From Yellow Star to Pop Star by Dorit Oliver-Wolff

Author:Dorit Oliver-Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RedDoor Publishing
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

ADANA

We had an exclusive contract with an artist agency for the Middle East. They were responsible for all of our bookings, wages and the venues we performed at. Our next engagement was in Adana, over four hundred kilometres (two hundred and fifty miles) away in the south of Turkey. Again, we had no idea what to expect. Our suitcases were loaded up in several taxis, and off we went on another adventure. I felt a bit sorry about leaving Ankara. There were so many places that I would have liked to have seen.

Once we’d left Ankara and its outskirts it suddenly became very bleak and uninhabited. From fairly well-surfaced roads we found ourselves driving along unmade, bumpy and very dusty trails. The further we drove the worse the roads became. The cars had to keep a big distance from each other to avoid the dirt and the sand that came off the wheels onto the windscreens. This road seemed to be endless. After a while the dotted buildings completely disappeared, and all we could see on either side of the road were cotton plantations. We could see girls in groups picking the cotton. When they saw the cars they would all wave, and we would wave back to them. There was hardly any traffic, the occasional bus laden with people. There were people riding donkeys. The poor donkeys looked so small between the thighs of their big fat riders. The men’s feet were practically touching the ground. I felt it should have been the other way around! There were usually three or four donkeys following each other’s dust trail.

The heat was unbearable. Every now and then the driver would stop at a remote little shack with a corrugated iron roof improvising as a roadside café. They would serve Turkish coffee which you could have ‘sweet’, ‘medium’ or without sugar. You could have hot tea, which was surprisingly thirst quenching, but we all went for the cold coke or iced lemonade.

Behind the ‘café’ was a very small wooden shack which contained a simple hole in the ground. This was the Turkish toilet.

We finally reached Adana. This place was a complete contrast to Istanbul or Ankara. The tallest building seemed to be the minaret of the mosque. There were no red carpets or porters awaiting our arrival, only a short, fat, bald-headed man who came out to greet us with a big grin from ear to ear, rubbing his hands together all the time as he was speaking to us, and bobbing his head up and down in a very subservient manner. He shook my mother’s hand, introducing himself as the proprietor of this establishment, actually the only hotel in town.

There was no air conditioning, but each room had an enormous fan in the middle of the ceiling which was spinning round and round, circulating the air. In each bedroom we had smaller fans which would make the horrendous heat a bit more bearable. The rooms were clean but very basic. After our lengthy, bumpy, uncomfortable journey we could not wait to get to our rooms to have a rest.

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