What a Weekend!

Hello, everyone!
I'm back in Ankara after an exciting time in the Southeast of Turkey, as you can probably tell from my last post. I went to Diyarbakir with a friend on Wednesday; we took the overnight bus and arrived in Diyarbakir at 8:30 Thursday morning. After checking out a hotel, and checking into another one, we set off to see Diyarbakir's fabled city wall (it's the second-longest wall in the world, after the Great Wall of China).
Lonely Planet's Eating and Drinking section of their Diyarbakir entry starts out "A stroll along Kibris Caddesi reveals plenty of informal places to eat." Hah. A stroll along Kibris Caddesi revealed nothing but metal security grates, pulled down and locked securely. We'd read about the demonstrations on Tuesday, but the stories we'd read noted that the demonstrations were strictly in response to the Tuesday funerals of PKK fighters killed last Sunday in the mountains. The stories also noted that most of the fighting was localized in the mountains, and that things seemed to be settling a bit in Diyarbakir. Apparently noone told the Diyarbakirlilar, because they were locked up and hunkered down. It didn't seem too strange at 9 that very few stores were open; Diyarbakir's a hot city, so we figured that maybe they got a late start to their days. However, after we walked through the park next to the walls, and clambered up onto the walltops, we began to think it was a bit strange that the stores weren't opening yet. Two Kurdish college students struck up a conversation with us on the wall, and showed us around the ruins on the walltop (according to Lonely Planet, that's completely normal; they wanted to practice their English a little). After we saw the cityscape and the ruins, we walked back down to the park, where we chilled on a bench and remarked on how even in the playground area men outnumbered women by about 30 to 1. We asked about the pazar, as my friend wanted to buy Kurdish headscarves and salvarlar (Kurdish old lady pants; they're excellently horrible!), and the two students started to take us there before remembering that it, like most of the businesses, was closed Thursday, as well as Wednesday, and perhaps even Friday, because of the civil unrest. We headed off towards our hotel to look for some lunch, and couldn't find anything open, so we asked the front desk guy for an open restaurant, which he found about 5 minutes later. While he was looking, we popped up to our room and watched the live report on NTV from Diyarbakir, which showed recaps of some of the clashes. The restaurant only served kebaps, and it had raised its prices since there was an utter lack of competition and a lot of demand (oh, economics...). We headed off to the Tourist Office to ask about the current situation and to pick up some information; they didn't speak English there, and didn't tell us how the city was, but they did give us a map, and they pointed the way to the Archaeological Museum. At the Archaeological Museum, the staff was really surprised to see us; we were their first visitors in a while. We toured the museum with the chief curator, Ramazan, and had tea with him afterwards. He was very interesting; he's Kurdish, lives in a Kurdish village, is married, and has 7 kids. His brother has 3 wives and 22 kids (ughhhh...); Ramazan's the only guy in his village with 1 wife. He used to work at Incirlik, the US military base in Adana, but now he's the head Turkish archaeologist in the area. He invited us to see his village, but we figured that would be not so safe, so we politely declined. After that, we walked back towards the kale, passing a vehicle roadblock outside the police station, and were stopped by Ali, a photojournalist for BBC, who was stopping by his hometown (Diyarbakir) on his way from Iraq to London; he thought we were journalists, as we were obviously foreign, and he didn't think there would be any tourists in Diyarbakir. He showed us the Ulu Camii (Great Mosque), and tried to bring us to the pazar, except it was closed, of course, and as we walked away from it we heard drums behind us, meaning demonstrators were gathering nearby. Ali invited us to have dinner with him and 2 of his friends, but the only place we could find that was open was where we'd had lunch, and Le Xuan and I couldn't eat that much meat and bread again, so we had tea, and we had a really interesting discussion about Kurdish relations with Arabs and with Turks (all 3 of the guys were Kurds); they were vehemently against the demonstrations, as they didn't see any progress for the Kurdish cause coming from them, and they opposed violence as a means of attention to their cause. I learned a lot by talking with them. After we finished our tea, we headed back to our hotel, then went back out to get some bread, fruit, and chocolate, and spent an enjoyable evening talking with two other travellers, Lina from Ireland and Andre from Holland.
The next day, we ambled on down to the bazaar, which thankfully was open, and went shopping. I picked up some Kurdish headscarves, and some salvar, and we spent a lot of time exploring, before heading to see some mosques and the kervanseray. We walked outside of the main walls to the Hazreti Suleyman Camii, which was built in the 12th century and which houses the tombs of Islamic war heroes, and we had such a delightful time there! The courtyard was full of old men getting prepared to pray, women, and children running around. After we paid our respects at one tomb that was set aside for veneration, at the direction of a very nice Turkish lady, we said hi to the kids, and started talking with them in our limited Turkish. They were really excited to talk with us, and when we brought our cameras out, they were fascinated: they took as many photos as they could with my camera, of each other and of us. They laughed at our haphazard headscarf-tying jobs, and played with my sunglasses for a while, til we left to see another mosque. From there, we tried to walk along the eastern side of the wall, but were stopped by locals who pantomimed that people would throw rocks at us if we went down there, so we headed down the main road. There were policemen everywhere, and dozens of armored personnel carriers, police Hummers and tank-looking things with machine guns mounted on top; they all looked fairly battle-worn, I'll post pictures later. We stopped by a pastanesi, or pastry shop, and while we were sitting there, they were replacing their front window, as the original one had been shattered the night before. In front of the pastry shop, a police battalion was getting ready for a raid or police action of some sort, we watched them all read an official-looking paper and then get all their riot-y gear ready before loading up into a police transport vehicle and driving off. We headed off and found the Kasim Padisah Camii, also called the Four-Legged Minaret, because its minaret stands on 4 thin pillars. We visited the ruins of an Armenian church as the sun was starting to set, which was absolutely gorgeous, and tried to see another, which was closed, before heading back to the hotel and talking with Lina, Andre, and some French and German tourists for awhile. The next morning, though, we were out of there like a home run out of a ballpark, and we took a dolmus to Mardin to explore that city a bit, which I'll write up hopefully tomorrow.
I do have some photos up on Flickr, but unfortunately my bandwidth for the month is used up, so I'll have to figure out an alternative for the rest of my photos to post them here. Hope you all are doing well!
-R