Malena in Turkey

So as we’ve started running out of time here, less time spent on the Internet and more time spent squeezing every last minute out of the day!  But I’m sure I can find the time at work to update some entries.  Heh.  However, for those wondering, a quick overview of where we’ve been since the last update:

Fethiye - spent one more day visiting the ghost town of Kayakoy (abandoned 75 years ago when all the Greeks living in Turkey moved to Greece and vice versa.)  We then sort of hiked, sort of trailblazed back down to Oleduniz (the beach where we went sky-diving) and met up with our good friend Hector there.  If by good friend I mean sketchy guy who sold us the skydiving package and then stopped by our hostel room the next night to see if we wanted to go out.  Sweet.  We then headed out to Olympos…

Olympos - Where we met up with some other travellers, saw the eternal Olympic flame’s birthplace (really cool!) and hung out in a treehouse.  And drank some beer.  Then we headed to Antalya..

Antalya - where we spent five hours seeing the sights, including a fun museum that featured exciting scenes from Turkish life 500 years ago (and you think I’m being facetious.)  We also only made our bus thanks to a nice Turkish waiter who spoke very good German but very bad English - so he actually walked us the 4 blocks to the bus station!  Because we were on the way to Goreme…

Goreme:  We spent 4 days 3 nights here, going on hikes both successful and unsuccessful, meeting even more other travellers and actually hanging out with some locals, and going scootering in the hills (to, among other things, an amazing underground city that I’ll write more about later, a castle and a winery.)  We also rented bikes and headed over to Urgup where we tried our hand at pottery (apparently they let native English speakers take multi-week pottery classes there if you just talk in English with them… how cool is that?  Gabi, you should totally do that after you graduate - you’d love it.)  Hmm, we also played a lot of backgammon, saw some ‘interesting’ rock formations, and drank a lot of tea, a lot of beer, and a lot of Cappadocia wine.  We headed out on another horrible overnight bus to Istanbul for one day…

Istanbul:  Where we’ve ridden a ferry on the Bosphorus, bought Turkish Delight in the Spice Market, bartered in the Great Bazaar, and drank the most expensive cup of tea ever.  Which was spilled on my face.  But we still didn’t receive a discount.  Grrr.  

Tomorrow morning we head back home!  Booo!  I think we’ve both had a very nice time here, although the famous Turkish hospitality is more so they can sell you things than anything else.  I plan on making a Tshirt that says:  “Turkish hospitality — No obligation”  when I get back.  I also need to find out more about the famous Ataturk, pictured everywhere here.  But don’t worry, we’ve been taking pictures.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 7:32 am and is filed under 01 - Turkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.