General Safety

Street crime is not a big problem here. Theft is rare and assault on an individual, especially a foreigner, equally so. Anyone whose been here a while will have a collection of stories where 'the taxi driver brought it back to my hotel the next day'. Obviously this doesn't mean nothing nasty ever happens but you're probably a factor of 100 times safer wondering around Bodrum at 4:00 in the morning than you would be in Brighton (not that Brighton's a dangerous place).

As a woman traveller in Turkey you are more likely to be the catalyst of trouble than the victim of it. It seems impossible to write about these issues without invoking stereotypes and to explain that last sentence I'm going to have to talk about Turkish men. Oh well, here goes. There is a degree of chauvinism present in a proportion of Turkish guys. Perhaps a slightly higher degree than you might be used to. There is also an intense pride that occasionally manifests itself as a refusal to believe that you might not find them irresistably attractive. No difference so far, right?. I feel like stopping right here for fear of all sorts of things. It's difficult to get anyone else to write about this stuff but hopefully we'll have some other takes on these issues within a week or two. Just to finish this topic, men here are less likely to get drunk and fight with each other over anything or anyone than in my particular part of South London. If they do however it will probably be nasty and if a guy feels that he has been made to look silly in front of other guys, especially by a woman, very especially by a foreign woman, then it's just possible that things could get very unpleasant.

That will do for now.