keep making mistakes and that we are now filthy rich.  Every time we get another million lira note, he hoards it.  I think he has about five of them, so he almost has enough to buy a Happy Meal, but to hear him talk about it, Donald Trump had better watch his step.

Turkey has been delightfully weird and funky in many other ways, too.  One such way is the extreme friendliness and politeness to a fault.  But, that story will have to wait for another epistle.

We are all fine.  Katrina has discarded her remaining crutch.  Her steps are slow and deliberate, but she is at last mobile under her own power.  We now find ourselves in Selçuk, Turkey, situated next to the ancient town of Ephesus and dreading a 14-hour overnight bus ride into the interior of the country.  I am not sure what is there that is worth a 14-hour bus ride.  I am merely doing what I am told.