Starting Point: Van

For Seker Bayram, I headed to the Southeast with two good friends, Cat and Corey. We flew to Van, and made our way over to Gaziantep, by way of Nemrut and a few more places.
This is our second day, on top of Van's castle, which is right on the shore of Lake Van. The area is ringed with mountains, and it's just beautiful. It's also pretty large as old fortifications go, so we spent a good long while clambering the length and breadth of it. Van (pronounced "von", like the von Trapp family) is not so south, but very east; it's near the Iranian border. We were there for the last few days of Ramazan, so we were able to have the Iftar (sunset fast-breaking meal) with what seemed like half the town's population; it was quite an experience, and delicious food as well. We took a day trip out to Hosap to see a medieval Kurdish castle, only to be told by helpful primary school children that the castle was locked for the day. Whoops. No minibusses would stop and pick us up for the 60 km ride back to Van, so we ended up driving back with a very nice Kurdish businessman from Van and his 10-ish-year-old son. We were stopped by 3 checkpoints, and while the driver's credentials were scrupulously checked, and the vehicle pored over, the soldiers really didn't seem to give two hoots about us. It was really interesting to see though. When we got back to town, we got a little lost on our way to Van Kale, got directions to the dolmus stop by this really nice woman who invited us to her family's Iftar (we sadly already had reservations, but it's very representative of Vanlis, that she'd invite the 3 of us home less than 5 minutes after meeting us). We made it to Van Kale just before sunset, and got some great exploring and sightseeing in before the storm on the neighboring mountains got uncomfortably close and started lightening. At that point, we skedaddled down the citadel and grabbed a cab back downtown and to our Iftar. At least during Ramazan, there is really just one place that you should eat at in Van: Halil Ibrahim Sofrasi.
Oh, except for breakfast: Van has a Breakfast Street, literally a street filled with breakfast salons. I'm not a breakfast person, but I can get behind the idea of Breakfast Street. It was gooood stuff.
Alright, more stories later, I'm going to bed. Most of my Van photos are up on Flickr already, check them out! Quality-wise, they're much better than my Antakya pics...