turkish lifestyle:shopping
Shopping
All the resorts have the souvenir shops where you can find all sorts of weird and wonderful trinkets that you can spend hours looking at, from games, to magnets, to plates, to ornaments. There are plenty carpet shops and rug factory’s scattered around the area, where you will find homemade, hand crafted rugs that can take anywhere from a few months to years to make, they don’t come cheap but you can see the quality of them, they will ship to the UK for you and quite often you will see a Turkish woman sitting at a little stool creating one of these rugs, it really is quite amazing to watch and believe someone could have that much patience to work at one item for so long but this is a long standing Turkish tradition and is only passed from female to female within families, you also find that you can identify where a rug is from by the style, as different areas have adopted different patterns over the years.
Then of course you can find gold centers where there normally a couple of floors of some of the most beautiful jewelry you could ever find, normally with at least one craftsman who makes and repairs jewelry by hand. When I came on holiday here, I fell in love with a ring, but it was in yellow gold which I don’t personally like wearing, unknown to me at the time, my now husband spoke to the salesman and arranged that it be made in white gold instead and had it delivered to our hotel for me where he proposed, another example of how the Turks will do anything for you nothing is too much trouble, and of course, the jewelry here is much cheaper than in the UK.
Finally for those looking for something special, try the leather factory’s where you will find every type of leather jacket you can imagine as well as pants, belts, tops and sometimes purses/wallets and again much cheaper than the UK and from my experience good quality, my husband bought me for my birthday a gorgeous studded black leather fitted jacket which if I’d bought in the UK probably would have cost me at least an extra one hundred pound.
For those not interested in spending a load of cash, then go to the bazaars or markets which are held at least weekly in most of the villages, yeah they try allsorts to get you to buy with the comments “cheaper than aldi” or “buy now pay next year” but for the most part you can have a good laugh with them, and please haggle, this is what they expect and if you do you can walk away with some great bargains. On a typical market you will find clothes, leather, jewelry, console games, Turkish teas, spices and Turkish delight, sometimes toys and souvenir stores.
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turkish market spices
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turkish water pipes
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fish for tea??
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traditional turkish dancers outift
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local veg market
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turkish delight
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turkish rug
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turkish rug factory
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