Black Sea Coast
We bounced up to the Black Sea coast yesterday and stayed in Amasra, a pretty coastal resort town that’s popular with Turkish tourists. We seemed to be the only foreigners around, so, needless to say, I was probably the tallest man and Hazel was certainly the tallest woman in town.
Amasra was dreamy, with the sea and some nice cliffs and the sunset over the harbor etc. etc. This was basically our only honeymooney destination so far, so we tried to take what advantage of it we could with a romantic walk down the pier at the end of the day.
We only stayed one night, and the romance abruptly ended when we took a bus down the coast on the scenic but treacherous, winding, and poorly maintained road to the next town over. They pretty much handed out barf bags when we stepped on, and by my count three of the passengers were throwing up within the first fifteen minutes of the trıp. So Hazel and I abruptly cancelled whatever plans we had to continue down the coast and took the next dolmuş inland, to Kastamonu.
Here in central Turkey I was expecting women to be mostly absent from the public sphere, the way they are in India. This is not at all the case. I see women performing all the same roles that men do, at least in the service industries, and the women just as often speak better English so they’re the ones we often interact with, just like in the states.
I would add that women are notably absent from the gaming/Internet cafes that we blog from. Hazel’s outnumbered maybe thirty to one at the moment. But I’ll protect her from the World-of-Warcraft adolescent male gamers!