the reasons i love antalya

i really love my new city antalya. it's such a nice place, i love exploring it with my darling Iwona, she's been here for a while already and knows lots of little tiny streets and little tiny shops that i would never find or be brave enough to venture into on my own, so i love meeting with her and wander around and find things out - what's where and for how much. and though things are not immediately available like in london for example, where you go to john lewis and buy everything you need - every yarn of every colour you can conceive of, every craft tool you are surprised that even existed. here, we need to search for things, walk around, ask questions, get funny looks, and make fools of ourselves, but when we do find what we are looking for, it makes us that much happier - and gives us that much more satisfaction and excitement. and so recently we've decided we needed some erasers and linoleum cutters to make some stamps after falling completely in love with Geninne's gorgeous hand carved stamps and her great tutorial on how to carve them. so one day we set off in search of a linoleum cutter, though we didn't even know where to start nor how to say linoleum cutter in turkish. we assumed that a shop with art supplies might have such things or that at least they would point us into the right direction. it took us a while to find such a shop (there is only one in the whole of antalya!). but find it we did and to our greatest surprise mingled with a feeling of total victory - they had the cutters (even two types, though the cheaper type was described as crap, so we bought the more expensive one, to the shop owner's great satisfaction - a win win situation, I guess, ha ha). finding erasers wasn't hard - every stationery shop we saw had a big selection - from cheap (i.e. described as crappy) ones to more expensive types (i.e. the ones that do their job of erasing very well, ha). we bought a few from the medium price range and our new hobby of carving stamps begun. now, we need some ink and ink pads - but that will be the subject of our next exploring trip, how exciting.


oh and one more thing. my friend Kamila has a new lovely baby - a cute little guy called Deniz who looks like this:

with such gorgeous friends like mine and cute babies around - how could I not love this place?