Home from home...

Well sort of! A bit about where we are staying.


It's called the hotel Usbada, which translates as Manor House.


This is the view from the hotel driveway back towards the village. Yayva is basically a couple of dozen of these apartment blocks arranged in a grid pattern of streets. Shops etc occupy the groundfloor on half a dozen blocks and there is a district heating scheme with a network of 18" pipes above ground distributing hot water all over town.
The hotel only has 8 rooms, we are in rooms 4 & 5 which take up all the second floor. The rooms are actually a suite with sitting room ( fridge, microwave, kettle , tv settee, table & chairs), bedroom and en-suite.





Very clean and comfortable but no restaurant facilities or bar etc!! Heating is on all the time, controlled by us opening windows if it gets too hot - which it does, even though -15 or less outside. It's self catering and they have given us the use of their kitchen downstairs - Al B is chief cook, Al G head bottle washer. With self catering, we are regulars at the little supermarket in the village and doing wonders for their turnover.
Out the back their is a log built building which appears to be mainly used for private functions. It has the billiard table ( kept us occupied for 4 hours last Saturday), a banya- a Russian sauna & plunge pool, and a kitchen/dining room. We can't quite work out the etiquette for the banya so haven't tried that yet - need the lowdown from the locals to not commit the equivalent of peeing in the pool or getting chased down the road for going in on ladies night!! The bear lives behind the log cabin. Amazingly there is also an outdoor barbecue - we saw it being used on the first weekend. BBQ in 3 foot of snow and -15, we'll give it a go when we get back to UK in February - not sure it will catch on.


Found this in the kitchen the other night- answers on the back of a 500 ruble note as to what its for - we have no idea and are really baffled as to what it translates as!!!!!!
The other thing about the digs is no wifi, broadband or any of that western decadence. Limited Internet via dongle or mobile phone tethering. Expensive, slow and intermittent. This is Al B in optimum position for best signal.


The Turkish warranty engineer sorted us out with a fast wifi connection at the site - great guy. To get it to work Al B managed to get into the modem and ended up changing the password, hence weve had a procession of guys trooping in to see us having got wind we have an unrestricted wifi connection and asking for set up details!! Got to be careful with that one.