The peak of summer is over and I now sleep with a sheet over me (as opposed to nothing) and warm the shower water (as opposed to cold showers). The days are still hot and the nights beautiful, though. The good weather (autumn) will start soon!

Last night Orhan and Banu visited for some Iranian pistachios, Iranian Turkish coffee and a Pera beer. Pera is a reasonably new beer brand. It tastes okay.

My lotto partnership with Huseying abi didn’t bring any results. Afterwards I went out for some beers with Taner, Ozge, Edge and Ali. It is funny in Turkey I often go weeks without drinking alcohol and it doesn’t bother me one iota, but in Iran, where drinking alcohol is forbidden, the love of a beer was more consuming. Karen and I were going to open a beer at Dogubeyazit but then she had to catch a bus earlier than expected.

The annual Mersin Festivali began Friday night with a Sertab Erener concert. Sertab won the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Everyway That I Can‘.

After dinner I walked to the Cumhuriyet Meydani (Republic Square) in time to see (in order):

-The sycophantic mayor present Sertab with a bouquet

-A good fireworks display

-The final two songs of the night: her follow up single to ‘Everyway That I Can’ followed by, predictably, ‘Everyway That I Can’. These two songs are in English (although there are Turkish versions of ‘Everyway That I Can’) whereas Sertab’s previous work, if I recall correctly, was in Turkish.

There were many thousands of people standing in the square. People living in the multi-storey blacks of flats nearby were lucky (or unlucky) enough to receives bird’s eye views of the concert without the rush of the crowd.