You and Your Ultra-Hi-Tech Hotel Room Thermostat

A week on the Turkish Riviera

We landed in Antalya on time, got our passports stamped, and headed past a number of currency-changing counters toward the great outdoors, where a surly young man herded us into an area in which I saw no sign saying, “No not-smoking,” but expected that I would at any moment, as no one one in sight wasn’t igniting cigarette after cigarette.

At last we were ushered into a minibus driven by a non-English speaker. We drove east for what seemed 40 days and 40 nights, during which I entertained myself by trying to decide if I should tip him at the end. Having not paused at any of the money-changing counters, I had only 5.40€, which seemed paltry for so long a drive. I changed my mind around 150 times, and in the end decided that it might be better not to tip him than to tip him only 5.40€.

Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) and I agree that nothing is more important on an all-inclusive holiday than the food, and the Diamond Hill Hotel’s was the best we’ve ever had, delicious and beautifully presented. Oh, what the Turks can do with aubergines, cabbage, and peppers! Our first dessert — a wonderful tiramisu served in a cup made of chocolate — was the best we’ve ever eaten abroad. I resolved to consume no more than 5000 calories per day. Oh, all right. Per meal.

On checking in, we were issued cards that we could redeem for towels, given a thick pamphlet entitled You and Your Ultra-Hi-Tech Room Thermostat, and encouraged to allow ourselves to be oriented the following morning by a guy who turned out to be in the business of persuading visitors to go on various overpriced tours. Mrs. Mendelsohn liked the idea of the Alanya City one, which cost 90E. “Too much,” scoffed I, predictably, whereupon our new friend, pretending to be accommodating, asked how much we were prepared to pay. I was quite content not to go at all, but Mrs. Mendelsohn liked the idea and said she would pay 120€ for the pair of us. The guy got out his phone and pretended to need to persuade his boss to accept our bid. (They’d probably have accepted 90€ for both of us.) I was later dismayed to learn that the excursion precluded the birthday sushi-fest in Chiswick I’d been looking forward to.

There are few things on earth worse than packaged supermarket sushi, and Turkey’s giant Migros chain has it!

Most of our fellow guests were Russian. I didn’t see any of them snapping fingers at the waiters, as at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt, but we did see one little boy, the spawn of a surly-looking steroid abuser who looked as though dying to snap his fingers at someone, picking up and examining a succession of delectables at the evening buffet, and then putting them back whence they’d come. I’d have urged him to cut it the fuck out absent my impression that Papa would break every bone in my body, and a couple in the bodies of innocent onlookers.

The hotel’s bit of beach, reached via an overpass and a short walk, was grubby, with unpleasantly gritty sand not reminiscent of the fine paler sand I’d enjoyed as a boy in Playa del Rey and Santa Monica, but the Mediterranean was obligingly temperate. Back at the hotel’s gigantic swimming pool, relentless dance music — thud! thud! thud! — with deafening bass — made it impossible to enjoy a book. It was as though one of those assholes who wants the world to know how much he loves hip hop pulling up beside you at an intersection, and the light never turning green.

I shuffled geriatrically over to the DJ booth to ask how many of my fellow guests had asked for the music to be so loud. The DJ frowned in confusion and said none. “Well,” I said, “I’m asking that it be much quieter, so I guess the vote’s 1-nil.” He wasn’t convinced. Thud! Thud! Thud! Two hundred and fifty-six of them a minute.

A vacant lot a black from our hotel. In the shadows of some of the most luxurious hotels one finds shocking squalor.

We were awakened every morning at a quarter to five, as was everyone else in the region, by an amplified muezzin summoning the Muslim faithful to prayer. Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling), the lightest sleeper in the solar system, commonly manages finally to fall asleep at around four, and was significantly unamused. I wondered, as I always do in majority-Muslim countries, why the pious need to be reminded so often and so loudly of Allah’s need of constant reassurance of their devotion.

Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) relaxes between meals.

One was seldom more than a few hundred yards from a minaret, and I amused myself by wondering if there were a local company that dominated the market, and advertised on TV. “Need a minaret? We’ve got a minaret for every taste and budget! You tell us the height! You tell us the circumference and color! We erect it, at a price you can afford! Minarets R Us, building spires to the sky in Antalya since 1951. (Terms and conditions apply. Not available in Northern Ireland.)”

Mrs. Mendelsohn contributed the part in parentheses, without which the whole thing would be very much less hilarious.