Silly me. I've arranged to meet friends in Avanos without taking into account the demands of the social calendar, which mean that the best-connected people receive so many invitations that they're forced into double booking.The wedding is taking place on the grounds of one of the more featureless local hotels. The large pool looks eerily turquoise and oddly empty beneath the floodlights and the tables are lined up along one side of it, with the couple parked on chairs so close to the edge that I worry lest in all the excitement one of them should step backwards and wind up in the water.
My friends go off to hobnob with relatives, which leaves me alone and twiddling my thumbs with little to distract me bar the habitual plate of dry biscuits and packet of peach juice. Then an “oohing” and “aahing” starts up at the next table, and I glance round to see that tiny paper balloons with candles inside them are being released into the sky where they float up and up before ever so quietly imploding in the distance. Next the cake is unveiled with a flourish. It is a monster of a multi-layered masterpiece, and I am reminded that while guest refreshments may go tediously unchanged, there is nonetheless a sort of celebratory inflation going on locally, a form of keeping up with the Joneses that means everyone is on the lookout for a novelty to make theirs the standout wedding memory of the season.
There's a lot of tut-tutting over the continued habit of reading out the value of gifts given to the happy couple (“X a generous $500, Y a measly $10” -- I paraphrase), so we make our excuses and leave in search of the engagement. This is taking place at one of the cooperative housing developments that have sprung up all around Avanos. The houses may be nice in their cookie-cutter way, but all too often the infrastructure that should go with them is sorely lacking. Sure enough, we arrive to find white plastic chairs set up for guests on the patch of dirt that passes for a road between two rows of houses.
I'd love to say that it was an exciting few hours, that I came away with some great cultural insights or even with a great sense of occasion. In reality, though, the banality of the relentless concrete, plastic and dust filled me with gloom. Where, I wondered, was even a hint of the Cappadocian beauty for which tourists were prepared to travel thousands of miles? It is true that there was dancing; it is true that most people looked as if they were enjoying themselves. I, though, could think only of another occasion when I'd attended a wedding party inside the shell of a half-built shopping complex in Göreme. The sun had blazed down on the concrete; we could only see the fairy chimneys across the road by craning our necks and risking a back injury. Presumably the happy couple went elsewhere for their photographs. It was a shame they couldn't have taken the rest of us with them.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. 
