Almost every Friday (except during the summer) the Antalya Devlet Senfoni Orkestrasi performs in the Aspendos Salon at the Ataturk Kultur Merkezi.  They tend to focus on the classical "greatest hits", and this Friday is no exception.  On the program is the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s 4th Symphony. 

The concert hall is a modern structure with excellent acoustics, and its setting in the park is lovely, with a path lined with fragrant pine trees and decorated with whimsical sculptures.

The concert starts at 8:00 and costs 10 TL.

We took Ellis to this performance and for a seven year old he was pretty good at sitting through over 2 hours of classical music. He did nod off a bit at the end though but that may have been due to the heat in the place. It was like a furnace in there.

Why do Turkish people insist in having the heat turned up full blast? I am from Scotland, anything above freezing is warm for me and so I find 30 degrees heat inside a building using air-con a bit excessive. I don’t imagine the performers are thrilled at being cooked alive either. The company would save on their heating bills too and could maybe even reduce the price of the tickets to 8TL. Well, I did say I’m Scottish.

Here are some videos of the most recent concert we attended:

Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (excerpt)

Dvorak’s New World Symphony ( 3 excerpts )

As I was walking around Kaleiçi yesterday I bumped into Katja who I knew from the time she Couchsurfed in my apartment.  At that time she was talking to me about opening a laundry business but that she had very little funds to do so.

Imagine my surprise then when I saw her sitting outside her newly opened laundry business shop.

She had managed to raise the funds through a variety of means, one of which was something called Crowd Funding.

You listen to Katja explain more in the video below.

Here is a link to her website with lots more info about the project.

http://antalyalaundry.jimdo.com/englisch

Good luck Katja!

Cheers!

I popped along to the Black Betty last Thursday for a chat about the possibility of organising some more social events there and walked into a film set!  I had heard before that film sets were really boring and that was basically confirmed to me that afternoon.

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I hung around for about 3 hours to see if I could capture some of the scenes on camera and all I got was about 3 minutes of footage edited down from the 15 minutes or so that I took and even that isn’t exactly edge of the seat stuff.

It took absolutely ages to set up even a simple scene like walking in and out of the toilets and made me realise the incredible amount of painstaking work that goes into making a movie.  

You can get a feel for the afternoons proceeding below. 

Feel free to leave a comment even if it’s just to let me know you fell asleep halfway through.

Cheers.

I went along to Tudor’s Pub in Kaleçi to see my friend Oğuz’s new band which is called Voyn. Oğuz explains what that means in the short interview with him below.

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Although it was a Monday night quite a few people made it along as the night progressed. I certainly enjoyed myself and hope to see more of them performing in the future.

Here is the interview and the songs I recorded before the battery on my camera ran out. As you can see, some other musicians joined the stage and formed what I refer to as a Supergroup. The singer who sang a couple of numbers certainly knows how to wail….rock style!

Oğuz Demirtaş Interview

Song 1

Sweet Home Chicago

Jamming

Satisfaction

Knocking On Heaven’s Door

Smoke On The Water

Everybody Needs Somebody

Supergroup – Jamming

If you enjoyed the band feel free to leave some comments or share on facebook or wherever.

Cheers

So after our fun day out at Saklikent we just about had enough time to have a small rest before heading off to Ayyaş Bar in Kaleiçi for Sevinç’s Birthday Party.

Ellen and I arrived at about 9.30pm and I was worried that I would have missed the cake. Fortunately we arrived just in time as 10 minutes later Sevinç had a large knife in her hand and was soon dishing it out. 

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It was a really fun night and we had a good chat with some friends like Tina and Esrin (from whom I stole some photos and video footage) and also met some new people like Marc Bowman and Sevinç’s mother who, just like the cake, was very sweet.

There were two guys playing guitar in the bar.  I think it was more suitable as background music than for dancing to, but we gave it our best shot anyway.

I got more than my fair share of cake as I got a large second helping.  I had a good excuse though. I had danced my ass off and needed to get some energy reserves back.

A good friend of Sevinç called Oğuz Demirtaş was there.  I knew him from last summer when he played guitar in Miles bar with another friend of mine on vocals, Hendi Mypa.

Oğuz told me about his new band called Voyn who are playing every Monday at Tudors Pub and I promised I would go along to check them out, which I did. That will be the topic of the next blog post, so stay tuned for that one.

Feel free to leave a comment.

Cheers