Piano Shopping in Izmir

Our first road trip since Oludeniz in October was mainly to check out a piano shop in Izmir. Found the store ok and it looks like we will end up parting with about 3800 ytl sometime soon. It's overdue though....we have to get some of the kids' musical energy channeled into structured lessons or it will be an opportunity lost I fear. At the risk of being driven mad with the plinking and plunking, lessons mean there simply has to be a piano in the house. Nino has researched a couple of options for a teacher so it looks like the New Year begins with the Sound of Music.

This week end also marks the beginning of Kurban Bayram, or the 'Feast of the Sacrifice' holiday. It's more commonly recognized with the beginning of the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca which is associated with the same holiday. Sacrificing a sheep during this time is very common and this will begin in earnest tomorrow. The roads were awash in sheep being carried home on the backs on trucks or poking their heads out from the half open trunks of cars. Sheep could be seen tied to trees or fences in the yards of the homes who had already made their purchase. The holiday officially started this afternoon and will last four and a half days with most activities returning to normal on Friday. It will be a very quiet week at work and perhaps a chance to get caught up slightly. The roads are also notoriously extra dangerous during this Bayram...even more so than Ramazan Bayram...another good reason to stick close to home.

There hasn't been much worth writing about over the last few weeks as we have more or less been in a regular work and school routine. Other than some glorious weather at the beginning of November, the rest of the month was on and off rain. We did manage a walk around Haç Kadın (spelling?) one Sunday afternoon. It's a large outdoor area full of walking trails and beautiful large pine trees just outside of Uşak. Mostly reforested it appears and well looked after as the Turkish people tend to do when it comes to treed areas. Pound for pound I would venture to say that Turkey plants more trees than Canada does. This past week brought the sun out again and things have had a chance to dry out. Nino attended a parent/teachers day about two weeks ago. This was conducted on a Saturday if you can imagine and all the teachers were available and Nino got around to talk with all of them in a few hours. Not having been directly involved in such things in Canada before, I can't say for certain, however I doubt if Saturdays are a common day to hold these events on back home?


Nico has adjusted very well since his first week of delinquency and although not challenged much academically at this point he is coping very well by all accounts.

Galina is doing exceptionally well and the amount of praise she keeps receiving is making us very proud. She deserves every bit of it though.

The big family event for us was Nico's birthday on the 23rd of November. We don't tend to get very carried away with these things as a rule and we were most excited about the fact that he started riding his bicycle without training wheels the day before he turned five. Quite an accomplishment it was too. He had been talking about giving it a shot for a few weeks and when it dried up for a few hours on the Saturday before his birthday, I asked him if he wanted to give it a shot. Off he went with not even a hint of falling, up to the end of the street and back again. I was impressed but not as much as Galina who had prepared him, (and herself), for at least a few bad crashes. So that milestone has been reached now for them both.

Although the piano pre-purchase visit was first on our list with the Izmir trip we did finally manage to also visit a few sites in Izmir that we had been putting off until now. One of the 'Seven Churches of Revelations' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Patmos) existed in the old city of Smyrna which Izmir was known as long ago. It's growth has long since absorbed all of the old ruins which can now be found in different parts of what is now a sprawling metropolis of about three million people. It is much like Rome in that respect and in fact Smyrna could claim the largest Agora, (a kind of Roman market/business complex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora) outside of Rome during it's heyday. We found ourselves first at the very old Smyrna ruins which existed much before the Roman era and the church as it turns out and logically so considering the time period, was not actually there but somewhere near the Agora which is the newer, if you like, area. It must be kept in mind that Smyrna, along with Ephesus, has probably one of the oldest records of continuous habitation known in Asia Minor....5000 years or more. As interesting as the Agora was though we never did find any reference to the general location of the church.
Another little piece of interesting information that Nino came across on Saturday night when we discovered that our first attempt to find the location of the Church had failed, was the existence of Saint Polycarp Catholic church downtown that we have driven by several times and never really noticed. It seems St. Polycarp was affiliated with the Revelations Church. We walked around the walled city block that the church grounds occupy inside but entrance is apparently only by prior appointment. Inside there would probably be information as to the location of the church referred to by John of Patmos but we had to leave it for another time. http://www.allaboutturkey.com/izm_site.htm

Note the bacon in the pan. A stop at the large Migros grocery store in Balçova for some foodstuffs on our way back to Urla brought with it the discovery that they now sold bacon. We ignored the 11.80 ytl price and snapped up two packages....each 80 grams. What you see in the pan is the contents of one package-in Canadian dollar equivalence, each strip is worth about $1.80.

We made a slight detour on our way home to have a road side picnic with leftover Kentucy Fried chicken and take in a stop at Alişehir where ancient Philadelphia was located and the site of another of the seven churches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ala%C5%9Fehir . Not much remains now but the site is worth visiting nevertheless.

We continued the trip back home by travelling through Eşme and managed to be off the roads to avoid the driving craziness that increases when the sun goes down.

Ölüdeniz & Paragliding

I have been falling down on the job....as far as getting my weekly posts written goes anyway. I have somewhat of an excuse in that access to any blog sites was been banned for awhile, some sort of extension to the youtube ban that has been in effect in Turkey for some time now. I won't elaborated on it here as a quick web search will turn up more than enough info on the subject. Here's a link to a BBC story http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6427355.stm.

The month has slipped by pretty quickly and here it is Halloween already. The kids have increasingly faint memories of this pagan North American ritual. If fact it has not come up at all this year. Nicolai probably would claim to have never heard of it although he was dragged around the neighborhood in HVGB at least once if my memory serves correct....perhaps it was just Galina?

We did manage to make what will most likely be our last trip to the beach this year when we went to Ölüdeniz to take in the 9th international paragliding event. The water and weather were lovely and watching the para gliders is never easy to tire of. Not too many pictures to share since we took mostly video. Here's one though showing the beach and one glider. It doesn't do justice to the number of kites that were generally in the sky at any one time. Saw two mishaps; one when a pilot managed to land into a steel framed hut near the beach and had to be carted off by ambulance, another when a sail? kite? wing? looked like it started to come apart in the sky and the pilot had to pull his emergency chute and ended up ditching in the water. There were a disproportionately large number of people limping around with assorted casts and bandages. This might lead you to believe that the sport is mostly for the young and foolish however there are many 40+ year olds that are involved and the tandem jumps with a professional are taken by more than a few in their 60's.

Nino and I each did a tandem jump in 2006. Her's was a nice, leisurely 45 minute ride down from Babadağ, with a brief vomitous moment, straight down onto the unsuspecting sunbathers below, brought on by the nauseating ride up the mountain, sitting sideways in the back of a truck. Later in the day I had a scream packed 20 minute ride with a kamikaze style pilot who mistook my innocent question about acrobatics for a desire to do some, and promptly hurled us into tight descending turns which brought on screams from me that are still echoing around the hills I am sure. I would do it again though and watching this year brought on renewed interest to perhaps take the training required to go solo. Who knows and Nino would also not be shy about it I think.

Anyway this year we were strictly observers.

We also spent a bit more time in Fethiye and get a fairly close up look at one of the more famous Lycian tombs which are all around but mostly difficult to get close to since they are carved into faces of the hills surrounding the city. We also drove around the harbour and found where a few 'Bodrum' style boats were under construction. All in all a nice trip to the coast for that time of year.

Iyi Bayram Lar...and Gold Eagles

Well Ramadan and the Bayram (holiday) associated with its ending are over for another year. Since the start of this religious observance is based on the lunar calendar it retreats every year by ten days or so. This makes it increasingly harder for observers who choose to fast as the lengthening daylight hours require longer periods of obsrvance.

It made it particularly hard for us this year at the mine site when we seemed to be afflicted by 'The Curse of the Investment Analysts' who started a tour of the operation immediately following Bayram...what would be the Christian equivalent of January 2nd.

A lot of our equipment seemingly conspired against us to pick last week to self destruct and what should have been time spent celebrating with family turned into a nightmare for many of us.

One of those weeks where you wonder why in the hell you ever decided to get into the mining business.

As is becoming regular, our guys rose to the challenge and although there were a few wrinkles if you looked closely, the Tuesday of the big visit dawned sunny and warm and the whole show was ticking along like a Swiss watch while they came and kicked the tires.

Unless you are familiar with a heap leach operation, the following may not make much of an impact on you....but here goes...keep in mind that already for about three weeks, many employees have not been eating, drinking or smoking during daylight hours, coupled with little sleep as they celebrate with family and friends during the night. Tired and hungry is an understatement...

We go into the last week of Ramadan hoping that the liners in our gyratory crusher will hold up only to realize that there is every chance that they won't and if we do not shut the show down for 4-5 days during Bayram to change them out, the IA's will be here while the crusher is torn apart and won't get to see our shiny new 150 t CAT trucks hauling muck to feed it. The 'COTIA' begins.

So two days before we decide to jump into that job, and have told about ten guys that...'Hey, you've got to work through Bayram, (the equivalent of Christmas and New Year's), our 700 meter long overland conveyor decides to tear in half. An hour later, our conveyor tripper car decides to ram itself into the rail stops and bends itself to ratshit.

So the crew that is already tired comes out to fix things and get more tired before they start the reline job that is going to really make them tired. All while family and friends are enjoying the most important holiday of the year without them.

They did well though and made us all proud. Then the weekend came, three days before the big IA visit and we saw something like 28 mm of rain in 24 hours....a leach pad operator's nightmare. Heavy rain on a pad with a 12% slope can cause you grief but we survived relatively well....just more fix up stuff to take care of before the show.

Just as all hands were getting ready to grab some well earned rest before the start of the new week, word arrived that the new gyratory mainshaft liner was wonky. After about eight hours of trying to tighten it up by swinging a battering ram against it, we all went home and kept out fingers crossed....only to find out that three hours after starting crushing the upper mantle came loose again. The IAs were arriving in about six hours and it's 0130 hrs on the 7th and your's truly is wedged between the concaves and the mainshaft trying to figure out what in the name of Christ to do. About 6 shiny new 785 trucks were backed up and the IA's were having breakfast at the Dulguroglu Hotel getting ready to hit the bus to the minesite.

Nothing to do but keep pouring the muck into it and hope for the best and believe it or not, it kept together for not just one day, but three days.

The whole time the IA's were on site the entire operation was humming along famously...and has been ever since. I love this business...

In the midst of all this fun, I continue to be consumed by the unfolding events related to the lack of credit in the world's banking community. Even though I have been expecting it for years it is somewhat like watching a car wreck. You feel like you should turn away but you just have to watch.
Among the incredible stories unfolding is this one... http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=3bc8e278-9546-41b5-aa10-c49ce11e20cb where the US Mint announces that it will no longer produce Gold Eagles because of high demand!!! Can you imagine if GM declared they were not going to produce any more of a certain car model because too many people wanted to buy them?
The truth is TPTB want your money in a bank account where they can get their hands on it. Not much good to them if it is tied up in gold coins...or at home stuffed in your mattress. One arm of the US G'ment is propping up the banks while Paulson declared today that he expects as many as 1500 US banks to fail. Rough waters ahead.....