Or that's how it seems to me sometimes when I'm feeling at my most churlish and into my inbox pops some absurd difference of opinion between expats over who might or might not have asked the vet to give which street (or possibly not street) dog an injection at which hotly disputed price. Don't even get them started on when such a request might or might not have been made. All I know is that it wasn't me, and I wasn't there at the time in question, whenever that might have been!Get over yourselves, I find myself itching to shout. In Pakistan, over a million people are on the move. In Sri Lanka, there's an unfolding humanitarian crisis. Gaza is in the same dire straits as a few months ago. Really, there are more important things on which to be expending one's emotional energy. But to say that would no doubt lead to yet more dissension, so instead I'm obliged to waste precious time on an exchange of emails promising to sort out the problem almost certainly to the satisfaction of no one at all. And the worst of it is knowing that once this hiccough is resolved, another one just like it will be following along close behind.
Sigh. I guess it's the price one pays for choosing to live in a small community, although even as I write this, I'm reminded of noisy-neighbor and property-boundary disputes that drag on interminably in London and no doubt İstanbul, too. It's just that one tends to assume that people living in beautiful surroundings will be mellowed by them to the extent that they won't want to fight over trivia. It's also even more irritating, when trying oneself to attain that mellow frame of mind, to be distracted by such nonsense.
Regardless, I'm trying to focus my energies on higher matters, in this case preparations for Göreme's twice-yearly open house event. Even this is getting trickier as one house-owner is vanishing to Holland just when we need him, while a shadow hangs over whether we will be able to open the frescoed governor's mansion now that it may or may not have changed hands. My own house will need a scrub from top to bottom. I will also need to rush to the garden center to stock up on plants since there's nothing sadder than a spring courtyard with only the dead relics of last year's plantings in place.
Still, allowing for no more vexatious interruptions, I'm confident that all these problems can be resolved in time, which means that the invitation is open to anyone who will be visiting Cappadocia on May 23-24. Drop by and see how life is lived behind the high walls shielding the cave-houses from view. I'm sure you won't be disappointed.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
