Leigh in Azerbaijan

Azeri web crawler finds my blog. 

The above link is now part of something that appears to gather news on Azerbaijan.

Yesterday chaperones here had the option of touring some of the city.  I had a tour of the Aegean (Tax) Free (industrial) Zone here in Izmir, where the Space Camp is situated.  It’s a gated suburb.   Later I joined some others in going to a glass bead shop and then a walking tour of the old and new city – by old I’m only talking 50 years ago.

Izmir is a beautiful clean city unlike anything I’ve seen in Turkey.  We saw no rubbish on the streets and the buildings’ exteriors are clean and neat.  Very few women are wearing headscarves, t-shirts can be seen being worn … it could be any other Mediterranean city.  I’ve decided this is the second Turkish place I could come and live happily, the first being Sirince which is not far from Ephesus, south of here.   The Camp has an employee, Bisak, whose role is customer relations.  She organises small buses to take us on the various tours.  She’s a recent graduate in International Relations and thinks she’ll probably end up in marketing for a international company. At the moment she has a ‘green’ passport which gets her into any European country as her father was a senior army official.  It expires shortly, so she will join the rest of the Turks who suffer long delays at most countries’ immigration gates.

I missed the first Azeribaijani lesson on Monday but I’ll be there next Monday.  It’s nice to at least have a few words here in Turkey, mostly greetings and polite words.