Turkey Recap

Friday, July 17th- Cruise is Over, Trip Begins

Pre-port was a shocker today.  No more fun and games let me tell you!  It went from an atmosphere of “YAY, TURKEY!” to “ Holy crap why are we going here!?”  Basically, the faculty highlighted all of the terrorist groups and gave places that are targets, and told us that mostly they target the tourist areas that we WILL be in.  Last year’s voyage diverted from Istanbul after a terrorist attack killed 13 people I think was the number only days before they were supposed to be there! They pretty much freaked us all out which may be necessary just so that people don’t act like idiots here.  The best way is just to not stand out as a tourist, so I can tell you I definitely will be wearing pants while in Turkey.




Saturday, July 18th- Market Day

Today was planned as the day of the Grand Bazaar and Spice Market of Istanbul.  I found out last night that I only filled out one of the two required forms to obtain a visa, so I am no longer going to Cappadocia!!!! :( :( :(  The worst part is that it is through a travel agency so my $400 probably won’t be refunded.  I’m pretty pissed seeing as SAS sent a letter prior to the trip saying that no visas were required! I asked the Purser, a couple of girls from my trip talked to Debbie (field office lady) and Dia (one of the Deans) with no success, so I left this morning with intention of spending 5 days in Istanbul.

I went shopping crazy, it was awesome!  It was like the Mall of America xs 2 with all Turksih traditional and some modern stuff mixed in.  I had analyzed my $$ situation this morning before leaving and was disappointed with myself because my goal for this trip was to have it be the one time in my life that I am not going to be cheap and buy lots of souvenirs/fun stuff to do, and I am well under budget.  So I took out 300 Lira ($200) and told myself to have fun! Such a good choice! The Bazaar was fantastic and I didn’t feel guilty haggling for gifts.  I got 4 people gifts from the bazaar, another from the spice market and only spent about $50. 

The bartering system is cool, yet kind of annoying! Every shop owner approaches you, blocks your way, I even had an orange thrown at me so I had to catch it and walk it over to give it back.  You can tell prices are different depending on where you’re from because a couple of times I was asked where I was from before a price was even offered!  Typically a 25 TL item could be bought for 20, if you walked away 15, but if you offer about 12, they get offended, tell you see ya!, don’t touch!, leave!, all of you! Haha It was quite the experience but I got so much neat stuff and plan on going back… I have a couple more gifts in mind…

Getting back to the ship, the girls from my trip found me with good news and it turns out I’m going to Cappadocia after all…   I then went to see Harry Potter that night! I have only seen 2 of the other 5 movies, but thought it was really good and a nice connection to home and a break from the foreign culture.




Sunday, July 19th- KAPADOKYA!

Getting up was pretty rough, I’m just so drained! We met and left at 7 by taxi to the airport.  It ended up being 20 TL per person which is kinda a rip, but it was a 20 min. ride.  The airport went extremely smooth… We got a full meal in-flight: coffee, “homemade” cherry cake, cheese sandwich, and water. 

Meeting the tour guide was great! We were expecting Sullyman but insteady got REMZI! With 14 people in our group and one guide and one driver we come up one seat short in our van, but Remzi sits on a cooler full of water for us.  He is the coolest guide. He was an English professor but is retired and now just does tours.  The cool thing is that our trip is our trip.. we completely changed the schedule around based on our interest. 

Today we:

stopped @ a few photo stops of rock formations (lava rock formed when the land used to be a giant lake)

saw our first camel, toured cave village, ate traditional lunch (Turkish coffee is okay, but there is a NASTY sludge on the bottom because it’s so thick) and toured a pottery shop.

We got the wheel demo and three of our people got to try it out.. the first girl that gets up there didn’t know what she was doing and well, let’s just say that the shape of the clay got worse and worse as her hands went up and down until it finally flopped over… it was sooooo funny!  Pottery was beautiful, but also expensive.  In fact, a 3-foot pot (hand painted) cost 8000 TL and a circular flask (like a donut) cost 26000 TL holy moly! I was afraid to even move.  We saw the painters and they do everything free-handed with no pattern.  A 2-ft. plate takes 4 DAYS to complete.  I did end up getting something because they offered us a 35% discount .  During the demo they gave us complementary apple tea which is amazing! It got really awkward when all of the Turkish men/salespeople tried to schmooze our girls.  They were desperately trying but wouldn’t even acknowledge me, which is good I suppose! 

We arrive at our hotel, it is in this little tiny village of 1000.  It is kinda like Santorini all over again- it looked really crappy and definitely not like the pictures! But once inside the hotel, it is SPECTACULAR!  They offered us complementary wine, there is free internet, complementary breakfast, and our randomly picked room was ridiculous.  It was probably the honeymoon sweet, seeing as the shower was actually a Jacuzzi tub with no curtain or wall, just chillin’ there on the floor.  I think I forgot to mention that our hotel is a CAVE HOTEL.  All of the rooms were built into the rock wall, so our room you walk in, there’s like a little sitting area, go up the stairs to the Jacuzzi, sink, bathroom, then there are a couple more stairs to the beds.  Wait til you see the pics!

Enter culture…   I really wanted to watch the sunset and a couple of people came with.  We walked through this small town and instantly knew it was like no place we’d been before.  Picture a little farming community, but of people that find you fascinating as much as you find them fascinating! The first Turkish lady we contacted offered us the edible part of a Cyprus tree (it was like a sugar-snap pea, YUM!) and told us this is my home, hotel, and restaurant if you are interested.  We said thank you but continued on.  The next lady sees us, has the hugest smile on her face, waves, runs inside and comes back out with some sort of homemade socks she wanted us to buy.  We continued on and everyone was waving and smiling and observing it was great!  A couple of the people wanted to eat so we scoped out one of the three restaurants in town (our hotel was like $30 for dinner so we had to look elsewhere) this place was so cute that you had to tell them 2 hours in advance if you wanted dinner there because they had to build a fire in order to cook with their like 5 cast iron pots!  Walking on to the sunset, we saw children playing in the street that came and talked to us, only men sitting at the one coffee shop staring us down, a runaway cow, a man riding a donkey down the road waving!

On the way back this 13 year old girl runs out to greet us.  Her name was Emine, and she kindly greeted the four girls in our group with a “nice to meet you” and a handshake, but before she got to me she asked if I was a father and one of the other girls was a mother… um… no??? haha well we concluded she did this because she probably isn’t allowed to shake the hand of a boy her age unless they are married, because she said “nice to meet you” but left my outstretched hand and did an air shake! Haha  While she was obsessing with one of the girls, I heard the first call to prayer.  (happens five times a day) In an already quiet town, this call sent chills down my spine.  It just echoed off all of the rock formations in a language I don’t understand and it was just all so mystical.  It all sort of reminded me of the computer game Myst, because it was just so eerie but cool!

Well we decided to give the Cyprus tree lady a try, and it was the best decision we made the entire trip.  Her dinner was also about $30 but we settled to have only one entrée (ravioli with yogurt sauce) and one side (stuffed grape leaves) for about $10 plus drinks.  She rushed to have us sit down at their one table and cleared off all of their personal items and goes in the open door into the cave which is their kitchen.  Basically, we were eating at their personal table in their house!  Her son comes out, who turns out to be the owner, and talks to us a bit.  He translates all the food names for us and then shows us each of the rooms in their hotel (only 3, but he’s working on 4 for next year) AND home! The second call to prayer happened here and walking in the dark lit by candles with this going on was incredible.   I have a video, but the experience is just something else. 

After chatting we got to know him, and he puts on some music for us (Turkish elevator music, then Elvis, then popular music after dinner when we were invited into their living room to chat)  The mother brought us way more food than we ordered including fresh bread and watermelon and beans, it was all so delicious!  She comes out to eat her watermelon at a separate table, so we told her to come eat with us- it was cute. She asked what our majors are and only got through one person.  One of the girls is a music major and sings, so we dropped everything, put her on the spot and she sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  It was AMAZING, maybe just the setting and echoing off the caves, but she finished and we all clapped and the son says, “Better than Beyonce!”  Talking inside, the mother says she started a library in town and she makes jewelry to raise money to buy books, so we all pretty much cleaned out her home collection :)  The son will be Turkish Facebook friend number one!











Monday, July 20 -  KAP II, one crazy night

I got a wakeup call in my cave in Turkish- I think it was the wrong number… then I get a call from the girls next door saying “we’re locked in our cave can you let us out!?”  they had to drop the key through the window because the lock doesn’t work from the inside. Haha

Breakfast was outstanding- fried something or other with some sort of berry sauce, bananas in chocolate, dried figs, strawberry juice, cookies, bars, cherries, bread, etc.  Possibly my favorite meal yet!  My favorite part- they had what looked like cheese and 3 or 4 people took it, but the first girl that took a bite revealed that it was BUTTER! Haha

Remzi’s niece was with us today from Anatolia and we were encouraged to speak with her to practice English since none of her friends knew it.  She’s 16 and very good at it actually.  Her name is Merye and likes to sing (sang us Titanic and 2 Turkish songs). We rode horses next to the Tigris river and drank some more apple tea while the other group was riding, followed by a ridiculously expensive jewelry shop and rock polishing place and lunch with Turkish gyros.  Merye taught us numbers today too, bir, ikki, uch, doert, bech is all I got down along with teshikkuler or something like that for thank you.

The crazy fairy chimney formations entertained our afternoon along with the underground city, which fit about 5000 people when it was used! (only 10% is excavated, and it took us an hour to see)  After a bath in the Jacuzzi, I borrowed a computer to use free internet but got distracted with traditional Turkish music.  Merye was singing with two of the hotel employees playing a guitar-like instrument and a drum.  It was sweet to see the Turkish equivalent of our jam sessions.. I asked to play it when they were done and they were more than happy of course.  It’s so much different than a guitar with drone strings and 7 strings total and randomly-spaced frets, but I putzed for awhile and came up with a song that the hotel guy clapped for a one point, all excited :)  At this point, someone informed me that they think you can check out guitars on ship and I am extremely excited now!

And for the crazy night- it was pretty expensive (70 TL or about $50) but you can’t put a price on seeing/interacting with culture I suppose.  Plus there were snacks and all you can drink wine included… They started the show with whirling dervishes (spin in circles forever haha) with some musical accompaniment.  By the time the belly dancer came out I had had 4 glasses of wine so was a little tipsy, or else I probably never would have gotten up on that stage when she came over to grab me as the first “volunteer”!!  I “belly danced” in front of about 150 people, it was great! Haha No worries, I bought a picture from the professional photographer there for a few dollars :)  The night turned from traditional, to crazy! There was all sorts of dancing, a knife-throwing bit, and even a train that went outside to dance drunkenly around a fire, which they were running through with audience members… yeah, a little sketchy, but hilarious, and just an awesome experience. 

Other tidbits-  one girl in our group decided to leave our trip and fly back a day early… she wasn’t very social (in fact would only talk to one girl and only that girls) and just wasn’t any fun AT ALL.  After she leaves, that girls says THANK GOD!  Apparently she has been driving her nuts the entire time.  It turns out that the girl has a fiancé in the states, but a Turkish boyfriend from the last time she did SAS and came to Turkey so she had to leave to go get it on with him.. um… yeah, there are some real winners on this trip.






Tuesday, July 21st- Splinters

The call to prayer woke me up at 5ish echoing through the caves… it is much cooler when you are not sleeping!  After that I didn’t sleep the greatest, so I just got up at 7 to take advantage of some free cave internet :)  (except I didn’t have my computer so once again no picture updates..)   I was going to sleep for another hour then, but I get a call from the other girls next door saying we had to get over there asap!  It turns out that one of the panels on their door was off and the molding was too!  They thought it was hilarious, but then I said this is really creepy, because I could fit through the hole, and in order for it to come off like it did it would need to be 1- kicked from the inside 2- the door slammed like a gorilla 3- someone pries off the molding first…  We told the hotel people later and they did say that it had been off once before, but still, it took a lot of coaxing to get back in there. 

We visited Hermit’s Valley, which is a cave city where people went to live for many years for personal pain/meditation to make themselves purer and stronger.  They had cut into the rock and put chains around them to ensure that they can’t leave and staid for periods of 4-5 years!!! WEIRD

Next up- the rug place.  We got a demo of how they make the double-knotted carpets… one lady makes about 3500 knots per day, and the finest silk rug about 3’x4’ takes over ONE YEAR to make! I asked the price and it’s about 10-15 grand.. I bought 3… The next stop was the silk room to see how they get the silk.

First- steam kill the silkworms in their cocoons
Second- cocoons are hard and brittle so put them in hot water to soften
Third- use hard bristles to collect free ends and feed through an eye onto a spool

I’m not sure if they thought we would actually buy some, but they “performed” a rug show and rolled out all of their carpets.  The cheapest was $250 and for fine quality, a rug less than 1 square foot cost about $800!!

My favorite part of the day (even though this is where the separation of the group begins) was hiking.  It was 4km and most of the people were like “omg I might die.” Seriously!? It was probably one of the easiest hikes I’ve ever done! We made it less than 5 min. before a girl gets stung by a wasp and cries for 15 min. thinking she’s going to die, shouting cuss-words right behind the 4-yr-old kid, and claiming that it is a poisonous spider or something because it hurts too much to be a bee.  Hahahahahaha  She milked it for a good half hour wasting our time..

Continuing on though, the hike was really pretty- in the bottom of a canyon.  I had fun climbing big bouldiers and jumping over rocks in the river.  Remzi says, “You are like goat.” :) At one point I said to Merye, “Some of these people don’t get out much!”  she looks to me laughing and says, ‘YA, I’ve noticed!  And you are Crazy!” haha Also, before the hike our water bottles were frozen so I was chucking my bottle on the pavement trying to break it up so it would melt faster, and she says, “are you ugly?”  Everyone kinda laughs and corrects her with angry… she says, “no, ugly!”  We bust out her pocket translator and she says OHHH SORRRYYYY!!!! Hahaha      

I found out later that B-1 recorded herself on the hike and said something to the extent of this is the worst thing that she’s ever done in her life….. well excuse me for you being an idiot and wearing flip flops.  It was like hiking with supermodels [[though none of them had any looks]] If I had been by her when she was recording that I would have let her have it because she had been the biggest Beyatch the entire trip- thus the name B-1!!! She is worse than Top-Knot BY FAR!!!!! (B-2 was the girl that excused herself from our tour a day early)  WOW.

Lunch was cool too- we ate at a restaurant on the river (private room-piers) I ate my first whole fish, eyeball and all (presented with eyeball, I didn’t eat it!!), and it was delicious!  It was actually sad leaving, we had to drop Remzi off at his house because he had a dentist appointment, before we left for the airport.  We had made him a card and a HUGE tip (13 x 20TL = a lot) and a SAS t-shirt someone had brought because we liked him so much!  He and Merye also have Facebook, so I will hopefully have 3 new Turkish friends.

As soon as we entered the airport our ‘group bond’ went to hell.  B-1 and Dan (my trip roommate) went to check in by themselves because apparently being there 2 hours early wasn’t enough time to stick together and they have no patience.  I laughed because they didn’t have the code and had to go to the counter and wait in line because the machine wouldn’t work for them.  We used the machine and B-1 “kindly” informed us the we had to go to the counter… wanna bet!?? Ha!

Getting through security, it turns out this airport has ONE gate. Hahaha

On the plane, EVERYONE was quiet with nearly no talking except for 4 or 5 of our people.  They were being ridiculously loud and I wanted to say something but didn’t want to be the jerk.  Well finally this old lady turns around and basically says shut the hell up with her eyes and gives a nice hearty 3-second SHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!  The kid next to me just laughs and says, “can you believe that!?”  I couldn’t help but saying, “well you are the only ones on the plane that are talking!”  He was pissed then and we didn’t talk the whole flight (though I fell asleep).  Landing though, they picked it up even louder.  The lady turns around AGAIN and said something and the Turkish lady next to me translates into something like she has a headache and Americans are just obnoxious.  The kid next to me says, “what is it illegal to talk on a plane in Turkey?”

I’m so fed up with the fat, lazy, LOUD, rich, obnoxious American stereotype and the whole loud group was fitting part of that.  People have no respect for the fact that WE are the visitors and you can’t expect ANYONE, not alone everyone to know English, and you can’t act however you want!  The lady said something again and someone in the group mocked her, so me being half asleep and pissed off turned around and flipped it on them.  The extent was, shut up, I’m embarrassed to be with you, you’re disgracing our country. Someone shouldn’t have to tell you to shut it three times and what’s worse you mock her.  That’s incredibly disrespectful..

Well needless to say, I was pissed and a jerk, but it was necessary (and all the people who weren’t being loud actually told me it was much needed afterwards).  Lets just say that the group severely split after that!  A few booked it outta there so fast we didn’t even know they got on a taxi by the time we got out there! The other 4 were going to do the same, but a girl in that group got her foot ran over by a taxi that decided to jump up on the curb!  Only one of her toes was bloody, but she was screaming cuss-words and threats at the taxi guy… drama drama drama

We had had enough and left as soon as we made sure she wasn’t going to die! Such a horrible end to such a great trip, but I WILL remember it for the good things and not the disastrous ending, so now it just makes a good story! :)





Wednesday, July 22nd- “Hike!”

I had nothing planned the last day, but wanted to head back to the market to buy some delicious apple tea and one of the signatures of Istanbul- the little tea glass.  But right before bed last night, my roommate comes in and hands me a ticket to the hike for today and says it’s all mine because he’s sick! So I passed my last 25 liras to Jon who was going to the bazzar with instructions…

The hike was okay- the first hour and a half was ridiculous, it was walk 10 ft. stop and wait, walk 10 feet, stop and wait, etc.  Some people just suck at hiking!  We ate our sketchy box-lunch by the water before heading out to climb up the canyon, which I actually broke a sweat for 3 minutes!  I can’t complain though, because it’s hiking, it’s outside, and we were going through/climbing up a canyon.  SWEET. 

Jon ended up buying a whole tea SET (he thought I said one of those tea sets, not glasses) which is fine, because I kinda wanted one, but I already have too much stuff to bring home! We’ll see how this goes…




Impressions on Turkey:

AWESOMELY CULTURAL- This country expressed its culture more than the other ones COMBINED.  The people were incredibly friendly (even at the bazaar, though they just wanted your money) and hospitable (offered apple tea numerous occasions), and I feel like I really interacted here.  Ex--> I got to listen to Turkish music, and even offered my iPod to Merye who wrote down Hands Down by Dashboard so she could download it later :)