The Rest of Bayram: Sanliurfa

In my quest to finally get up-to-date on this so I can write more on current happenings in my Ankaran life, I'm going to try and get the rest of my Bayram trip posted all at once here...
We got into Sanliurfa (also known as just plain Urfa) after dark on Tuesday night of the Seker Bayram holiday. We grabbed a taxi to take from the bus station to our hotel (we'd called ahead and reserved a room from Diyarbakir; one of the perks of knowing decent amounts of Turkish).
When we got in the cab, we immediately noticed that it had no meter. The driver was attempting to leave the parking lot of the bus station when we asked him how much it was going to be to take us to our hotel; it’s a good thing we asked, because he quoted us 10 lira, for a trip that we knew had to be much cheaper. When we told him that there was absolutely no way we ere going to pay that, he tried to argue that we were getting a really cheap rate, and tried to drive off with us in the cab, at which point I opened my door to keep us at the bus station til our money situation was resolved. We finally all agreed on 5 lira, which was still too much but at least not exorbitant. The cab was sketchy as heck, too; one of my travel companions was more than a little freaked out by the whole situation, but we got to our hotel with no additional fuss. When we got there and checked in, it was clear we were getting out of The East: the front desk had a wireless router, had we schlepped our laptops along we could’ve had wireless internet. Next time...
Our hotel was pretty nice; our room had an enclosed balcony and breakfast was included in the price. In the morning, we had bread, olives, tomatoes, and cheese in the ambitiously air-conditioned breakfast room before setting out to the tourist center of Urfa. Urfa is really handy for tourists in that pretty much everything one would want to see in the city abuts one central park/public space. It’s brilliant, as you can see everything, and you know where absolutely everything is. It also works well for Urfa’s guide program: the city has a program set up where high school students interested in careers in the tourism industry guide visitors around for free, to practice their English (or other foreign language of choice) and their tourist demeanor. Longtime readers of this blog might remember Le Xuan and my adventures with our incredibly overeager tour guide, Cebrail, last time I was in Urfa. Luckily, we must have looked like we knew what we were doing this time, as we attracted no would-be guides (or perhaps they were all at home for Bayram, but either way it worked out great for us). We got to the complex of mosques that mostly mark major events in the life of Abraham (he was born/lived in the city), and explored/took pictures for a bit. After a half hour or so, Corey and I left Cat to meticulously photograph everything interesting and headed downtown to find a travel agency for our Nemrut plans. We’d both been through Urfa before, so this ended up working out great. We set off through the (largely closed) bazaar, and ended up taking an unexpected scenic route through a really old neighborhood on our way back to the city center. Once we got to the main business street, we found that the tour company we’d hoped to use was closed for the holiday. We stopped by another agency, which catered predominantly to Turks, and were a bit discouraged to hear that they only had a tour planned that Friday or Saturday for Nemrut (in order to get over to Antep, and then back to Ankara on time, we pretty much had to go up Nemrut that day, Wednesday, or the next). With the promise of a phone call to see what our options would be for getting a tour organized for the next day, we headed out and decided to stop by our hotel to see if they could help us find an open tour operator. They luckily had the cell phone number of the company we’d originally tried to stop by, and the owner of the company headed straight over to our hotel to meet us. We had a good long chat over the logistics and options of doing a tour to Nemrut, debating back and forth over whether to see both the sunrise and the sunset, or one or the other, whether we could squeeze into a car, or whether he thought he could find more people and make a minibus a better idea (2 of our friends from Gaziantep were joining us in Urfa for the Nemrut part of our trip, making us 5, which would have been a squeeze in a car with a driver). We ended up bargaining down the price and deciding on the two-day trip option, leaving the next morning, seeing both sunset and sunrise on the mountain, and the being dropped off in Adiyaman the next day to catch a bus to Gaziantep.
After settling all the details of our Nemrut tour, Corey and I met up with Alexandra and Erin, the English Teaching Assistant and English Language Fellow living in Gaziantep. We all met up with Cat for lunch at Halil Ibrahim Sofrasi. We’d been at a restaurant of the same name in Van and it was amazing, so we were hoping for the same experience in Sanliurfa. It wasn’t quite as fabulous, but it did have great patlican kebap and overlooked the main tourist park area. After lunch, we strolled through one of the mosques and around the sacred carp stream before heading up to the fortress (I’ve explained what the various parts of Sanliurfa’s mosques and such are in my posts about Sanliurfa 3 years ago, if you’re interested, check out my April entries from 2006). We spent the afternoon on the fortress, strolling, chatting, and taking some really fun photos. While we were on the fortress, we met a teacher who had been a Fulbright Teacher Exchange participant last year; she taught science in the Bronx, but is back in Istanbul this year teaching. She and two of her friends were also on vacation in Sanliurfa, and thinking of going up Nemrut the next day. After chatting with the 3 of them for a bit, we climbed down from the citadel and struck off to find dinner. Sanliurfa is known for its “Turkish Night” dinners, in restaurants in old Ottoman mansions. We headed to one, only to find it completely booked for the night. Luckily, with our mad Turkish skillz we were able to talk to the host, and he called around to other restaurants, found one with open places, and had them send a guy over to bring us to the right place. Bizarrely, we bumped into Juliya (the former Fulbright teacher) and her friends, and had dinner with them. Dinner was really good; they had a set menu, with 2 different soups, mezes, and a communal kebap platter with chicken, kofte, eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. The real fun part, though, was the music: they had a traditional Ottoman/Turkish band, which played folk songs for literally hours. There was a Turkish package tour group there, and they all got up and danced around the dinner tables, more enthusiastically than skillfully. I got some video shots of the music and dancing, which are mostly up on Flickr. After a bit more dancing, we headed back to our hotel, because we had to be up eeeearly for our trip up Nemrut.
And, as this is already ridiculously long, I think I’ll leave Nemrut to another post. Photos of Sanliurfa are finally up on my Flickr account though!
-R