November

Only one trip this month...

Turkey:

I took a week of vacation at the end of November and went to Turkey. There is another ELCA intern in Oslo, Norway and she and I met at the Istanbul airport and went from there. We stayed there for a few days and saw many mosques, the Hagia Sophia, where we had a chance to practice reading Greek (long history there – it was a church, then a mosque, and now a museum and had an incredible amount of history happen there), the Galata Tower, Topkapi Palace, spice markets, and just lots and lots of life in general there. Including odd men on buses, out-of-commission rail lines, fishermen on the bridges, and the overlapping calls to prayer from the hundreds of mosques there. The crazy thing about Istanbul is that half of it is in Europe and half of it is in Asia…We then decided to go to Chanukkale, which is near Troy. We had thought we could take a boat across the Sea of Marmara, and were wrong. But we decided that we were at the dock, so we might as well take a boat, and got on one to Bandirma. We got there about 9:30 at night, found no one who spoke either English or German, but managed to get to the inter-city bus station nonetheless. We got on the bus, the driver left to talk to some policemen, came back and we gathered that he had told us we all had to get off. We did. They put us (about 20) into a 12-passenger van and drove us to some random city in the country. We got out and they put us in another van of the same size. They drove us some more until we got to Chanukkale at about 2:00AM. We found our hostel, slept, and woke up to realize that they (and the rest of the neighborhood) had no running water. We went to Troy, came back, had lunch at a place where our common language was German, and then at night watched a documentary that was being shown in a nearby hotel. Took a bus that night to Selchuk, which is near Ephesus. We arrived at 6:00AM and were basically accosted by an over-eager pension-owner. I had no intentions of following him to his hostel, but lost to my friend who didn’t care. It ended up being a nice place with great owners, just no heat. But Ephesus was amazing, and then we also were able to get a personal tour of a ceramic factory. We stayed there another night and then the following one took an overnight bus back to Istanbul. We were put into a van that would take us back to the district of Istanbul that we wanted, and in said van, our driver had an extensive amount of energy, which led him to dance to disco music all the way there. We went to the international church there in the morning and then I flew back to Berlin that night. It was a crazy week, but we met a ton of people with fascinating stories and just had a lot of fun. I wanted to upload some pictures here, but the intern in Oslo did a much better job of taking pictures than I did, so I want to use hers. Unfortunately, I'm having a bit of trouble downloading them. So they are "soon" to come.