On Europe's "Refugee Crisis"

Macedonian police try to keep back people attempting to cross illegally from Greece.

I have been reading accounts of the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe with dismay. Why should Europe, or North America, be saddled with some kind of misplaced sense of “responsibility” for these people?  I don’t believe they should.

According to international agreements on refugees, Turkey, as the first point of refuge, should accommodate the refugees with the aim of repatriating them when conditions improve and resettling them only as a last resort. The notion of automatically resettling them all over Europe is ludicrous. The role of other countries should be to provide humanitarian aid through Turkey: food, shelter, clothing, etc. The refugees do not have a "right" to go and live where they want.

Now, to be sure, the plight of people displaced by war is terrible, and good people everywhere should want to help. But that desire to help has to be tempered by the realities of what kind of help is appropriate, how many people are truly in need of such help, and what impact that help might have on the people giving it.

If you can help others without it having a seriously negative impact on yourself or your society, then it’s the right thing to do. But if giving that help creates deep problems for your own people, or even puts your country and the lives of its citizens in peril, then it is not appropriate, no matter how sad the situation is. And it's important to note that there are other countries that should be bearing this burden far more than Europe.

For me, there are a number of points to consider, and while they may not be “politically correct,” and it might make me seen cold and uncaring, these points need to be considered nonetheless.

Who Are the Real Refugees

So much has been made of Europe’s reaction in the past few weeks because this is where most of these (illegal) migrants have been trying to go. We regularly hear stories about boats sinking in the Mediterranean Sea, and people dying trying to reach Italy from North Africa. The recent news has been mostly about thousands of people from the Middle East trying being stopped in Hungary as they try to get to Austria and other points west.

Apparently there has been a huge influx of people trekking from refugee camps in Turkey to Greece, Macedonia and then Serbia as they attempt to enter Hungary and then go on to Austria and Germany. But they are not all Syrians attempting to escape the bloodshed in their country.

People near the train station in Budapest wanting to travel to Austria.

While many of them might actually be genuine refugees from the civil war in Syria and the ISIS-led strife in Iraq, many are not. According to a September 6, 2015, article in the Washington Post, many of those trying to gain “asylum” in Western Europe are not refugees from the war-torn areas at all. There are a large number of non-Syrians pretending to be from Syria and trying to fake their way into Western Europe through this crisis.

The Post reports that there are Pakistanis, Afghans and others who carry fake Syrian identification or discard their identification papers altogether and then claim to be refugees from Syria. Near the fence that divides the border between Serbia and Hungary, the ground is reportedly littered with non-Syrian identification papers as these people throw away their real documents and then claim to be Syrian on the other side of the border.

Instead of being genuine refugees, they are people trying to escape poverty and low living conditions in their own countries by merging with the refugee streams and trying to get the same kind of asylum. They are essentially just illegal migrants taking advantage of the crisis to get into Europe. The Post article mentions the anger among many of the real Syrians when they encounter these people.

The Demise of Europe?

Western Europe is already reeling under a decades-long influx of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. The way of life in European countries has been affected, severely in some cases. These immigrants refuse to assimilate and conform to local laws and ways, demanding instead that the host countries let them live according to their own cultural mores and, even worse, their own religious laws.

This threatens to completely destabilize Europe in the near future. Indeed, a stated goal of ISIS and similarly minded, radical Islamic groups is to establish a "Caliphate" in the Middle East and then destablize Europe so that they can make Islam dominate on that continent. Christians and other "infidels" must convert or die. They talk of raising the ISIS flag over the Vatican.

The process is already underway. There are places in Paris, Brussels and other cities where regular French or Belgian people – including the police – are afraid to go. These enclaves are called No-go Zones, and they are controlled by the immigrant groups. They impose sharia law in these zones, and the local authorities seem impotent to stop them and enforce the national and local laws.

As the numbers of these people increase in the future, they will put pressure on the host nations to change their laws to accommodate them. There have already been moves to have some countries adopt sharia into their legal systems. Thus far, these demands have been refused, but it might be only a matter of time.

By sheer force of numbers, these Muslim immigrants are on track to displace Europeans in their own countries. If it is allowed to continue, French, Italian, German and other cultures will be lost. Europe will be lost.

Can Europe really afford to absorb thousands more Middle East “refugees” who will swell the ranks of those already there?  Do they really want to hasten the demise of European civilization?

One result of this groundswell of Muslims into Europe has been the rise of nationalist groups whose rallying cry is to defend and preserve French, German and other traditions and culture. This creates a separate, but equally serious problem. But a majority of Europeans seem not to care.

Who Should Really Step Up?

Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, which then spread to Iraq, Turkey has accommodated almost two million refugees. This is appropriate, as Turkey, like Syria and Iraq, is a Muslim nation. Many Turks are more secular and certainly not even close to the fundamentalist sorts of Muslims found in some other countries. And even though Turks are not particularly fond of Arabs, at least they share some religious commonality. 

But recently, Turkey has decided that the burden is too great, and they've been allowing - perhaps even encouraging - refugees to leave Turkey and enter Europe. 

Lebanon, which is very small and has plenty of its own problems, has taken in more than a million displaced Syrians. Jordan has taken in more than a million, and Egypt has accepted about 133,000.

Beyond these, however, the extent to which other Muslim nations have helped in this crisis is practically nothing. The worst offenders, as is often the case, are the oil-rich Gulf states. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have given refuge to exactly ZERO.

These countries are exactly where the refugees should be going. They are Arab and they are Sunni Muslim. Culturally, linguistically and in terms of religion, the refugees would be most comfortable, most “at home” in these countries. And with all their oil money, these are the countries most able to help these people. But they do nothing.

Why isn't the world raising a stink about the inaction of the rich Gulf states and demanding that they be the ones to take in the refugees? Why is it that people are so quick to criticize the West (including those in the West) for practically everything, yet refuse to call out the Arab nations for their hypocrisy and their many practices that run completely contrary to human rights?

Even worse than doing nothing, the oil-rich Arab states have the gall to criticize Europe for the events unfolding in recent days. They refuse to help their fellow Arabs, their fellow Muslims, yet they demand that Europe and the West do more. They are singularly disgusting.

Equally disgusting was a statement over the weekend from the president of Iran who praised Europe for making accommodations for the “refugees.” If Iran was opening its country to refugees, that praise might carry some significance. But Iran has largely been financing the war and arming the government side; their responsibility for creating the crisis is almost as great as their “praise” is hypocritical.

Wolves with the Sheep

Within this influx of millions of “refugees” there are undoubtedly terrorists. Whether from ISIS, Al Qaeda or some other groups, the opportunity to infiltrate operatives into Europe through these masses is too good to pass up.

It will be nearly impossible for European authorities to adequately screen these people and identify the potential assassins, bombers and other terrorist operatives. The very fact that people are crossing with no documents, claiming to be Syrian refugees, and then granted asylum makes it clear that it’s a golden opportunity for terrorists.

Europeans need to brace for even more attacks in the near future.

What of Ukraine?

Europe’s ostensibly heartfelt embrace of these “refugees” and all the feel-good statements about helping people escaping the horrors of war look pretty weak here in Ukraine. To the best of my knowledge there has been no such outpouring of humanitarian empathy for the millions of people displaced by Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The European Union, through its Schengen visa regime, still makes it a bureaucratic hoop-jumping exercise for Ukrainians to get even a visitor’s visa. And the long-promised visa-waiver policy for Ukrainians still seems like a pipedream.

It’s hard to understand why Europe continues to put up such a bureaucratic wall to Ukrainians – who are, themselves, Europeans – while rushing to admit more and more Middle Easterners whose goal is not to become European, but to make Europe become Muslim.

And What of America?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney stated over the weekend that the crisis at Europe’s border is a direct result of the Obama administration’s botched handling of Middle East policy. He is not wrong about that, but he does seem to conveniently give his own administration a pass for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was largely responsible for the situations that have followed. The Bush administration is at least as responsible as the one that followed.

If the U.S. had not gone into Iraq, the world might be a very different place. Iraq turned out not to have the weapons of mass destruction that were the stated reason for the invasion. And while the despotic regime of Saddam Hussein was overthrown, what has followed in the years since has been weak and unable to create any kind of stability. If the U.S. had not invaded, there might still be a relatively strong Iraq to counter Iran and the fundamentalist forces that have risen in the region.

But the Obama administration is more directly responsible for what has happened since 2010. They created the power vacuum that has been filled by Iran and Islamic extremist groups like ISIS. Their complete botching of the “Arab Spring” movements allowed Muslim extremists to rise to power in a number of countries, and Obama’s embarrassing reactions to the Syrian situation in 2011 created the mess that followed.

The USSA does bear a lot of responsibility for what is happening now, but the brunt of the consequences is falling on Europe. I wonder if Europe will survive.

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Remembering Tia

Those of you who know me well know that I love cats. Always have, always will.

When I was a child, we always had cats in our family. We had one dog as well, but the cats ruled. We were especially fond of Siamese cats. We had Tiki, and later, when I was a teen, my mother got a new Siamese kitten, and we named her Tiki (2). She was a joy to all of us, and was my mom’s constant companion right up until her death. Tiki 2 died at the age of 16, only a month after my mom passed away.

In my own adult life, I’ve had several Siamese as well. There was Jaydee and her kittens, Spassky (named after the Russian chess master) and Stonewall. In Japan, we adopted an adult Siamese tomcat and named him Tayka.

For a long time after that, my lifestyle didn’t really accommodate having pets, but then I agreed to take two young kittens, a brother and sister pair, that were part of an abandoned litter. Nekko (cat in Japanese) and Koshka (cat in Russian) were with me for 12 years until Koshka mysteriously disappeared and Nekko died about five months later of what I believe was a broken heart. I wrote about Koshka and Nekko in an October 2013 post entitled, A Sick Cat.

Enter Tia

Several years before Nekko and Koshka were gone, a new kitten entered the scene. One of my daughters moved in with me and brought a little black ball of fur she had rescued in Arizona. She named the kitten Tia. And she fit in immediately.

Although Nekko and Koshka were starting to show their ages, they were still pretty active, and they were used to having new kittens in the house. A few years earlier, my other daughter decided to move in with me for a while and brought her little gray tabby, Chili Gizmo, with her. Sometime after that, a girlfriend moved in with me for a short time and brought her kitten, Kisu (kitty in Finnish).

Cats usually find it difficult to adapt to a stranger in their territory, but Nekko and Koshka seemed to accept new kittens pretty quickly. They got along well with Chili and did the same when Tia appeared. Sometimes they were not in the mood for a kitten’s antics, but more often than not having a playful kitten around kept them a little livelier as well.

Eventually, my daughter got her own place in Boulder, and Tia went with her. But she moved around a lot in those days, and it wasn’t always convenient to have Tia with her. So on several occasions, Tia was back at my place in the suburbs south of Denver. It was always a pleasure to have her, especially after Koshka and Nekko were gone and I needed another soul in that big house.

The Hunter

One facet of Tia’s personality that soon became apparent was that she was a superb hunter – better than any other cat I had had. Koshka and Nekko were housecats whose outdoor experience was generally in a fenced backyard. But Tia, despite being a very warm and affectionate pet in the house, was a well-honed predator.

One particular spring and summer, she became the scourge of the local rabbit population. When I first moved into that house, I installed pet doors that allowed the cats to go from the house to the garage (where I kept their litter box) and from the house to the backyard. When Tia moved back in with me, the dead rabbits began to appear.

There was a pretty sizeable rabbit colony nearby, and despite her relatively small size, Tia became adept at catching the small ones and bringing them back to the house. Like most cats, she would “play” with her catch for a while before finally administering the coup de grace. It wasn’t uncommon for me to come downstairs in the morning and find a bunny carcass on the carpet.

But rabbits were not her only prey. She brought in small rodents, birds and even a snake. One time, I found what appeared to be a dead bird under my kitchen table. I brushed it onto a dustpan then carried it outside to toss over the fence. When I tossed it into the air, it flew away. I was astonished.

Finally, I had to lock the cat door and limit Tia’s access to the outside on an “ask for permission” basis. It worked – there were no more dead critters in the house.

The Mountain Cat

Eventually Tia went back to live with my daughter, and a while after that, I decided to move from the suburbs to a home in the mountains southwest of Denver. I had been there for just a couple of months when Tia came to live with me again. It was good timing too: I had a few mice in the house, a problem that was permanently solved after Tia came.

Tia was with me in the mountains for the three short years that I lived there, and it was during this time that we really bonded, and she found a special place in my heart. She was still the super predator, but she was also very affectionate and a great companion.

She came at the end of the summer, and for the first few weeks, I would not let her outside, no matter how much she begged. I lived in a forest, with foxes, raccoons, coyotes, and even bears and mountain lions. I was not sure that this little black cat could survive for long out there with all those critters. But she did more than survive: she thrived.

I knew that eventually I would have to let her out, but I wanted her to get accustomed to the house first, to understand that it was now her "queendom." Eventually, I started to take her out with me during daylight. I would sit on the porch while she explored the front of the house, then walk with her around to the back and watch while she explored.

Eventually, her exploration took her further and further from the house. And soon she was staying out at night. And I worried. But she knew where home was, and she always returned. She knew how to take care of herself, and she never came home with even a scratch to suggest she had a run-in with another animal. She knew how to avoid the dangerous animals, while being a danger herself to the local rabbits, rodents and birds.

There was no pet door, so she had to let me know when she wanted to come in. I had a pile of firewood stacked on my porch so that the top of the pile was even with the bottom of my bedroom window. Tia would jump up on the pile and tap or scratch at the window to let me know she needed in. Sometimes, when I was home, I left the window open just wide enough for her to go out or come in on her own.

Always the Predator

As at the other house, Tia tried to bring her hunting trophies into the house. I was usually successful at keeping her from bringing them in, but she did manage to sneak a couple of them past me.

One summer evening she had been out quite late, so I left the window open just wide enough for her to pass, and I went to bed. At some point, I heard a sound on the woodpile, and sure enough she came in, jumped over my head and onto the bed, then jumped down and went into the other part of the house. I figured she went to her food and water bowls, and I closed the window.

A bit later, I was awakened by the noise of some commotion downstairs. It sounded like Tia was running around, and I thought it was strange, because I was sure she would have wanted to sleep after being outside for so long. Suddenly I heard the telltale scream of a panicked bunny, and I realized what was going on: Tia had brought a rabbit into the house – carrying it in her mouth right over my head – and was “playing” with it downstairs.

I realized she was in the process of killing it at that moment, and I did not want to deal with it, so I closed my door and went to sleep. In the morning, I went down and cleaned up what was left.

Besides that rabbit, she managed to bring in a couple of birds and a ground squirrel. And I have no idea how many she caught and did not bring in. I was never angry with Tia for these episodes. She was a cat doing what comes naturally.

Affectionate Housecat

Despite being an efficient predator and successful forest cat, Tia was also comfortable as a housecat and was a very affectionate companion. She learned that in the dead of winter she could not go outside because of all the deep snow, and she adapted just fine to being a full-time housecat. But when the snow began to melt, she was more than ready to get back out. 

Even in the warm parts of the year, she enjoyed her indoor time. Her favorite place to sleep was on my bed, usually against my leg. Whenever I sat in an armchair or sofa, she was immediately on my lap, purring and wanting to be petted.

In the early evening when I returned home from work, I would unlock and open the front door to find a sleepy Tia sitting in the middle of the living room and greeting me with a yawn after her daylong nap (she had heard my truck pull up to the house). When she saw me, she would meow and then flop over onto her side and roll onto her back so that I would rub her belly. Then she would be out the door and ready to explore, except when we had several feet of snow everywhere.

Sometimes, she would meow for me to come outside with her, and we would take a walk together. When I was with her, she didn’t feel so much of a need to be stealthy and careful. She felt protected and knew that she could run where she wanted without having to worry about attracting the attention of a dangerous animal.

Living alone in the forest house was a little lonely sometimes, but having Tia there made it a lot less so. She made a big difference in my life in those days, and I was always grateful to have her there.

The Leaving

After I made the commitment to move to Ukraine, I had to sell the house. It was very, VERY hard to give up that idyllic home in the forest, and one of the hardest parts was having to take Tia away from it. When my daughter came to take her, Tia knew that something was happening that she would not like, and she did her best to avoid being taken. But we finally got her into the cat box, and they drove away.

I was sad for myself to lose the companion I had had, but I was sadder for Tia to lose the home and lifestyle she had come to love.

Tia lived in several different circumstances for the next few years, not always able to be the outdoor cat she was used to being. Finally, my daughter got a place on the prairie outside of Boulder. There was a horse property nearby and room for Tia to wander. But Tia was older and not quite as alert as she had been. And the property didn’t have the plethora of trees and other cover that the forest offered. And there were coyotes.

One time, Tia went out, and she never returned. We never knew what happened to her. My heart broke a little at the news, but this is the way of pets: their time in our lives is short. When we take them as kittens or puppies, we know we will outlive them, and we know we will have to deal one day with the sadness of them passing out of our lives.

And so it was with Tia. Technically, she was not my cat, but in the ways that mattered, she was mine, and I was hers. And I still miss her.

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I am not sure why I thought to write about this. It just came to my mind the other day, and I started writing. But sometimes it is good to remember – and write about – such things.

The Bike Path of Life

This weekend I got out on my bike for the first time in weeks. The vacation in Turkey burned a couple of weekends, and last weekend, frankly, I just didn’t feel like it.

I rode alone, which has been a little unusual this summer, but probably something I should get used to if I am going to keep riding. Saturday I rode mostly on the street, but today I returned to the forest park near my home, which has been where I’ve done most of my riding this year.

At one point, after I had ridden about five kilometers deep into the park, I stopped to just listen to the sound of the wind in the trees and try to enjoy some much-needed serenity in this little forest oasis surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the city. It was a warm, breezy day, and the leaves above rustled as a light wind moved them to and fro. There was the occasional sound of a tree trunk creaking or dried leaves falling to the ground.

Even though I knew the city was still all around me, it was nice to imagine that I was really far away in a forest and able to take in some calm power from the trees, the wind – from nature itself.

Such moments often inspire me to think beyond myself. For a moment, I thought about riding alone and how it felt sort of odd. Then I put that thought aside, and something else came to me.

The Path of Life

As I looked at the path straight ahead of me, I realized that at some point, the path seemed to merge with the trees at the end of my field of vision; I could not see where it ended. I turned around and looked behind me and noticed the same thing. Then it occurred to me that the bike path was a lot like the paths we follow in life.

You can only see a certain portion of the path ahead of you, but you have no idea what lies beyond what you can see. It’s a mystery, and the only way to find out what is there is to keep riding until you reach the end. It’s sort of a metaphor for life: you can only see or predict a small part of the future, but to find out what lies ahead for you, you have to keep going until you reach it.

And the path behind is a similar metaphor. You can recall well much of the recent past, but beyond a certain point, you tend to forget things that happened. Only truly remarkable or important things remain in your memory.

But the bike path resembles life in other ways. Some parts are rough and difficult to ride, while other parts are easier. Much of the path I rode today had only about a two-foot (65 cm) strip down the middle that was navigable, and there were deep ruts on either side. Veer off into a rut, and I’d find myself flying off my bike, possibly into a tree. Life is often like this.

And there were a number of obstacles along the path. In about five places, deadfall trees blocked the path, and I had to get off the bike and either go over the tree, under it, or around it. In the past, we’ve encountered places where the path was filled with muddy water or even impassible. And life often throws up obstacles to block your path; you either find a way around the obstacle, or go back and find an easier path. I suppose some people just stand there waiting for the obstacle to remove itself.

There are places where you can pedal along at a fast pace and make good progress. But in other places, the going is slower. Maybe you have to climb a hill, or push through muddy ground. Maybe you have to take it slow because the ground is irregular, with a lot of dips, holes and rocks. Life too has its times when you can move quickly and make good progress, as well as times when you find yourself bogged down.

Which Way to Go?

The forest park is crisscrossed with paths of various types, widths, difficulties and directions. There are no markers to tell you which path leads where, and there is no good map. You often come to crossroads and forks, and you have to make decisions about which way to go. A wrong choice can send you far from your intended destination and make your ride a lot more difficult. Sometimes you can make a good guess based on the position of the sun or by using a compass; other times you just have to use your intuition.

That is very much like life. In a post I wrote almost two years ago, called Decision Points Along Life’s Path, I wrote extensively about the forks and crossroads we come to during our lives and how these choices affect how our lives turn out. In that post I imagined how making different choices at those decision points might lead to entirely different lives and wondered whether all of those possible alternatives might actually exist in some kind of mirror universes. And I thought again about that today.

People and Messages along the Way

As I rode, I came across several people. One biker was coming the opposite direction very quickly and nearly caused us both to veer off and crash. But at the last moment, we were able to get control and pass each other safely. I came up on several pairs of people walking in the forest, slowed down, and politely thanked them when they moved to the side to let me by.

At another point, I came upon a man with a dog. The man was on a cross path coming from my left, and he asked me in a friendly way if I knew where the path that I was following led to. I told him that I thought it led to the golf club property, but he replied that the golf club was to my left, along the path that he had just come from. Since that was my goal, I went that way.

The man had a message for me that I needed at that moment. We often encounter people in life who have some message or knowledge for us at the right time.

More Thoughts

As I continued riding, I thought about change, about how none of us is perfect (some of us, in fact, are exceedingly imperfect), and how our life’s path should be about improvement, about learning how to be better people. It occurred to me that we should grow to be stronger of will, but at the same time more understanding and accepting of others, and more caring and compassionate.

I started my Sunday ride feeling a bit depressed that I was riding alone. But as time went by, that depression faded and was replaced by the exhilaration of hard peddling, a quickened heartbeat, and just enough sweat to know I was working hard. Even more, it was replaced by some valuable life insights that I would never have gained if I had sat at home or met friends in a café.

It was a good ride, and a great day.  But all in all, I’d still rather not ride alone.

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Turkey Part 4 - No Serenity for You!

(Note: This is NOT an actual photo from Le Jardin, but it could have been.)

One day at Le Jardin, while I was waiting in the reception area to register us for a special dinner, I noticed an electronic sign above the entrance that showed photos of the resort with single words to describe various features. One photo showed a woman stretching before exercising, and the word shown was “serenity.”

Serenity?

While the resort had many nice features, serenity was NOT one of them. The hotel is listed as having 308 rooms, and in August – the height of the tourist season – I suspect there is never an empty room in the place. There were many families there, so if you figure an average of three people per room, that’s around 900 people on the property at one time.

That’s hundreds of people crowding the dining areas, the pools, the beach, the garden, the bar, and other places. Hundreds of people grabbing lounge chairs and trying to get the best places. Hundreds of people walking or running by as you try to relax in your spot or walk from one area to another. Hundreds of people talking, laughing, yelling, screaming, and – yes – smoking.

Noise

Besides all the people, there was a constant beat of music, some of it nice, but most of it rather annoying due to the high volume and overuse of bass. Sometimes the music would be muted and fairly peaceful, and it wasn’t bad. But then, without warning, the volume would get turned up (along with the bass beat), for some kind of announcements or events around the pool.

And sometimes it wasn’t music at all, but that appalling bane of real music lovers everywhere: rap.

Accompanying the loud music was an even louder MC yelling into his microphone in multiple languages. At 10:00 every morning they broke the relative peacefulness for a repetitive “Good Morning” song followed by more loud music and a bunch of announcements (most of which were, admittedly, helpful). Then the volume would get pumped up at various other times of the day.

And there was competing loud music and other noise from neighboring resorts (they are all nestled rather close to each other). Each had its own programs and events, and they wanted to make sure that their people could hear their sounds over those of the neighbors. Depending where you were on the property, the result could be an aggravating cacophony of noise.

All of this would go on from mid-morning until late evening.

So much for “serenity”!

Droned Out

The sea was mostly calm, with almost no surf. So we didn’t have the soft thunder of waves pounding the shore, that inspiring sound of the power of an ocean. But there was one enjoyable, natural sound in the garden area, and this was the chirping of cicadas in the trees. All day long they made a never-ending chorus that could become mesmerizing as you sat on your lounge chair and let your mind wander. But most of the time, the song of the cicadas was drowned by the manmade noise all around us.

It occurred to me, however, that without the human noise, the sound of cicadas could have been a perfect mantra to induce great meditations. I would love to find a spot someday where all I could hear was the song of those little bugs in the trees.

Giving Customers What They Want     

Probably I am just a grumpy old guy for wishing to have peace and quiet, and the ability to get lost in my thoughts in a beautiful, natural environment. But I understood that that was how it was, and I adapted.

Most likely the management of the Queen’s Park chain of resort hotels has researched their customer base and concluded that the music and other noises are what their visitors want. They have probably determined that their program provides a feeling of excitement and fun for most of the guests. And they are probably right.

So I don’t really bemoan the practice of keeping the place pretty noisy. It comes with the territory of such a resort, and you should understand and accept that if you go there. And I did – mostly. After a while, you become able to tune out most of it, and you hardly notice it at all while you are swimming in the sea.

There were moments, when trying to relax on a lounge chair in the garden, when the pumped-up volume was a little annoying, personally. But if the great majority of guests liked it that way, then the feelings of a tiny minority – perhaps of only one – don’t really matter. And that’s how it should be. I get that, and I enjoyed my time at Le Jardin immensely, nevertheless.

Seeking Serenity

Still, I came away from that vacation realizing that real serenity, perhaps even some natural solitude, is something I sorely need. I need the opportunity to spend time in a natural environment, without a lot of people, without unnatural sounds, without Internet or other distractions. I need some serious alone time, not in my city apartment, but with the peaceful energy of nature around me.

In January, I wrote about the need to get away, and at about the same time, I wrote about the beauty and necessity of having silence from time to time. In “Getting Away,” I wrote about how, at times, a person needs to get away from daily routines and all the problems and issues in his or her life and just be.

There are times when we need to forget our daily concerns and replace those thoughts with the feeling of just being a part of nature, of being one with the universe. We need to find some peace for a while and let the accumulated stress drain out of our cells. Then we can start to come back and address the important issues with a mind toward making the right decisions going forward.

This is something I need very badly. I have decisions to make, and probably changes to put into place. I am not equipped to do this properly now because I haven’t given my soul a chance to speak through all the mental noise. I need to get away.

At Le Jardin, I did not think about work at all, and it was nice. I did relax to a point, and I enjoyed swimming immensely. But I was not able to find real serenity, and I was not able to expunge all my current life concerns. Even at such a resort, certain thoughts and issues continued to dominate my thinking, and at times, it made me less than an ideal companion. It was not good. So while Turkey was a great vacation, it wasn’t exactly what I needed.

So now I am thinking about another vacation, perhaps soon. It would be nice to go someplace far away where there truly is serenity in a natural environment. Somewhere in the mountains would be perfect. Perhaps I need to go alone.

What I don’t know at the moment is when or where. Summer is coming to an end, and autumn will be upon us soon, so there is not a lot of time. And autumn is an important and busy time for English teachers. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on travel for a while, after already having taken three trips out of the country in 2015. I need to save up for future plans. Maybe Western Ukraine is an option.

At any rate, as I said in closing the post, “Getting Away,” I know what I need, the trick is figuring out how to make it happen.

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Turkey Part 3 - Smokers

It was our first day at Le Jardin. Arriving in the early afternoon, we had settled into our room and then made the most of the remainder of the day to swim in the sea and the pools, and to generally get the lay of the land. Then it was time for dinner.

After surveying the amazing variety of options and filling our plates, we found a table in the huge dining room and sat down to enjoy our meals. Then we were hit by that unmistakable stench that absolutely ruins a nice meal: cigarette smoke!

I was shocked to see the people at the next table smoking away while we and others around us were eating. Then I realized that there was an ashtray on our table, and more on adjacent tables. Every table in the room had an ashtray, and I noticed smokers at some other tables as well. For me, the enjoyment of that first meal was definitely dampened by the wretched smoke wafting around us.

At the moment we went in for our first meal we were not aware that there was another, equally large, dining area for nonsmokers. As we left dinner, we spoke with an employee who told us where the smoking and nonsmoking areas were.

For our other meals, we used the nonsmoking area as often as we could. Unfortunately, they usually did not open it for the first hour of breakfast, so if we were early, as we usually were, we had to deal with the smoking area. We would try to find a table close to the open windows and hope that no smokers would crowd us.

The smoking room had all the windows removed so that air could move through the room, but this didn’t really help keep the smoke away from you unless you were sitting by the windows and had the air blowing in, not out.

The nonsmoking room, on the other hand, had almost no open windows. They seemed to believe that the air conditioning was sufficient to reduce the heat and humidity and make it comfortable. But it usually wasn’t. Sometimes it was just a bit too hot to sit comfortably in that room. So we were often faced with a choice: deal with cigarette smoke or with the heat.

Smokers affected us in other ways as well. Normally, we kept our room air-conditioned and the balcony door closed. While this made the room nominally cooler, it did make the air a little stale after some time, so occasionally we wanted to have the door open for a while, particularly first thing in the morning.

But on either side of us, we usually had smokers, and sometimes they would be on their balconies at the same time that we wanted to open the door. The result, of course, was having their noxious smoke waft into our room from time to time.

And the same sort of thing happened a few times when we were relaxing on lounge chairs in what we called “the garden.” It wasn’t frequent, but even a bit of that stench blowing your way can bring you down. And there were many times when walking around the place, I would get a nose full of someone’s secondhand smoke. I hated that!

I Just Don’t Get It

To me, cigarette smoking is one of the most disgusting things a human being can do. I truly do not understand why people would want to poison themselves with something that smells so obnoxiously bad, makes their hair and clothes stink, blackens their teeth (and lungs), and has such a negative effect on people around them.

I have a few acquaintances who smoke, and while I like them very much (they wouldn’t be in my circle if they were not good people), I have never been able to understand why they need to pursue that habit. One thing I must say about the few people in my circle who do smoke: they understand that nonsmokers generally dislike it, and I appreciate their efforts to keep it from affecting me when we are together.

But the majority of smokers don’t seem to give a damn about anyone else, and it is this attitude that makes me feel so negative toward them. Now, I am not perfect, and I have my weaknesses too. To some extent, I’ve probably had something of a food addiction for the past decade or so, where food becomes a kind of sedative or relaxant to make you feel better.

But that affects only me; I don’t generally throw food at other people. Cigarette smoke, on the other hand, DOES affect other people in the vicinity of the smoker: by breathing it out with impunity, it’s like “throwing” a gross-smelling, cancer-causing poison at other people. But, as I said, most smokers could not care less about how their behavior affects others.

For the most part, Ukrainians, like Russians, are heavy smokers. It is almost impossible to walk the streets of Kharkiv without having someone’s putrid smoke make it’s way into your nose. To Ukraine’s credit, smoking has been banned in restaurants and other public buildings, and things are improving here. But for a committed antismoker like me, it’s still a little tough sometimes.

With so many Russians (and Ukrainians) at the resort, I wasn’t surprised at the amount of smoking going on. And I fully expected that smoking would be pretty much uncontrolled in Turkey. But I was a bit surprised at how much of it was done by other nationalities. In a number of cases, there were parents raising a cloud of smoke with their poor children right next to them, having no choice but to suck in their parents' odious fumes.

I knew that the French have had a long tradition of poisoning themselves with cigarettes, but I sort of thought that they would have come more into the modern age and smoking would be on the way out.  Silly me! Very often, the heaviest smokers were French. Germans didn’t seem to smoke as much as the French or Russians, but there were a few.

It’s Just My Chance to Rant

Lest it seem as though the air at Le Jardin was just a cloud of cigarette smoke, I have to say that it wasn’t that bad. Most of the time, the air was clear and clean with sea breezes and such. But the occasional issue with smokers, while not a major problem, was one of the few small drawbacks of our time at the resort.

This has just given me a reason to rant about smoking in general. It’s something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time. And now I’ve gotten that off my chest, so I can move on to more positive impressions – next time.

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