This is a story about bay leaves, which starts in Turkey, where Sveta and I spent some time recently - I was teaching at what is often claimed to be the best university in the country. I hated it. Partly it was the location - I now know that Ankara is not the best place to go if you want to experience what Turkey has to offer the visitor - but mainly it was the idiots who ran the department I worked for. At one stage, we had a long weekend and Sveta and I decided to escape for a few days. We chose Istanbul as it was the middle of winter and rather cold so we thought visiting a city would be best. Istanbul, it turned out, fulfilled all our expectations and more. It is a very beautiful city, full of ancient and picturesque buildings and the Bosfor, the strait which connects the Aegean and Black Seas, runs right through the middle of it.
So what about the bay leaves? Well, if you go to Istanbul you'll almost certainly take a boat trip along the Bosfor as we did, and I would thoroughly recommend it. The best, and cheapest boat is the government one and it makes several stops, the last being at a village below a ruined castle on the east bank. You can walk up to the castle and scramble around it - the views are magnificent. You begin by walking up a road which leads out of the village towards an army base - the road goes all the way up to the castle and if you had a car, this is of course the way you would come. Walking, however, allows you to take a short-cut through what I suppose were the lower ramparts of the castle, now ruined and overgrown, and this is where you first notice the bushes with lovely green, shiny leaves.
Sveta and I stopped to gather a load of leaves - I had my wee Swiss army pen-knife with me and we used it to cut them off. As we were doing so, two women who were on their way down, stopped to watch us. One of them asked (well I assumed she did) what we were doing and I held up a leaf and pointed to it. "Ingilisce?" she asked. Had I tried to explain that I was actually Scots and Sveta was Russian, it would probably have complicated things unnecessarily and at the time it seemed like splitting hairs, so I just nodded, smiled and said "Evet." That seemed to satisfy them and they carried on walking down the hill giggling and chattering. We took the leaves back to Ankara with us and dried them out. We still have a jarful at home.
What's the point of all this then? Well, for a start, it illustrates that what you usually have to pay for, you can often get for free if you keep your eyes open, but that's the least of it. When we got back to miserable, shitty old Ankara Bullshit University, I promptly handed in my notice and Sveta and I made up our minds to use every spare day we had left in Turkey to see what was good about the country. And it was good. We visited ruined Roman cities, walked along beautiful beaches and through whispering mountain pine forests and sat by three different seas, but most of all we discovered how friendly, kind and hospitable Turkish people were to visitors and made many friends whom we hope to see again.
When we were back in Ankara we had a couple of unpleasant days before leaving and I used to look at our pile of bay leaves drying in the corner. Some people say that you're born and then you start to die. Others, that life is just for living. Looking at that wee pile made me realise that there's a very fine line between living and dying and which you choose often depends solely on you. As we left Bum-hole University and the idiots who thought it was the world and they were in control of it, we didn't look back. "Fuck 'em all." I said to Sveta. "Fuck 'em all, Ashy." she replied.