Testing times in Turkey

 Edited BY


G P Kennedy


Gul – in two places at once, Turkey



 We just spent the last week of summer 2020. The weather was so beautiful, warm and like the one – all your troubles were delayed. As we expected, there are still many people on the site where we stayed. We invite each other to coffee every day. I still love to read alone on the beach. While Mike lectures via the Internet I’m running to the beach. But I miss my books in Istanbul; we have left fewer books here naturally. 










COVID NEWS

 Apparently, Istanbul – a city of 16 million people, has recorded 40 % of Turkey’s virus cases, the health minister says. The pandemic is re-escalating in the entire country now. As always the Health Minister ridiculously avoided giving figures but said the number of cases in Istanbul is five times the cases in the capital Ankara. I have a few friends who have COVID in Istanbul. It must be worse than March- April.  We won’t be having our flu jabs this year as there are no flu jabs. Shame on our government.



More students will return to school on November 2 after a short holiday next week. But my cousin’s son went to his school just for three days. Then he’s been sent home due to the outbreak. We hear that many schools warned the virus is spreading in schools. In addition, people are bored and started to book a five-day holiday break from next Wednesday, which makes us worry. More people will be moving domestically and will spread the virus around the country. As of today (25 October) there were more than 10 million active cases and 1,152,536 deaths globally. That’s scary, isn’t it?





LIVING IN 3 HOUSES

 Aside from daily concerns, Mike worries about his 84 years-old mother in Liverpool, England. She wasn’t feeling well, she’s caught a nasty chest infection, luckily her covid test came back as negative. 


As Istanbul is that bad we have decided to stay as long as we can in this quiet area. Because we’ll be unable to stay in this house without heating, we started to look for a temporary apartment to spend the winter. We’ll be viewing a one-bed apartment by the sea next week and if it looks okay, we’ll rent it immediately. I can’t believe we’ll have three separate houses at the same time. We’ll end up paying two rents & utility bills for all three houses. I actually miss our home in Istanbul. Our goal just to survive our time in isolation.


 I miss my sister’s cat, Lila, too. Or, spend some time with my friends and family. Who would have thought that breakfast with friends in a cafe would seem like such a treat? We live in an extraordinary time. Stay safe & healthy.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 44 - Mixed messages lead to protests in Turkey

Image
Edited BY G P Kennedy Gul- Aegean Coast, Turkey  The weather was icy cold last week, when I said I can’t take another day, suddenly that feeling of spring was in the air.   According to the Turkish folk calendar, the first Cemre - imagine a meteor fireball passing by up in the sky, warming the air - fell on Feb 19 and 20. There are two more yet to fall, one on Feb 26 and 27 and the last two in March – also will lead to the New Year Nevruz (Nowruz, Iranian).    They say the first Cemre always falls to the air, the second to the water, and the third to the earth.  Nowadays, because of warmer weather, we are able to have coffee in our garden with our neighbors and have a chat. Otherwise, we were overwhelmed with loneliness.  POLITICAL CRAZINESS  Our ordinary lives can be boring but daily politics is the opposite, there was a controversial event almost every day this week.   This country will make all of us mentally sick. It is ...
Read more

Week 49 - Simon says, 'Count your blessings my fellow Aussies'

Image
Edited BY G P Kennedy Simon - Perth, WA   Hi everyone, hope all is well wherever you are.  So here we are at the end of March in Western Australia, which means over 12 months of the Pandemic.   Across all of the country, the vaccines are being slowly rolled out but we are not hitting our intended targets.   This seems to be a combination of lack of supply and the doses being given by GP’s rather than at vaccination centers. I guess the only thing that stops this from being a real concern is the size of our case numbers.   The vast majority of our small number of cases is from returned overseas travelers who are put in quarantine anyway.   This week sees a small outbreak in Queensland with some community transmission. This has led to a snap three-day lockdown to try and contain it and perform contact tracing.  Going forward it looks like this will happen fairly frequently. We have demonstrated that these short and sharp lockdowns seem...
Read more

Week 15 - Wednesday in Milan explores the 'new normal' for Ellie

Image
Edited BY G P Kennedy Ellie - Milan, Italy    “How are y'all doing?” a friend from Texas asked me recently. I am happy to report that the contagion rate in Italy have been mostly down. Daily rates of new infections have been around 150 for the country.    I have the feeling, though, that this is due not only to scared people who mostly stick to their masks and distancing, but of the possibility to do things outdoors, which is what helps with holding new infections down. There are many unwelcome signs for change, though. For example, hope for getting rid of plastics, and its dispersal in the environment, is definitely given up.    Now that all coffee shops, company cafeterias and restaurants that hope to have clients indoors are required to outfit their spaces with distancing partitions, plastic has drastically increased. But it has also started causing some awkward moments.    I met with a friend for a coffee recently, our first get together after...
Read more