And I really feel that I  and THE MOSAIC have come home! Knowing that this home is not where my family is gives me a crunch in the stomach. The fish figures that were still wrapped for two weeks are taken out of their bubble wrap blankets and seem to be happy to hear the waves of the aegean sea for the first time. I arrange my workplace  in the patio in front of Santimetre’s former atelier. In the morning I just have to walk through the garden and down a few steps to be at  work. Finally I again manage to set up a working routine, especially for the background tesserae as they are placed mainly in line but still have to be put down thoughtfully in order to achieve a good mix of shades of beige. I can visit THE HOUSE for the mosaic every day and feel completely happy and relaxed. I can go and smoke a cigaret on the roof top of the atelier and see the sea and the sun …

This week its cutting, cutting, cutting stone. Now Mustafa has his pride and I am not allowed to join in. So I start making the first wall piece inside the adjacent room as the wind is so strong on the open roof that I am afraid that the small tesserae are being blown away. In the mean time Mustafa and I have an ongoing discussion how to know when there will be enough tesserae for the background and how we could measure it. Finally we have the idea to put the printed design on the floor and spread the tesserae slightly heaped on it to see if it fills the background. It is not so easy to do this in the strong sea breeze and incredibly hot sun on a roof top! So we wait until sunset one less windy day. This proofed to be a good method and by Wednesday we have enough tesserae. Thursday is packing up time again because Mustafa has to leave back to Ankara. He offers to leave me a …

So – I arrived in Ayvalik on Saturday Aug, 22 and settled for the weekend with my friend Tulya Madra. THE HOUSE that is supposed to host the Ayvalik Mosaic is further under renovation. As it happened – Mustafa Salih – my first mosaic teacher (who already played a part in this story in lending me the hydraulic stone cutting machine), happen to have a holiday apartment in Sarimsakli. Sarimsakli is the longest sandy beach on the aegean coast and is 3km  south from the centre of Ayvalik. Mustafa offered to help with the mosaic. So all the stones and ready fish figures were shipped to his house and when I arrived on Sunday, Aug 23 the Kargo already had been delivered and the workshop set up on his roof top overlooking a tiny bit of the sea. One has to consider that there were about 80kg of goods that came from Gaziantep and that were damped on the street and 60 year old Mustafa carried it all up a tiny flight of stairs to …