Aleppo, etc.

Time's been slipping away from me, but I'm going to try to get this as up-to-date as possible, because there's so much to update on/anticipate. My last entry left off on the outskirts of Antakya, which Danaijo and I left via bus. We took the bus to the Syrian border, where we had to get off and apply for visas. Ostensibly, Americans are supposed to apply for Syrian visas well in advance from the Syrian Embassy in DC, but that takes a long time and costs somewhere in the vicinity of $130. Plus, I've not been Stateside since last June, so it'd be difficult for me to get my passport to DC. So we decided to chance it at the border. We grabbed our luggage and waited in the border authorities' building for about 2 hours or so while the Syrian officials called Damascus to check whether or not we were allowed in the country. After getting approval, we paid $16 apiece for 2-week visas and were good to go. Unfortunately, our bus hadn't waited around, so we took a taxi the rest of the way to Aleppo.
Our taxi driver was really nice, stopping along the way for food for us, trying to find the hotel we wanted to stay at, and giving us a decent discount on the taxi price when I asked. Unfortunately, he didn't speak and Turkish (or English, or French). This was a little surprising to me, as I'd figured that people around the border would tend to speak a little bit of Turkish. Many people in Antakya speak some Arabic, but apparently the inverse is not true in Aleppo. Maalesef. We couldn't get to the hotel we'd intended to stay at, as it was full, so our taxi driver dropped us off at one that was apparently 'cheap'. We walked inside and quickly did an about-face: it was over $100/night. Luckily, the concierge was able to direct us to the central hotel area, where we found a pretty awesome room for substantially cheaper. That settled, we set out to explore a little bit and find dinner.
Aleppo was like a different world compared to Turkey. It was noticeably more desertlike, the shops were all smaller and independent (compared to Turkey's mix of independent shops and Turkish chains), and perhaps most glaringly, women were veiled. In some cases, fully veiled--we saw women walking around in not just the chador, but also a sort of small black scarf draped over their entire head, made of thin material through which they peered at the streets. I've never seen a woman in Turkey wear that, and I've seen quite a few women in Turkey.
Anyway, that night we had a delicious dinner of street-side falafel, walked through a pedestrianized shopping street, bought scarves, and retired for coffee and bed. In the morning, we headed out for fresh juice and the Grand Mosque, which is one of the older mosques in Islam. As another sign that we weren't in Turkey anymore, we of course had headscarves with us, but weren't allowed inside even the mosque courtyard til we'd donned large, shapeless, button-front robes over our clothing. The mosque was beautiful, and immense. It also was on the edge of the bazaar district, which we happily plunged in to after turning in our shapeless robes. We spent quite a bit of time ambling down aisles, bargaining, and avoiding the English-speaking touts, and managed to make it out with a respectable number of purchases at pretty decent prices. We were really amused when we found out that the name of the shop we'd bought pashminas at was "Oscar Wilde"; we had a great conversation with the owner, who was really interested in America, as his boyfriend was at Princeton. I think Danaijo came closest to buying a carpet in Aleppo; the prices there were the best I've seen, and they had some gorgeous ones. The ones we saw were predominantly Iranian, so the designs were very different than the Turkish/Kurdish/Armenian designs I'm familiar with. They use an entirely different color palette as well.
After wandering some more through the bazaars, and getting wonderfully lost trying to find a fabled amazing restaurant, we ended up having falafel again before heading to the bus station to hop a bus for Turkey again. We got there to find that the busses had all left for the day, so we had to take a cab. Luckily, the cab drivers at the station spoke a fair amount of Turkish, so I was able to bargain the cost down and get a cab to Gaziantep instead of Antakya. The border crossing this time was a breeze; I don't think many tourists come through the Gaziantep road's border, so the Turkish border official made us take as many Turkish tourism brochures as we could carry, even though half of them were in German. We got to Gaziantep in the late evening, and met up with my friend Alex, who's teaching English at the local university, after a brief adventure on the Gaziantep city busses.
We pretty much just made dinner and crashed at Alex's place, before getting up to explore the city the next day. We ended up at the very edge of an industrial part of town after taking a city bus, and finally made it downtown in time for lunch and shopping and baklava. Gaziantep's bazaar district is pretty adorable, and there are really good deals to be had; it's much more relaxed than the Istanbul bazaars, and the local handicrafts are better quality. We spent a lot of time chatting with shopkeepers and learning about handicrafts, with me translating between the shopkeepers' Turkish and D's English. It was a great linguistic exercise. After shopping, we stopped at a cave cafe for a narghile and baklava, which were both delicious. I'd wanted to stop by Gaziantep's museum, which is probably my favorite museum in Turkey, but when we got there, at about 4:35, the exhibit halls were closed, even though the museum closed at 5. Ah well, that's Turkey.
We met up with Alex for dinner, after she finished her teaching for the day, at the best restaurant in town. As I've mentioned in earlier entries, Gaziantep food is unique in Turkey, and unlike traditional Turkish cuisine. We had a great bulgur and lamb dish (D's was lambless of course), and for dessert the waiter brought us something I'd never even heard of before: Gaziantep coffee. It was fabulous, even if it wasn't strictly coffee. Gaziantep coffee is made of pistachios, roasted like coffee beans and brewed in milk. It smelled of chocolate and tasted of deliciousness. We then all headed back to Alex's place to grab our bags before D and I headed to the otogar to grab our overnight bus to Ankara. With my previous Gaziantep-Ankara bus experience (see October 2008 entries) still fresh in my mind, we'd purchased tickets in advance, and had verified that we had seats and a reputable company. We boarded the bus, and settled in to sleep. Sadly, that was easier said than done as the bus proceeded to stop hourly between midnight and 4am. Oh boy. We did make it back to Ankara just fine though, and nobody had to sleep on the floor, so that was a success in my book.
In Ankara, we headed to my place first to drop a few things and collapse before heading to my friend's apartment, where we were staying as I was catsitting starting that day (Saturday). We dropped more stuff, took stock of our exhaustion, and headed out for Ulus and Ankara's citadel, which we climbed and explored for a bit before heading to Kizilay. In Kizilay, we walked throught the subway and a few streets before meeting up with a group of expats at a bar to watch a football match. I'd never met those particular expats, but the football match meetups are part and parcel of the Round Ball in Ankara blog (ankarafootball.blogspot.com), whose co-author I've known for quite some time.
I'd never been to a football match besides my younger siblings' games before, so I was quite excited. We met up at a bar in Kizilay before the match with a Scottish teacher who's been in Turkey off and on for a few decades and a few Bilkent folks, generally here for a year as Communications Skills Instructors at Bilkent's English language preparatory program. After a quick lunch for D and I, and a beer all around, we headed en masse to 19 Mayis Stadyum, where both Ankaragucu and Genclerbirligi play their home matches. The match we saw was Ankaragucu, who were playing Sivasspor; I'm sure this doesn't mean much to most of my readers. For perspective, Ankaragucu is fighting relegation and is I think 4th from the bottom in the league, while Sivasspor is the top-ranked team in the league. Clearly it was not going to be a knock-out win. The stadium had 2 different security checks, where we were patted down and had to surrender any coins or bottle caps we had so we wouldn't throw them on the field later. At each checkpoint, there were maybe a dozen male police officers, and one female police officer to check the few women attending the match. It was a bit interesting to see how few women were actually at the match; there were 4 in our group, but maybe 10 others total.
We found decent seats and settled in to watch the match. I don't think D or I really followed which player was doing what, but the first half was pretty closely-fought, and ended scoreless. Much more interesting than the match (to us) was the crowd: Ankaragucu supporters tend to be young, male, and energetic, and the area behind the goal was full of guys on their feet and chanting the entire game, their section undulating as they waved their scarves and gestured in unison. It was really cool to see. I tried to figure out what the crowd was shouting, but aside from one ridiculously easy cheer ("La-la, la-laaaa, Ankaragucu!"), couldn't distinguish many words. In the second half, Sivasspor showed why they were top-ranked, and outplayed Gucu quite a bit. The game ended with Sivasspor winning by 2 or 3, and the Ankaragucu supporters showed their displeasure by turning their backs for the last few minutes.
After the game, we all headed back to Kizilay to discuss the game, and after a bit D and I headed back up the hill to have dinner at one of my more-favorite restaurants in Ankara, Spice. It's an Indian place, and we both had delicious dishes, and D tried raki for the first time. It wasn't her favorite beverage, but then there's a time and a place for raki, and it's not all-the-time and everywhere. It's traditionally eaten with fish, but as D doesn't eat fish, it went decently with her Indian food.
After dinner, we were so exhausted. We headed back to the apartment and D packed before we grabbed a few hours of sleep. The next morning I got up at 5-something to get Danaijo to the airport bus. I looked outside to see...a snowstorm, with a few inches of snow already on the ground and driving winds of heavy snows. We headed out early, but still just barely made it to the Havas bus before it left for the airport. I took the same taxi back up the hill, and the roads were so bad the taxi couldn't make it up the last bit and the driver and I had to abandon the cab. The entire time I was a bit terrified that I'd get a call from D saying that her Ankara-Istanbul flight had been cancelled, but luckily the flight got out fine and I spent the rest of the day watching the storm from my fantastic hilltop vantage point.
And that was Danaijo's and my epic Turkish-Syrian adventure, briefly.

kib,
-R