This is a photo of my husband and me taken when we recently went on holiday to Ayvalik. Ayvalik is on the Marmara Sea so it is relatively close to Istanbul. This was in 2002, the last year we went on holiday like this. We stayed there for a week. Both my husband and I used to like swimming very much. In the old days, we never needed to take long trips out of Istanbul to go swimming because we had the best sea here in Istanbul. However, the sea all around Istanbul got polluted about 15-20 years ago, and that’s how we started going on holidays out of Istanbul.
We used to go on holidays in the summers, but my husband doesn't enjoy that as much any more. We used to go to the Aegean coast mostly. We used to travel by bus to these resorts and it was quite tiring actually because even when you go to the Aegean, the bus trip takes at least 12 hours. We usually went if one or more of our friends went, too. Nowadays neither my husband’s nor my health allow us to go on such long trips, so we haven’t been for a couple of years. I had a heart attack a couple of years ago and since then the doctors have forbidden me to get tired. At the smallest type of exertion I start getting palpitations and this scares me a lot.
