Fethiye...and beyond!

Took a very windy, stomach wrenching four hour bus ride to Fethiye along the coast. While it was beautiful scenery, we both felt a bit nauseated by the end. At one stop, I ran out to get us some fresh oranges (it's orange season here and you can see them everywhere) and the owner was super nice and gave me four oranges for free. The bus stopped in another town called Kas, a cute little town where a Turk told us St. Nicholas was born. They had a cute little statue of santa claus in the middle of a square, and since then Louise and I have seen about four men wandering the streets that resemble santa claus and it's been fun to discover them;) Fethiye is an awesome, laid back town, big into sailing and hiking and such, but disappointingly the crappy weather followed us, so we ended up staking out a good coffee shop and spent the better half of two days in it. It was good to get some reading and knitting done, although it was a bit frustrating to be in Turkey on the Mediterranean and stuck in a coffee shop. There was an awesome boardwalk along the shore with tons of restaurants and coffee shops and locals hanging about. People were very relaxed and you'd see them walking around in jeans/sweat shirts and workout clothes. Stayed in a crazy hostel called Farah's place, where the owners lived and had about 4 cats and a huge dog that wandered around the place. It was filled with plants and schtick everywhere. The oweners were nice though and pretty much kept to themselves.

The coffee shop we staked out had AMAZING coffee (probably even better due to the nescafes other places sold for exhorbitant prices that we avoided) and it was decently priced too (only $2-3). The place was packed with locals, either watching a football (soccer) match or playing backgammon. The never ending sound of dice hitting the board was omnipresent. It was fun and Louise and I played a bit....sadly we had both forgotten how to setup the board and had to ask the older waiter if it was right, and he happily confirmed it was right and proceeded to help us along a bit. Really nice guy and he kept coming back to check up on us and see how it was going. Grabbed a doner for dinner (hehe, that sounds wicked) in a wrap with french fries in the sandwhich, which was surprisingly tasty. Walked around town a bit and checked out the Carrefour, which was the largest grocery store in town. It was fun to check out the food.

The next day was again rainy and we headed straight away to our favorite coffee shop. Staked out a table right next to the huge open fire pit, and proceeded to drink some amazing Sahlep. It's sort of like a chai latte, and is milk with some sort of white root powder, topped with cinnamon....tastes a bit like rice pudding as its a bit thick. The waiter kept giving us supposedly free drinks throughout the day (they had the best apple tea there), which in the end we had to pay for;) He was constantly hanging around and asking if we wanted to smoke nargileh later or if we liked to drink and then wanted me to give him the scarf I was knitting in exchange for his heart...our numerous refusals apparently did not sink in. He then proceeded to tell us that we should be wary of Turkish men as they don't have good intentions and only want sex, which was funny because he was one of only a few Turks that we had run into that had acted this way. The rest have been extremely decent folks.