So I left off my last post with some of my always-entertaining visa woes. Thankfully, after a helpful visit to the Fulbright Istanbul office, I should be just fine on my current documentation until September, when I'll get my residence permit. I just can't really leave the country til then, which I suppose is fine, as I wasn't planning any extra-Turkey trips this summer.
Last week was pretty hectic for me: I had midterms on Thursday, for all my classes. After a lot of studying and even more procrastinating, I finished up with all of them by 4 on Thursday afternoon. After that, I headed right back to the dorm to pack: we had no classes last Friday, so I went on vacation. Thursday night I took the overnight bus to Cappadocia with 2 of my roommates (Robin and Abby), my fellow Fulbrighter (Cat), and Cat's cousin, who was in town visiting (Nicole). We all rushed to get our stuff packed and to the bus station to try and get an 8 or 8:30 bus to Goreme; this however didn't happen, as Istanbul is enormously huge and it ended up taking 2 hours to get to the bus station via city bus. In Ankara, I lived 5 minutes away from ASTI (their intercity bus station), so this was a bit shocking to me. Anyway, we got to the bus station by 9, figured we'd buy tickets, and head on our merry way to the land of fairy chimneys.
Except, when we got to the first bus company that travels to Cappadocia, we were told that they had no more tickets that night. Uh-oh. One of the bus company representatives told me to come with him to the other Cappadocia-going companies (after a semester of travelling in Turkey via bus, I am in my element, Turkish-wise, in bus stations and thus handled our travel plans), and we headed to 2 other sold-out busses before finally, luckily, getting the last 5 tickets on the 9:30 bus at a third company. We found out later, they actually only had 4 seats available, and kicked some poor guy off the bus to make room for us. Anyway, we did get on the bus, and off we went to Cappadocia.
We arrived in Goreme at about 8:30, after a short stop in Nevsehir (the regional capital, but really boring from a tourist perspective), and after setting off in the wrong direction managed to find our pension and have breakfast. They had French toast, which was so, so wonderful. After checking in and cleaning ourselves up a bit, we struck off to Goreme Open-Air Museum, which is just like 3 km outside of Goreme and a UNESCO world heritage site. I'd been through it the last time I was in Cappadocia, but it is really pretty so I didn't mind going again. When we got there, we found that our Bogazici student IDs got us free admission, which was excellent, as it's normally 12 YTL. We had a pretty leisurely and enjoyable time exploring the cave churches and monastic ephemera, and this time around I sucked it up and paid the extra cash to see the Dark Church, which was totally worth it. The frescoes inside were stunning. I'll post one of my photos below, the rest are on my Flickr account, in my Cappadocia set.
After that, we wandered back to town, stopping by a pottery workshop for one of my roommates before heading back to our pension for a late lunch and some lounge-time. The pension had milkshakes on the menu, and I was really excited as the Turks generally seem to abhor anything resembling a partially-frozen beverage, but I got my hopes up too soon: the 'milkshake' was warmer than refrigerator temperature and the consistency of chocolate milk. So, a word to the wise: don't order milkshakes in Turkey. My lunch was better: I had Cacik, a Turkish garlic-cucumber-minty yogurt dish, served with bread. It was phenomenally good, and I'm very excited because I may actually be able to make it in my current kitchenless situation. We spent the rest of the afternoon poolside (our pension had a pool; they also had a pet dalmatian mix that guides guests on valley hikes--they pretty much rock), before ambling out to a restaurant that we heard had good vegetarian food for dinner. After dinner, we headed to the bus station to buy our tickets back to Istanbul for Sunday night, as after our almost-not-getting-to-Cappadocia, we wanted to ensure we were going to get back ok. We started with the first company, and I was in the bargaining zone. The tickets were originally 55 YTL each, and I got them down to 35 YTL/person, or roughly $28, $30. The prices were so low they wouldn't go through their computer system, so they had to give us handwritten tickets instead. It was pretty nice to be able to almost-fluently use my Turkish there; again, bus station vocab and usage is my best vocab and usage.
The next day, we took an organized tour to a scenic overlook, Derinkuyu underground city, Ihlara Valley, Selime Monastery, the so-called "Star Wars rocks", Pigeon Valley, and an onyx workshop. We originally were going to just go to Derinkuyu and Ihlara using public transportation, but quickly figured out that we'd spend more money and more time commuting than if we joined the tour; and the tour had air conditioning and free lunch. So, we got on the tour minibus and headed out for our day of adventure. Derinkuyu was really neat: the city is 8 storeys deep in some parts, and kind of resembles a human ant colony. The first 2 floors were made by the Hittites, for siege protection in wartime and food storage in peacetimes, and later communities just expanded as they needed. It got the most use as a legit city in the early Christian era, when the Romans weren't so keen on Christianity and sent forces to take care of their uppity new-religion-having population. The people of Derinkuyu chilled in their underground city for several months at a time, with up to 10000 or 14,000 people living just in that city. The other major underground city in the region (there are actually hundreds, but most are just 1-2 storeys) was 8 or 9 km away, and they actually had a passageway connecting the 2. The whole thing was very well thought out and cleverly designed, with multiple blockable entrances, kitchens, a church, a religious instruction room, and just all kinds of passageways. Very fun to climb around in, if a bit low-ceilinged.
After Derinkuyu, we headed to Ihlara Valley, which is in the southeast of Cappadocia. To avoid this being the single longest post of this blog's lifespan, I'll just direct you to my photostream for descriptions of everywhere else we went on Saturday, as I captioned decently well there: flickr.com/photos/bonkano.
We had lunch in the Ihlara Valley, before heading to Selime, stopping en-route to see the infamous Star Wars rocks. They say parts of the movies were filmed in the region, which I can believe. The Selime Monastery was another fun, interesting, and clamberable formation, we spent a good deal of time there before heading to Pigeon Valley to see the pigeon houses and then to the onyx workshop, which was not so thrilling but thankfully low-pressure. After that long and full day, we did some swimming before having dinner at the pension and playing some tavla.
Sunday morning, we got up and set out to hike the Pigeon Valley to Uchisar, which is the name of both a fortress and the village around the fortress, about 3-4 km from Goreme. It was a great hike, full of all kinds of steep hills, and Nicole was nice enough to quiz the rest of us on Turkish verbs taking the accusative, indicative, and ablative particles, so it was a learning excursion. It felt so great to stretch my leg muscles going up and down the valley; I expected to be really sore after getting back but so far that hasn't been the case. Anyway, we got to Uchisar village and proceeded to hike up to the fortress; it's the tallest point in the region, so it was still quite a bit up. We climbed through the interior of the fortress to the very top, where we spent a good amount of time chatting and contemplating before running into a group of American students in the equivalent of our program, but in Ankara. They were pretty nice, and we exchanged thoughts on the language, our respective programs, and travelling in Turkey; sadly they're leaving before I arrive in Ankara. By and by, we hiked back down to the village and decided to grab lunch there before heading back to Goreme. Uchisar is the French tourist hangout in Cappadocia, so all the restaurant and pension signs were in French; I enjoyed that quite a bit, especially seeing some of the Turkish-French mistranslations. Back in Goreme, we had more pool time, played with the pension owner's new kitten, and had pie baked by the pension owners before packing up and heading out. We had a 7 pm bus out of Goreme, which got in to Istanbul at 6:30am Monday morning. Mindful of our fon times getting to the bus station in Istanbul, we asked if the bus company had a shuttle into the city, which they did, so we took that. They failed to mention, though, that the shuttle wouldn't be leaving the bus station til 8am, after the next bus from Goreme arrived. The shuttle took us downtown, where we transferred to an Etiler-bound bus and arrived at the dorms at 8:45, just enough time to shower, drop our stuff off, check email, and be an hour late to class.
It was a pretty fantastic trip; 5 people is a little large a group to travel with, but it did help me bargain down our bus tickets, so I'm not complaining too much. I had a great time relaxing, and a better time exploring the parts of Cappadocia I missed the last time I was there.
It's been a decently quiet week since Monday; I've pretty much been immersed in class and homework. Tuesday my class went to the Kadikoy pazar with my TA; it was fun, and overwhelming, and crowded, as pazars are. Wednesday one of my professors took us out for ice cream at the swanky ice cream chain in Etiler, which was awesome. One of the girls in my class found a large chunk of glass in her ice cream, which was not so awesome, but the manager was wonderfully apologetic and gave us all free Turkish coffees, which was nice. My professor read all our coffee grounds for us after we finished our coffee; apparently there is a guy who will become a larger part of my life, and apparently I bring good luck. We'll see about that.
On that note, I'm out til my next blog post, which hopefully will be sooner than in 2 weeks, like the gap between this and my last post.
-R
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