So, the previous part (before the interlude) ended with us leaving our bikes in a hospitable pension and stomping off for a walk around town. Almost immediately we came out onto a very cute promenade.
By the way, my sister's been asking me here, did I really not know what a pension was? I did, but purely subconsciously. I've already written about this kind of thing: you've encountered a word in books many times, and you understand the context in which it's used. But how are you supposed to know the direct meaning if it's not entirely obvious from the context? Anyway, it all ended well, as we know. At the pension, I relaxed and started chatting with the locals. If I hadn't been so monstrously tired (I wonder, is there a Russian equivalent to the concept of grammar nazis?), I would have had a proper chat, but even so, I spent quite a bit of time in the lobby.
First, I showed two little girls where Latvia is. They applied their knowledge of English on me in a very funny way. They would ask questions in memorized phrases, but struggled to understand the answers.
Like:
- Where are you from?
- Latvia
- [nodding head]
- Baltic country, near the Russia, Belarus, Poland
- [even greater bewilderment]
Some time passes.
- How old are you?
- Twenty six.
- ???
- yirmi altı
- ;-)
At least the iPhone came in handy for something — showing where Latvia is wasn't hard.
Then I talked to two young girls, about 20 or slightly older. One of them babbled a bit in the bourgeois tongue, so we managed to communicate tolerably well, while the second one had to have it translated. Pretty quickly they got tired and gave up.
But then a guy showed up and told me a bunch of interesting stuff. He spoke English perfectly, much better than me — he delivered everything smoothly, and even used words I didn't know. With non-native speakers, I've very rarely had such an experience. The dude was polite, wanted to talk really badly, stood right up close to me and whispered insinuatingly. I chewed the fat with him for quite a while, but soon my strength ran out.
As a person monstrously detached from the common folk, I'll cautiously hypothesize that some of these vessels are fishing boats, because they have cranes installed on them. The ubiquitous Wikipedia, which is genuinely slowly becoming "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", claims that such a vessel is called a "seiner," and the crane is a "cargo boom".
Generally, I want to live to the moment when you point your smartphone at something, and it takes a pic and spits out a detailed reference. Of course, probably not by itself, but by connecting to a cloud of servers via the global network. Which it seems we'll now be forced to call the internet until the end of time, even though the word "infosphere" is way prettier. Actually, the seeds of this are already there — for audio, the technology more or less works (see musicbrainz) and commercial equivalents. All that's left is to bring image recognition tech up to scratch, and fill out Wikipedia to the end.
Actually, while on the promenade, the idea of buying and boiling some shrimp quickly ripened. I looked up what they'd be called in the heathen tongue, but it wasn't necessary — the crustaceans could be spotted on the counter with a glance without much trouble.
Igor (the navigator) started recalling that supposedly shrimp are boiled on the ship right after being caught, and that's why they become reddish. Maybe they do boil them, I won't say anything about that, but they are red from birth — it's not hard to verify this in any reference book.
Here I'll mess with the chronology a bit again, and tell you what I found out about the pension's inhabitants. First, a mother and son run it together. The granny who supposedly called the "boss" is actually his mother, and they rule together, so in a way we were put on a show, albeit a harmless one. The granny's name was Emine. The girl I was explaining Latvia to at the beginning was named Melike. Both names are beautiful, in my opinion.
Then, there was an interesting topic regarding an unknown fruit we bought — with five pits or something. By some miracle, the granny guessed what it was from my description (despite the fact that I "know" Turkish, and she English), and after my attempts to find a translation, we eventually saw the light of truth.
This knowledge didn't bring me any use, however. The fruit in Turkish is called malta eriği, and in Russian — mushmula. Well, did that make it any clearer?
I didn't have time to read anything, except for the fact that there used to be an incredibly cool and great ancient city here (or nearby). This is very valuable information, which is why I included it in the story.
In the evening we ate pasta, as usual — the only difference was that we cooked it not on a burner, but in the kitchen downstairs. Also, the comrades periodically bought local alcoholic beverages, and tasted them every evening. Mostly beer and wine, as well as the famous Balkan anise vodka "rakia," which is drunk in a considerable part of Europe, and, as we can see, Asia. I won't hide it, I also tried some wine, even though I don't usually drink. Alas, I couldn't resist the temptation to test out the local stuff, especially since it usually comes in large, unusual bottles. Of course, this might just be an excuse of my mythological consciousness, and in reality, I'm just thirsting to get drunk as a pig.
For instance, recently Jerzy and the girls won the city's annual competition "Battle of the Shish Kebabs – 2," and in honor of this, he also got me drunk on homemade wine. The local news, by the way, can be downloaded. The shish kebabs are at the 19th minute — I also flicker in there, a few minutes later. Generally, I hope there will be a full episode of the show "Grub's Up" about this event. There will be more of me and Jerzy there, because I participated in a stupid contest and won an umbrella, and he's just a superstar and a champion in general.
As for Turkey, this time everything was very nice and good with our overnight stay. For me, a hotel, even such a simple one — is just pure joy after the tents in the bushes. Another local micromeme, by the way — "tents in the bushes". And another by the way — I finished reading Dawkins' book "The Selfish Gene" — it's wonderful, terribly fascinating, and has something in common with programming. Which is logical, since Dawkins himself is a heck of a programmer, because it's very useful for biomodeling.
Well then. My narrative, although slowly, is steadily moving towards its conclusion. A sign of this is also the momentous fact that on the sunny morning of the next day, our tourist brigade set off with a dashing roll towards Istanbul.