Travel Journal

2002-11-02

Tour over...

The theater is enormous -- probably the largest ancient theater I've ever seen, it can seat 25,000 people. There's also a smaller theater known as the Odeum, where the city council met and musical performances were held. The library was very impressive; Lale said it was built by the children of the roman governor after his death as a combination mausoleum and library. Apparently, he specified in his will that he'd like them to do something nice for the city, while what they really wanted to do was to build him a mausoleum. Creative, if bizarre, thinking... Lale also remarked that this is the third-greatest library of the ancient world, after that of Alexandria and that of Pergamum.

The ancient public toilets were a big hit with our group, and we were all particularly amused when Lale described the way men used to socialize at the public toilets, discussing business matters. Not what I would have expected!

At one point during the tour of Ephesus, I asked Lale about the quality of tour guides in Turkey, and she remarked that most guides in Turkey are quite good because they are all required to attend a guiding school before they can be licensed guides. Naturally, some guides work harder at keeping up on the latest developments in archaeology and the like than others, but at least they all start with a basic level of training. The government seems well aware of the importance of tourism in Turkey -- earlier on the tour, Lale explained that foreign tour companies can only operate in Turkey through a partnership with a local company -- it's apparently not possible for a non-Turkish company to offer tours of Turkey on its own.

After we finished at Ephesus, we paid a quick visit to the site of the ancient temple of Artemis, where exactly one pillar is currently standing. Nonetheless, it was interesting to visit the site of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and it has a lovely view of the ruins of the 6th century St. John Basilica, a 13th century mosque, and a fortress on top of a hill.

A boy tried to sell me some "ancient" coins. I didn't look at them very carefully, but explained to him that whether I wanted them or not, it was illegal for me to remove them from the country. Now, honestly, if he'd admitted to me at this point that they were fake, I might well have looked at them more carefully and bought one or two (at a price that reflected their actual status as clever fakes). Instead, he kept trying to talk me into buying them on the basis that the authorities would never notice. Needless to say, I didn't bite. (Lale told us they were fake when we got back on the bus, and the Lonely Planet guidebook also mentioned it.)

The bus dropped us off in downtown Kusadasi to find lunch on our own and do whatever we wanted with the afternoon. John and I went souvenir hunting without much success. The shopping district is heavy on gold and leather, light on meaningful souvenirs. I guess that's what the cruise ship travellers like. We did find an Internet Cafe, where we checked for a response from the hotel in Athens -- they got back to us, so we'll be staying there tomorrow night. The Internet Cafe was interesting -- very nicely decorated, with bright blue walls and yellow trim. All the computers were occupied when we got there, but the manager threw some of the young guys out to make room for us -- they were playing some kind of car racing game on the LAN.

After that, we found some lunch at an outdoor cafe, where a cat meowed at us piteously at least half the time we were eating. We didn't relent and feed it -- it seemed like a bad idea at a restaurant.

We had a couple of hours to do laundry and such back at the hotel before heading out for the farewell dinner at a winery in a town called Shirince. I didn't much care for the wine, but the company was excellent and the food was delicious, as usual. Kitty and Lale surprised everyone by celebrating John's birthday with a construction known as a yanar doner. It was at least a meter tall, and made of plates and wineglasses stuck together with caramelized sugar. There was fruit on the plates, and flaming wineglasses on the top tier. We all sang Happy Birthday for him, and he had to blow out the torches.

We had a few minutes after dessert to wander through the house and gardens; John and I used them to stargaze. The skies were gorgeous, and we were able to make out the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye.

This morning, almost the whole group got back onto the bus to head to Ismir. John and I are the only ones who are spending the day here -- everyone else who went to Ismir is flying out today, either to go home or to continue their journey. The bus to the airport was fun -- some of the folks walked back and forth through the bus to say goodbye to everyone, and there was a lot of talk of the tour reunion in February. (I have no idea if we'll be able to make it!)

And then Rafet dropped part of the group off at International departures, the rest at Domestic departures - and us in the Basmane area of downtown Ismir. During which we discovered that he speaks a little more English than than I'd thought, and got an inkling that he might speak a little German, too..."

Ephesus

Farewell Dinner

Izmir

After settling in to the hotel and relaxing for a while (the walk to tourist information and then to the hotel with our packs on had been a little tiring), we headed out in the direction of the Archaeological and Ethnographic Museums, which are conveniently located right next to each other.

We went rather the long way around (it didn't look that way on a map), which led us through an interesting shopping area bustling with people. Kebap shops were everywhere, and Chicken Doner seemed especially popular. There were also rather a lot of bakeries. The disadvantage of this circa 1.5 km route was that it was entirely uphill -- and that once we got to the museums, we had to go down quite a bit to get to them, so we'd probably climbed twice as far as we needed to in order to get to the museums. We did have a lovely view of the harbor (it would have been lovelier if it hadn't been blanketed in smog), and we walked past a beautiful mosque covered with intricate blue and white tiles.

The Ethnographic Museum was our first stop, and the fellow working there actually had to turn on the lights for us, as we were the only visitors! Many of the exhibits clearly hadn't been updated in many years, and could have been clearer, but it was nonetheless interesting. We were particularly amused by the section on camel wrestling, which is apparently a venerable art in this part of the country. Specially-trained camels, outfitted with safety gear, have at it for the amusement of the spectators. Can you see camel wrestling taking the place of Nascar?

The Archaeological Museum was very well done and had clearly been updated more recently -- it even had the motion sensor-activated lights. It also had extensive English-language translations, which covered the obvious and also revealed that Philip Morris has been sponsoring at least one archaeological dig in the area.

The whole time we were walking around in Izmir, I don't think we saw another non-Turk. It was a bit difficult to tell, because some of the local people here look very European, but this is definitely not a tourist town.

We had lunch at a pizza restaurant called something like Piu Pizza, which we selected because it looked like a turkish equivalent of a McDonald's. The place was packed, and we were very pleased with the delicious pizza we ordered with only limited knowledge of what toppings it would have. While we were there, we noticed that there was a place with an awning proclaiming Canon Digital Photo & Video across the street, so we stopped in and found that they did indeed have a 128 MB memory card for John's camera -- he's running low on memory after 2 weeks in Turkey.

After that, we headed back to the room, where we've been reading and relaxing; I think we both needed some down time."

Izmir