Friday, May 25, 2012

Otel Iris


Our second stop in Turkey, the Otel Iris, outside of Canakkale...



Not sure if you can see the mosaic up there--2 sad lovers in a boat.  Probably meant to be Helen and Paris, as Canakkale is the staging point for visits to both Troy and Gallipoli.  TheDardanelles are also the spot where Leander would nightly swim across to meet his gal Hero--the swim Lord Byron imitated later, for his own complex reasons (beyond writing a bad poem about his swim).

So, we arrived at a beach hotel...


A beautiful place...

with the swimming pool, an outside bar, and this, the first time I've seen an olive tree in bloom...

Friendly locals...



Hard to resist getting to the water--here Matthew and Steve have plunged in...

But if you look closer at the beach, well, they don't seem to do any immediate local clean-up, and both the plastic that won't dissolve and who knows what that has dissolved has all arrived "downstream" from Istanbul...

Supper was a sprawling buffet, colorful, though toned down for every visitor possible...


I was irritated the wi-fi didn't reach the rooms and kept cutting out even in the lobby, and those of us on the not-pool, not-beach side of the hotel overlooked a ? petting zoo? animal reserve? chicken yard ? (smelled like a chicken yard from my balcony on the second floor), and that one sad rooster thought that dawn came at 3, and 4:30, and 5 and 6:20...

But not a bad 2 nights, and we could look across the cove to hills just before Troy, where some of those Greeks may have landed, some, oh, 3200 years ago...


later, bob
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