Also from Friday night, a photo of my apartment’s lounge room. The photo was an accident – I wasn’t aware I had taken it.

Don’t you love the furniture?

From Friday night: a sign at a cafe in Mersin offering “Nest Kafe” for 1,000,000 old lira or “1 one” new YTL (“bir” in Turkish is “one”).

I guess the cafe meant the well known multinational coffee brand that is also the generic word for instant coffee in Turkey: Nescafé.

In the past week bootlegged raki has killed at least 15 people in Turkey. This has lead to a massive recall of all the current authentic raki bottles on the market to be replaced by bottles with different colour caps.

The motivation to produce illegal raki is fairly easy to find. Recently, the tax on a bottle of raki went up again. Now a 700 ml bottle costs 22.5 YTL (almost US$18 at today’s rate), 65% of which is tax. For a poor country this is a lot of money.

Raki is not the only product or service to have a recent price rise. Other rises I have personally experienced:
* My last haircut (without a wash) at local hairdresser cost 5 YTL, whereas the previous one, including a wash, was 4.5.
* The cost to dry clean a pair of pants has risen from 3.0 to 3.5 YTL.
* A return Mersin-Adana train trip is now 5.0 YTL, up from 3.5. When I bought my ticket Saturday I gave a 5-lira note and waited, expecting to receive change…

In Turkey’s hyperinflation past, regular and large price increases were the norm as the lira was always losing value (see table 2/3 down page). Correspondingly, wages also rose. However, in the past 2 or 3 years, both inflation and the lira value have stabilised. In fact, the Turkish lira is at its strongest against the USD since July 2001. This financial stability has helped keep salaries in check.

Stable salaries and rising prices result in a squeeze, causing people to either modify their purchases or go without. For an essential like raki, many people and restaurants decided to buy cheaper, for going without was not an option…

See what the Columbians, German, Indian and Romanian are up to at: blogspot.com/.

UPDATE: The lads have now joined the wonderful collaboration nomadlife and their blog is now at: http://adanatrainees.nomadlife.org/.

My blog will be joining nomadlife as soon as non-nomadlife-hosted blogs are allowed.

Looking upstream from the bridge at the river outlet.

The river bank.

The large light in both photos is from the corner of the residential military base.

This website is currently #9 out of more than 25,000,000 results on MSN Search for pictures of nude woman.

Sorry folks, there aren’t any pictures of nude woman [sic] on this website. However, you are more than welcome to stay around and read the articles 🙂

Last night, with outdoor wedding music in the background, I took the following photo of the new path’s lights reflecting on the river.

Today I received boxer shorts for Christmas from Annie and David. The parcel took exactly 3 months to arrive from Australia to my office in Mersin, Turkey by sea mail.