Turkish delight, Tuesday 1st November

Hi everyone,
Sorry I've been so terribly slack but it's hard to get motivated to write useless crap when you're on holidays. At this very moment I am back in Turkey for the second time. Once just wasn't enough. Have been toying with the idea of moving here but the pay isn't very good even though the lifestyle would be awesome, although it's getting far too cold for my liking and considering we spend most of our days outdoors it's not ideal.

Have had a wonderful time here and I highly recommend it to everyone as a holiday destination. I haven't been keeping my diary up to date at all so when I get back to London I'm going to have a hard time remembering it all, which just defeats the whole purpose of ever starting this thing! But there is indeed much to tell.

Have been seeing a very crazy Turkish boy who works at the pension (backpacker type place) where we are staying. Their website is www.bayrams.com and it rocks! I am here with Wes and Claire, who used to work here for 5 years and so has made life for us very, very easy and we get to hang out with the local lads heaps. Not the women, but that's a cultural thing which I'll explain some other time.

We basically spend our days either at the beach, reading, drinking, smoking Turkish water pipes, playing Turkish games (backgammon is most common but I can't be motivated to learn it, so I've taken to another one called Okey) and just lazing about (it's in a village so there's not a whole lot to do). I decided to come back to Turkey a second time as I honestly loved it so much that I couldn't be happy in London again and I needed to come back and get horribly bored at this place we are staying at to get it out of my system. I'm not sure that's such a valid reason but it seemed good at the time!

In a nutshell as I'll hopefully tell all in more detail later, we spent 4 days in Istanbul (not Constantinople) which was so great and Claire having lots of friends there we got to experience local life in some depth. We then headed to Olympos which is a beach village on the south coast. After a few days at Bayrams Wes and I went on a 4 day boat cruise where we also got to go paragliding over the blue lagoon. Then back to Bayrams for a short stay before I was forced back to London. But only a week of work and I was back in Olympos again.

However my second time is nearly up as Wes and I will be flying back to London on Friday where I will have to live in absolute poverty (so life as usual) for the next few months but it's been most worth it.

I was going to try and gloss over it but no doubt the most interesting part of my Turkish story to a number of people will be the boy. His name is Servet, he's 24 and bloody hot. But he's also completely insane to the point of being worrying a lot of the time. I'll try and post some photos one of these days.

Okay it's dinner time so I must go. Love to you all sweet people!