The Black Sea

On our way to the Black Sea last week, after the pickle shop incident. There were a lot of animals on the road as we drove through farmland - cows, chickens, ducks, and what looked like some sort of buffalo:

This beach is usually very crowded, but summer is over now, so it was just us and the cows.

The beach was littered with the sort of things you might find on a Canadian beach.  There were a lot of beer bottles and cans (here's a Tuborg bottle):

Other assorted bottles as well - this one's covered in barnacles.

Shotgun shells! Very Canadian. There were a lot of less attractive things, including dirty diapers, which I didn't photograph.  I found a lot of empty sunscreen tubes, alcoholic drink containers, dead campfires, and old sofas and rugs littered around. There was a fair bit of garbage, but not as much as there is on the public beaches at the Dead Sea.

Seagull footprints:

Little kid footprints:

Rukiye and a relative having fun in the waves. The first time they got drenched was a surprise.

The seagulls who made all those footprints:

It was a very fun trip, despite the incident with the police.

I nearly got arrested

My friend Rukiye loves pickles. We stopped in a village on our way to the Black Sea, and Rukiye loaded up with pickles - there are whole shops that sell just pickles. They pickle all sort of fruits and vegetables.

If you look closely, you can see that the two big jars on the far right in the photo below are full of pickled melon.

A neat old house next to a very typical Ottoman masjid.

A run down old wooden house which I found interesting.



I went back to the pickle shop to find out if Rukiye was finished (she wasn't). Moments later, the little shop filled up with police officers wearing green uniforms and carrying very large guns. Rukiye and I were escorted to the police station and went before the commandant to explain why I had been taking pictures. The commandant's smoky office filled up with police officers arguing loudly in Turkish. I don't speak that much Turkish and none of the police officers could speak English or Arabic, and I was having a hard time communicating why I was photographing pickles. I found out later that photography was prohibited in that neighbourhood, because there was a police station nearby, although there were no signs or notices about it.  Everyone there already knew.

I suppose that the commandant eventually decided I was just a clueless tourist, because they released us. They didn't even delete the pictures. The commandant found out that he and Rukiye were from the same village, and they had a long chat, none of which I understood. She told me later that he invited her to his house for tea, rather more forcefully than she found comfortable, and she had a difficult time avoiding it.

I was afraid I had gotten Rukiye into trouble, and felt terrible for inconveniencing her. She thought it was all a great joke, and told everyone we know how I'd nearly gotten arrested. I'm told that's not at all unusual in Turkey, or in Jordan. Rukiye was taking pictures of ordinary touristy stuff in Zarqa, and was taken to the police station to explain what she had been doing.

I have to wonder, don't the police have anything better to do that take tourists in for questioning about why they were taking photos? That's what tourists do, they photograph everything in sight. There are a lot of police officers, and they monitor everything, perhaps they don't have anything better to do, but it seems like a waste of time to me.

Oh well, I'm just glad I didn't get arrested, or get Rukiye into trouble.