Village Voice December 2013/January 2014 | Page 24

dance for at least twenty minutes with no
support – something I couldn’t have done for
twenty seconds.
Eventually there came what at least two of
us had been waiting for – a visit to a leather
factory and shop. I say shop: imagine
Harrods stuck in the middle of nowhere. We
watched a fashion show and were invited to
write on a card the reference number of any
garment that appealed. I wrote three down.
One turned out to be an Armani coat, the
most expensive in the store, and way out of
my price range. However, by re-mortgaging
the house, offering to sell our girl to the
highest bidder and hardest of all, giving up
any thought of a new lap-top, I did succeed
in acquiring a jacket. And yes, I haggled!
There was a river boat trip down to the
Mediterranean, and a barbecue picnic at the
beach there. We had the lower level of the
boat practically to ourselves, as the crowd
had trampled over each other to sit up top in
the sun all day. We wandered along the
beach and, noticing tiny fish in the waves,
took off our shoes and gave ourselves a free
Mediterranean pedicure. It was a lovely
peaceful cruise, with lots to see, interrupted
only by the official photographer who took a
picture of each of us in turn, and 21 shots of
our girl (“Marilyn! Are you real?”)! Of course
we had to buy the lot.
We had one more ‘must do’ on our list: a
commission from a friend at home to get her
a ‘Genuine fake Rolex’, to replace the one
she’d bought in China that had stopped
working. My sister struck a deal with the
charming shopkeeper for three, one for the
friend, one for her and one for me. A genuine
real Rolex wearer agreed that they were
very good copies. Someone told me how
you can tell the difference; apparently the
second hand on a genuine Rolex sweeps
round, but on a genuine fake Rolex it ticks. I
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believed that until our one-legged friend
went into a shop and bought a fake with a
sweeping second hand for 240 euros (about
ten times what we had paid). Could it
possibly…? No. And yes, predictably, he
claimed it had cost him an arm and a leg!
Into the shop near the hotel for Turkish
Delight and a last-minute purchase of an
incredibly low-priced bag of saffron. FT,
meanwhile, bought something with GB
pounds* and came back insisting that the
pound coins in her change were fake.
Luckily someone on the coach was a bank
employee who confirmed they were
genuine. *Although the official currency is
the lira, all the shops pre