Others get twitchy if they can’t lay their hands on Cadbury’s chocolate. There are even people who think it worth the effort of trekking across to Greece from time to time just to avail themselves of a bacon sandwich.Of course, this was a question I asked myself when I first moved here. It was true that I feared the odd pang of desire for British tea with milk in it, for fish and chips or for a full-on Indian curry, but the real concern was always going to be laying my hands on appropriate reading matter. A nerdy bookworm from the get-go, I couldn’t imagine a day without reading, and not just any old reading either. Stranded in Khartoum in Sudan, I had once been reduced to reading a Jackie Collins abandoned by another traveler, but generally speaking I’ve always been someone who knows what I want to read, and most of it is fairly serious.
In İstanbul, even in 1998, there were several shops selling books in English. Göreme, however, was a whole different ball game, and it came as an enormous relief to discover that the expats already settled there were mostly avid book lovers like myself, which meant a regular supply of novels in circulation. Nowadays we’re especially lucky because we have, in 1001 Books, probably the best second-hand bookshop in the country. And if that’s not enough, there’s always good old Amazon to fall back on.
But Amazon has its periodic catches. Postage from the UK can be alarmingly high, and just occasionally you can get a surprise, such as the time when I decided that I wanted to reread “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” What I ordered was a small, cheap paperback. What actually arrived was “The Forgotten People of Siberia,” a glossy coffee-table volume in which the only common title word was “the”! Recently I ordered “Roseanna,” a seminal Swedish crime novel by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. This time it was certainly “Roseanna” that showed up, but somehow the version they’d seen fit to send me was the one translated into French.
But those surprises were as nothing to the one I recently received from Hepsiburada.com, the other Web site on which I regularly place orders. Despite pleas, prayers and even occasional foot-stamping tantrums, I’ve failed to persuade any local stores to stock giant sacks of dried cat food suitable for the owner of 10 felines. Clicking onto Hepsiburada instead, I decided to order 75 tins of cat food while I was at it. Unfortunately, on that particular day, the box for indicating how many of an item was wanted was not working, which meant having to tick the box 75 separate times. Somehow along the way I messed up so that 73 tins went into one order and the other two into another one. Come the day that the lonely twosome arrived you can imagine my surprise when I opened the parcel to find that it included a neatly folded Turkish flag so that I too can celebrate the bayrams (holidays) with a flag hanging out of my window.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
