Written on the bus from Izmir to Selcuk last night
I realized today that I had left out a few details about our
first day of the trip and details on Turkey. Our hotel happened to be right next to a
mosque, so about 4am, I got woken up by the call to prayer. Definitely don’t get that at home.
In Georgia,
I sometimes encounter Turkish toilets, so they can be disappointing but I’m
used to them. And they are called
Turkish toilets. Still, from the moment
we got to Turkey until we
hit our apartment in Izmir, all I saw were
Turkish toilets, including our hotel in Trabzon
and the airport there. Beautiful
bathrooms with Turkish toilets. Sigh.
On the plane, I asked one of my friends where in the city we
were staying. He replied he did not
know, but it could not be that big of a city.
My other friend and I laughed and told him it was Turkey’s 3rd largest city, and I
whipped out my Lonely Planet to astonish us all with the fact that there are
2.7 million people in Izmir. We knew that our adventure had just grown a
bit more.
When we arrived in Izmir,
we tried to find a café with wifi.
Although knowing they have to exist, we had difficulty and were so
hungry that we finally sat down at a place with cool chairs (this tends to be
the way we pick our fast food joints out of the many that Turkey
offers). Of course, we happened upon a
place that served only a few items of food, so we got tea and toast, which was
what they offered. There were two old
men sitting next to us, smoking their water pipes, thumbing their worry beads,
perhaps the perfect picture of what I assume Turkish old men to be like. That plus energy from food and tea set us off
again, resigned to find an internet café in hopes our couchsurfing host had
sent us directions. She had not, so we
told her we would meet her at 8 and set off for more food and again hopes of
wifi so I could use Skype to try to call our host. We wandered into the bazaar and were
approached after a while of looking confused by helpful Turk #2 (these are only
the ones I’m pointing out, but the majority of people we’ve met have been so
helpful and friendly, like in Georgia).
He had lived in Norfolk,
which pleased me greatly. He tried to
help us find an internet café (having not understood we wanted wifi, probably
because of the age difference more than the language barrier). He took us through the maze of the bazaar and
eventually handed us off to a friend, who plunged us deeper into the maze. Once he took us to a café that had computers,
we explained we really needed to call a friend, so he whipped out his phone for
us to use. Our host confirmed she would
meet us at 8pm, we thanked helpful Turk #3, and then decided it was time for
more tea.
A note about the tea.
Although people probably think of Turkish coffee when they think of
Turkish drinks, the Turks actually grow and consume quite a bit of tea, which
more reason I adore this country. Tea is
frequently served in tiny tulip cups, so drinking several cups of tea at a time
is just normal. So far my record is 8 in
a day, but that’s because I keep interrupting these tea sessions with traveling
and sightseeing. I’ll do better soon, I
promise.
Once filled up with more tea, with more time to kill, we
walked along the boardwalk in Izmir. Now comes the note about Izmir.
Izmir is a big modern city on the Aegean Sea, built around a bay, with development all
around. It has a long and storied
history, being the ancient city of Smyrna,
home to one of the seven churches in Revelation. It would be a much bigger player in modern Turkey (as in, a rival to Istanbul for culture) but much of the city
was destroyed a little less than a century ago in a terrible fire. The main draw of Izmir for me was the water, and it has a
lovely boardwalk.
We walked along the boardwalk, grabbed our first real kebab
and more tea (of course), before meeting our host. She was a really interesting Turkish woman
who spoke excellent English. She had
just come home a month before from studying abroad so had arranged for us to stay
with her friends. Her friends also owned
a café, so she took us there where she fed us tea, chatted with us about Turkey and Georgia, and then invited us to
play a game similar to mafia with the other patrons, many of whom were also
friends. These people were decidedly not
your average Turks, but they were incredibly welcoming. The long days of travel and chance to hear
Turkish while trying to discern by body language who was good and who was bad,
while still figuring out the rules to the game meant I did a horrible job
playing the game but still had fun. We
then went to the apartment we were staying at and regaled them with more
stories of Georgia
before crashing much later than we had expected.
We had a leisurely morning, found delicious pastries and tea
for breakfast, and headed off to find the bus station to get to Cesme, a
peninsula that had a castle and a beach.
Our host had told us that we could take a ferry to get downtown, where
we could take a bus to said bus station, and all of us enjoyed getting to use a
ferry as a form of transportation, especially as it was faster than taking the
metro around the city. We got off, took
a while to find the bus stop we needed, and then realized the buses did not
have all the stops written on them so we were going to have to ask for help. A group of giggly school girls got off one
bus and stood around waiting for another.
They were intrigued by us foreigners and clearly spoke at least a bit of
English, so I asked them for which bus to take us to the necessary bus station. Their English was limited but they not only
got us on the right bus, but they got off with us at the bus station and found
us the bus we needed (helpful Turk(s) #4.
Our bus left a few minutes later and drove through luscious countryside
that would have made my jaw drop coming from Illinois.
Having survived a long winter, the green was a very welcome sight, but
as one friend pointed out, the beauty of Georgia
had made the beauty of Turkey
a little less awe-inspiring.
Once we got to Cesme, we oriented ourselves and headed for
the beach. I was expecting something
with a bit more grandeur than what we found.
Next to the man-made sand beach, there were some beautiful rocks, so we
decided to swim there. Getting into the
water was tricky with broken glass, slippery rocks, and cold water making
getting in a challenge, but the reward was worth it. After adjusting to the water, I relished the
freedom of swimming. I swam over to a
small cove to investigate and then enjoyed the open, clear water, using my arm
muscles more than I had in several months.
I marveled at the scenery around me.
Aside from the Caribbean, it is the
most beautiful place I have ever gone swimming, and only my tired muscles and
realization my friends were all swum out brought me back to shore.
We found more tea and I ate another kebab, since they’re
cheap, tasty, and easy to order. Then we
went to climb on the Genoese castle but were disappointed to find out that it
was closed, since the museum inside it was closed on Mondays. We walked around it and then realized that it
was starting to rain, so we headed to the bus station. We had about half an hour to kill, so got
more tea. I decided to pop into the
nearby grocery store for something sweet to go with our second cup of tea. I quickly found baklava, had no problem
ordering three pieces of three different types, and then had to wait for almost
ten minutes while they struggled to weigh the pieces and price them
accordingly. I’m pretty sure they did it
wrong, but I made it back in time to gulp down my tea, and we enjoyed the
baklava on the bus. At one of the stops,
a man from the Air Force got on with his wife and two kids. Having heard English, I started talking to
him, and found out that he worked at the NATO base in Izmir.
It was interesting to get to hear another American’s perspective on the
city, especially one with less of a reckless twenty-something’s Georgia-colored
idea of the world.
We decided to head back to Izmir’s main bus station, thinking it would
be easier to find and easier to get back to the city from there. It took forever to get there and had no
metro, but we did find the bus we needed to get back. However, half the bus kept staring at us and
trying to talk to us for half our ride until they eventually told us to get out
and the driver had to walk us to another bus of the same number, helpful Turk
#5 (although the whole bus helped). As
the bus station only has one stop for local buses, you have to know which
direction you need and which direction that number bus is going. We had no idea, but the Turks knew what we
needed better than we did and graciously got us in the right direction. When we finally got downtown, we walked
around a bit, ate, and headed back across the water to our host.
We actually did a good job finding our apartment, but we had
no way to get it. We spent over an hour
trying to find the café from the previous night, thinking our friends might be
there. While we did a good job retracing
our steps, especially considering that our host had gotten us a bit lost on the
way to her friends’ café since her sense of direction is about as good as mine,
we did not find the café. Instead, we
parked ourselves at a café between the main street and our apartment. While we drank more tea, I finally realized
my Lonely Planet had the phrase “Can I borrow your phone?”, so one of the boys
asked our waiter, our waiter immediately obliged (helpful Turk #6), and we
contacted our host. I always thought
such phrases in phrasebooks were unnecessary.
I stand corrected. Our host came
over a little while later, paid for our tea, and took us into the
apartment. He then said he was staying
elsewhere, so we had several hours with the apartment to ourselves to shower,
drink, and let Wikipedia decided several of the debates we had had about
various subjects since our trip began.
Having stayed up late, we still got up fairly early to hit Sardis. We searched out another traditional Turkish
breakfast and then made our way back to the bus station, where we easily found
a bus ready to leave for Sardis. In addition to the smooth ride and free
water, this bus also served us tea, which made me happy.
A note about Sardis,
or Sart, as the current village is called.
Sardis
was the capital of the Lydian kingdom several centuries BC. They, like the Georgians, used fleece to sift
gold, and might have invented coinage.
The phrase ‘rich as Croesus’ comes from King Croesus of Lydia. Sardis
was also an important city under Alexander the Great and especially the
Romans. It is another church mentioned
in Revelation. There were some ruins we
wanted to see and separate ruins of a Temple of Artemis. It took us a while to find the right road and
we passed the ruins at first, since the only part we could see looked far too new. We headed down the road toward the Temple
with a bit of assistance from helpful Turk #7, since we saw a sign for that,
saw a few ruins, and started getting frustrated that we had not seen any
ruins. There were some crumbled walls
from some sort of fortification perched precariously on one of the two high
hills, so when there was a small sign and a footpath, we could not resist. One of the boys loves to climb on anything,
and we all agreed it was a good idea to head up. We followed the sheep paths up the hill until
eventually one of my friends started laughing.
When we got up to where he was, we saw that we had stopped probably three
minutes before we would have hit a very impressive ruined temple and that we
had actually past the other ruins. Thus
oriented, we continued up the hill until we reached the ruined
fortification. The height offered a
spectacular view, and two of us decided to climb up onto the fortification,
which was awesome, except I ripped a hole in my jeans in the process. A small price to pay for the satisfaction of
climbing and the rewarding panoramic view.
We needed to hurry so took the fastest way down, strolled
into the ruined temple, and climbed around.
We knew we had to pay for entry into the temple, but the area was not
entirely cordoned off, and we had entered through the exit. Only 2 other men were there, and the guard
seemed confused when I paid him as we left through the entrance. We were pleased to find out that our entrance
was also good for the other set of ruins.
Part of these ruins had been reconstructed, hence the fact we thought it
was too new. The reconstruction looked
stupid in parts but also made it much easier to imagine the city in its glory
days. There were some Byzantine ruins,
including a latrine and row of shops, but my favorite part was the classical
synagogue. The floor still retained
several mosaic patterns, which made my classical heart smile. The ruins were in decent shape, so I could
actually understand the structure of the synagogue. I realized I had never been in a synagogue
before as I imagined that some of the very first Christians could have
worshiped in that very place almost two thousand years ago. As I continued to wander through the ruins,
toward the part that had been rebuilt, I ran into an English-speaking tour
group. I mostly ignored them, found my
friends, and we headed back to catch the bus.
We assumed we needed to be on the opposite side of the street from where
we were dropped off, but were greatly helped by this old woman on that side of
the street. She assured us we needed to
come and sit on a bench with her if we needed a bus to Izmir.
She then motioned about being cold, so we all put our jackets back
on. She made me laugh since she had
about six layers on and must have thought me crazy for my t-shirt and light
coat. With more hand gestures than
words, she also asked if I was married to either of my two friends and
instructed us all to put on jackets. When the next bus came, she flagged it
down for us, serving as helpful Turk #8.
More to come.
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