Athens, London, Seattle

A few quick hits on our quick tour of Athens:

The transit strike ended up being a non-issue for us. We went to our hotel and the guy at the desk told us we'd be able to take the bus to the airport instead. We asked if there are frequent metro strikes in Athens. He said no, the last one was over 2 weeks ago.

Ruins abound.

Some in decent shape, if partially restored, like this theater in the Acropolis.

On the top of the Acropolis there are so many column heads that they just stack up all over the place.

When they dug the subway in Athens, they found lots of good stuff, like tombs. One person's eternal resting spot is currently at the Syntagma subway station.

Graffiti everywhere. A lot of it is just ugly tagging:

While some is a bit more on the artful side:

Amanda and I saw about as much of Athens as we could in 24 hours. I left with the impression that it is a pretty grimy place but it certainly has character. It wasn't too hard to get off of the tourist track and have a really great dinner in a neighborhood taverna. Perhaps we'll go back someday, when the EU has made up for Greece's crippling debt by selling all of their antiquities to the highest bidder.

A few hits on London-

Heathrow Airport Terminal 4 really wants you to take the Heathrow Express into London instead of the Underground. There were no signs whatsoever for the Underground that I could find. We ended up making our way to Terminal 3 and finding it from there.

We used Hotwire to get a hotel in London and ended up staying in the Kensington neighborhood. It seemed that people celebrate St. Patricks Day to a similar extent in the US.

Our hotel was next to a showroom for Bristol Motors, a boutique auto maker of whom I'd never heard. Their cars looked to be designed in the 80s and not updated since.

We're back in Seattle now, hanging out with our friends Shelby and Ross while we settle in and find a new residence.

Turquoise and Aegean

From Cappadocia we took an overnight bus to Kaş. That felt about as miserable as you might imagine; Matt got a few hours of sleep, I tried to convince myself that I was enjoying the scenery as we drove through the snowy mountains. Kaş, profoundly off-season, was a good coastal retreat on the Turquoise Coast.

Surprised to see that the water was actually turquoise. Thought the name came from an abundance of turquoise (the rock) in that region.

We spent some time hiking parts of the Lycian Way, a through trail that stretches along the coast from its eastern end in Oludeniz to its western end in Antalya.

A horse we met along the trail down from Phellos.

Lycian tombs on top of the mountain.

On our Phellos hike we had a notable encounter with a lost goat who mistook us for fellow goats. What is your responsibility when a goat approaches you, wanting to be led back to its friends and family? I should add here that we had several notable encounters with nature on the Lycian trail. Bees, turtles, caterpillars, ferocious man-eating domesticated goats and horses. It was enough to make me miss hiking amongst bears.

Another section of the trail that we walked outside of Fethiye brought us through Kaya Köyu, a Greek Orthodox Christian village that was abandoned during the post WWI population swaps. A bit sad to see the old stone buildings--there is a beautiful church that nature is slowly taking back.

We had the ghost town to ourselves, then hiked up over the hill and down to a lagoon.

The seafood in Fethiye was super. Tourist tradition is to go to the fish market and pick out some fish, then bring it to a nearby restaurant and have them cook it up for you. We liked it so much we went two nights in a row, have no idea what the fish we ate were, they were silver, little and tasty when fried.

Anchovies, maybe?

Our last stop in Turkey was at Bodrum on the Aegean where we needed to catch the ferry to the Greek Island of Kos. In Bodrum we explored St. Peter's Castle, which is also conviently the Museum of Underwater Archaeology. They have an amazing number of amphoras on display (conical ceramic containers for carrying stuff) and several great exhibits on underwater excavations of shipwrecks, including one from the Bronze Age. Amazing to see the relationships between all of the Mediterranean port cities stretching back through time.

Some of you might remember that we'd planned on spending time in Greece before our return to Seattle. Well, we liked Turkey so much that we decided to focus the end of our trip there and save Greece for another time. From the island of Kos we traveled to Athens. Here, in the face of a transit strike, we hope to make it to the airport and then head for home.

Adventures in the Offseason

After a bustling few days in Istanbul, Amanda and I made our way to Cappadocia via Ankara.

A couple of quick hits on the capital:

Turkey is currently working on completing the high speed rail link between Ankara and Istanbul. For now, the train runs a normal-speed train from Istanbul to Eskişehir, and from there the high speed line takes passengers on to Ankara. The high speed line really felt like the future of travel; it whisked us along comfortably at about 250 km/hr. I'm hoping the US can one day get its act together and get some good train travel.

On our way out of Ankara, we met a friendly young Istanbuler named Tichoten* who was heading home from Ankara after his mandatory military service. He helped us buy a ticket at the metro, we had a nice conversation with him on the metro, and he insisted on walking us to the right ticket counter at the bus station and even ordered our tickets for us.

*or Tichome or some other sort of common Turkish name that we didn't quite understand and we felt foolish about not remembering.

Cappadocia

On to Göreme, which was our base for exploration of Cappadocia. I hadn't heard of Cappadocia until after we had booked our tickets to Turkey so I didn't really have a lot of expectations about what we were going to see there. We've seen our share of fascinating natural formations and ancient ruins on this trip. Cappadocia more than held its own; it was a delightful time and we enjoyed being there and trekking around the various sites.

It is firmly off-season now; the town is rather empty, there's a lot of half-done road work, some restaurants are closed, and those that are open seem to have more staff than customers. Our experience in Göreme was certainly not typical of what to expect during a summer visit. Low season does have the benefit of lower stress - there aren't many lines at interesting sites, no long waits for food, no needing to make reservations weeks in advance to stay in a nice place, and places to stay are less expensive. The weather left a little to be desired, but so it goes with off season travel.

We took a nice hike up Pigeon Valley to the nearby town of Uçhisar.

Uçhisar (we learned later from a friend that the schlep up to the castle at the top was not particularly rewarding that day)

From Uçhisar, we hiked back to Göreme through Love Valley. Didn't quite figure out the name.

Earlier in the day we met Nils, a German student studying in Turkey through the Erasmus program. We met up later at the one authentic-ish Turkish meyhane in town. There we tried some rakı and watched as the patrons danced. As they got more drunk, they were a little more insistent that we join them in dancing, and finally at the end of the evening everyone was up dancing. Amanda and I pulled out some horribly rusty moves, but I think we were still better dancers than the British couple.

We had an amusing tour the next day, seeing some sites of southern Cappadocia. The weather was even worse than the previous day, but things were made much brighter by the cheery Korean and Japanese students who were on the tour with us.

We toured what appeared to be a well-established loop, but with it being cool, foggy, and occasionally rainy, we had many sites to ourselves. We also ended up seeing panoramas like this:

But then again sometimes the fog would cooperate and give us a cool perspective like this:

The Selime Cathedral

All in all, travel in Cappadocia in the off season has been pretty worthwhile.

Istanbul Aksamleyin

Matt says that he's not sure what to write about Istanbul even though it is his turn to write an entry. It is 8:00 in the evening in Ankara and I finished my book, the guidebook chapter on Turkish history, and every other scrap of English language writing I can get my hands on while Matt tries to finish Infinite Jest so I can start it. So this will be my entertainment for the evening.

Istanbul may be harder to write about because like any truly big city, we would have to stay put for a long time to understand what it means to live there. Since New York is my "this is what a city is" template, it's comforting to be in a big, cosmopolitan, dynamic place--felt like we were reconnected with the world. I loved the architecture and the water. This is what we learned in two days.

Great food. When we were riding into the city from the airport on the metro, Matt looked so longingly at a Turkish grandma's bagelesque sesame seed bread (Matt: I was not looking longingly at her bread, I was looking in astonishment that her bag appeared to be a bread oven.) that she broke off a piece and made us eat it. There are carts selling these breads and other snacks all over the city.

Roasted chestnuts, pastries. Many candy stores selling Turkish Delight (gummy sweet candy, sometimes with nuts). Don't worry Seattle, we'll bring you some. (Matt: Everybody else, worry). Pastry stores selling baklava and puddings, including one kind that is made out of chicken breast.

Tourist sites. Tourist sites in big cities are so often expensive, crowded, and more trouble than they are worth, but on a cold gray off-season day it was easy to take in some of the major sites. We checked out Topkapı Palace first where we were apparently fascinated by all of the geometric patterns because we ended up with tons of pictures of doors, windows and ceilings.

It was worth the extra fee to see the harem where the ruling class of the Ottoman Empire kept its wives, slaves, their children, and eunuchs. We also took in two religious sites, the Blue Mosque built in the 1600s, and Aya Sofya, the Byzantine Church of Divine Wisdom turned mosque turned museum.

View from the upper level of Aya Sofya, a big, big religious structure. The lights are suspended down to almost the level of your head, not quite sure why because it makes it difficult to feel the size of the place. Unlike big Catholic cathedrals that make you look up?

(As a side note, this is the most expensive place to use the bathroom that we have visited yet. It often costs as much as a cup of good strong tea, 1 TL. Then again, setting the price of delicious tea low and the restroom high may be a brilliant plan for increasing revenue, take notice University of Washington.) The Grand Bazaar was another impressive place to walk around. Although we were warned that the shopkeepers would bug us to come have a look, we found that in comparison to Vietnam and Thailand, they were friendly but easygoing. Many asked "Hola, habla Español? Italiano?" We just don't look obviously American, not blond enough and too stinky.

Ferries. We took a nice ferry ride on the Bosphorus to check out the Asian side of Istanbul, which is more residential.

Matt enjoying the ferry ride, a bit chilly but clear blue water with jellyfish floating around.

Great views from the ferry, and cool to travel between continents in less than hour.

I would have liked to go on a Bosphorus Cruise and see the Prince's Islands, but the weather was not cooperating. We took a train to Ankara en route to south central Anatolia (Cappadocia). We stopped in Ankara to see the Museum of Anatolian Cultures and surprised the people of Ankara by being American tourists. Everyone was friendly, helpful, and willing to participate in our pantomime skits for buying things and finding information.