Mini-vacation in Turkey

This weekend was almost a long weekend - that is, we had Tuesday off so we logically took the Monday off and made it a 4-day weekend. What to do with so much free time?  I know: last minute trip!  My friends Brad and Rachel and I found a great deal for an all-inclusive trip to the western coast of Turkey.  The location was chosen both for its proximity to a great archeological site, and because it was bound to be warmer and sunnier than Vienna!!

We flew off Saturday morning at the crack of dawn. Yawn! The upside of travelling so early is that we arrived at our hotel early afternoon, so we didn't waste a day travelling.  Upon arrival, we threw our stuff into our room and went to look around the place a little. Then we wanted to go into Kusadasi, a nice town just down the coast a little. We walked out to the main road to wait for the minibus that supposedly ran every 30 minutes.  After about 25 minutes wait (because of course we had just missed the previous one), a minibus came our way. Hooray? Not so much: the bus is quite full. The three of us are standing there, and the driver asks us if one or two people want to get on. Ummm, no.  So he drives off. OK, now what?  Conveniently, a taxi drives by and stops to pick us up. 

In Kuşadasi, we wandered around the beach a bit, and then made our way to one of the bazaars.  We looked at touristy crap, nice things too, lovely ceramics, etc.  Some shop owners helpfully and laughingly told us they would like to take our money. Kind of nice to be so direct. We ended up in a carpet store, with the full attention of Mike the salesman.  

We spent about 90 minutes in that shop, looking at a thousand variations on carpets.  Mike was very nice, chatting with us while at the same time asking questions to figure out which carpets to show us.  We were served hot apple tea - twice, and only after such a long time did the haggling really begin. The trick is to seem rather uninterested, and start your offer at about 50% of their price.  But it's usually done quite amicably, without too much pressure, so it's all good.  Brad and Rachel left with two rough wool carpets in geometric patterns.  I splurged a bit and took with me a small (really small) 100% silk carpet.  I plan of using it as a wall hanging, it's too beautiful to walk on!

We got back to the hotel just in time to sit on the beach and watch the sunset.

We then went in to dinner. The food was buffet style of course, with plenty of options so that we were quite happy with every meal.  I think I had olives and some sort of creamy white cheese at every meal - so good!  After dinner, we sat ourselves in the lounge area with some drinks. We chatted and played cards while listening to the... music-making person in the corner.  Not sure what to call him: he had an electronic keyboard, which he was tolerable at, but he also proceeded to sing butcher crooner (a.k.a. lounge lizard) songs. The one thing he was pretty decent at was traditional turkish songs, which everyone seemed to enjoy, but he only sang a few of those. Too bad.

The next morning, we headed off to Ephesus.  It is the ruins of an entire city, including baths, library, houses etc., though only part of the city has been excavated.  Legend has it the Amazons first founded the city, but who knows?  In its heyday as a major port, it had about 200,000 citizens, the 2nd largest city anywhere.  We walked around the site with our guidebook, soaking in the history and the atmosphere.  It was fabulous, very impressive. There was one covered area, designed to protect the fragile frescoes and mosaics of the rich people's houses that had been excavated.  We were some of the few tourists who paid to go into that area, and boy was it worth it!

We then headed to the closest town, Selçuk.  There we first visited the Epehsus museum, containing some of the finds from 50 years of excavation on the site. 

After that, we wandered a bit until we found the Basilica of St John (the Apostle) at the top of a hill.  Selçuk is where St. John and the Virgin Mary came in about 50 A.D. to escape persecution.  The basilica is where St John is purported to have written his Gospel. The Basilica is in complete ruin, but enough remains to give an idea of the size and importance of this site.  It is also where the tomb of St John is located.

Just before we left the Basilica, as we were looking at the Isa Bey mosque, the call to prayer began.  It was a strange, peaceful yet impressive feeling to be at a site of such Christian religious import while listening to the song of the muezzin.  By the way, I really do love that sound!

We got back to the hotel early, and ended up in our room after dinner to watch some TV and just relax.  That was half the purpose of this vacation anyways. :-P

For Monday, we had been thinking of hopping on a ferry to the island of Samos, but we would have had to leave the hotel waaay too early in the morning, so we nixed that idea.  Instead, we slept in a litte, and then went back to Kuşadasi.  We found a nice hamam and had a turkish bath.  This is really what it sounds like: the purpose is to get clean.  First you sit in a sauna and sweat out some of your toxins.  Then you move to a comfortably warm room and lie down on a marble slab.  After a few minutes of cooling down, a swarthy Turkish man come to rub you with a kind of oversize exfoliating mitten and some soap.  Rinse off, then back on the slab. Next up, the man uses very soapy water which he foams up using a kind of linen pillowcase that he blows up with air.  This produces incredible amounts of foam, which he spreads around you and give you a brief and bracing massage along the way. Then you rinse off again and off you go. After this treatment, your skin is super soft, and apparently also tans extra well (but who cares about tanning). How relaxing!

We then went in search of a restaurant for lunch. We ended up right next to the harbour, where we chose a variety of fish and seafood dishes.  I'm not much of a seafood fan usually, but most of these dishes were fantastic! Especially these little fishies (anchovies? sardines? one of them, anyways) that were fried to a crisp - so they were fish fries, really. Yummy!

We strolled away the afternoon around Kusadasi and Pigeon Island, and returned to the hotel for another beach sunset watch.  For some reason, all three of us were exhausted at this point, so after dinner we went right back to our room.  We were all asleep quite early.  Now, this was a very good thing, because we had to get up at the unholy hour of 3 A.M. to catch the bus to the airport.

All in all, a wonderful little break!

And to wrap up this blog post, here are a few non standard pictures I took along the way:

Banana flower

Ancient scribble (translated) on a wall in Ephesus

Beware of falling woman?

The barman insisted on making me a drink. It's got 3 kinds of alcohol, about a kilo of sugar and every possible decoration... Undrinkable!

My favourite store sign of the weekend:

Ham chips, one of the greatest snack foods ever!

Token pretty flower

Every tourist took a picture of themselves in between these columns, touching them with arms outstretched as though holding them apart. I couldn't reach, so I improvised...

Stray cats EVERYWHERE, from the hotel to the ruins of Ephesus. And all of them little and fluffy!

Smile!

Adventure in Hungary

On the last day of September, most of the staff in my Terrestrial Environment Laboratory section took the afternoon off to go on a "team building activity". Well, ok, we just wanted to play hooky and have some fun, but the title gives a nice ring to it.

So we piled into a few cars and off we went, bound for far off Hungary, a whole... 40 kilometres away! :-P

Just outside the town of Sopron, there is a nice forested area. In the forest, there is an "adventure park". What's that, you ask?  It's a kind of athletic course high up in the trees, where you have to walk tightropes, balance on beams, use ladders and ziplines etc.  For those of you in the Ottawa/Gatineau area, there are 2 such parks nearby, one at Camp Fortune and one at Cavernes Laflèche.

OK, so we get there. get harnessed up, and then play around in the trees for a couple of hours.  However, they don't beat the two I just mentioned above: the Hungarian one was a little too reliant on sheer upper body strength (which I don't have at all), and the zip lines were low and short.  But still, we had a great time. I love these things!  It was also fun to see my colleagues looking silly hanging on for dear life. :-)

Once we were done, we went on a short walk on a "path" in the forest. OK look, the forest was lovely, very similar to ones back home, but a path should not be 10 feet wide and paved!

We ended up at a tower with a view of Sopron, Neusiedler Lake and Austria beyond the lake. It was some kind of historical site, although not too sure what because almost all the signs were in Hungarian. The only translated sign was quite hilarious, full of amusing mistakes:

By then we were starving, so we went bak into town to some restaurant with an unpronounceable name. The sign had a depressed-looking fox on it, so we nicknamed it the "Sad Fox restaurant".
A nice end to a lovely day!

IT Alzheimer's

OK, long time no post again. I really need to remind myself to do this more!  I have no idea what I did all September, so you'll pardon me if I skip most of that month.

The only really memorable event of the month was the sudden mental illness of my laptop.  The poor thing was about 6 years old, and had been repaired/wiped twice already. Nevertheless, it was working just fine when I decided to back up most of my files on a Friday evening.  Luck? Karma? In any case, by Saturday morning, my computer got sick. No, not a virus: some nasty malfunction caused it to forget everything.  All of my files disappeared, even my profile, and every time the computer turned itself on, it asked to register new software and whether I wanted a tour of my new computer. Even just logging out ant back in caused it to forget whatever I had just done.  And yet all the software ran just fine... This was my fist case of IT Alzheimer's. No fun!

OK, so basically the laptop is dead. Now I need to buy a new one. That's fine, I was planning on getting one at Christmas, so a few months early is not a big deal.  But wait, problem: in Austria, all the computers have German keyboards, which I definitely don't want.  I ask around, and discover there are only 2 options if I want an international keyboard: order from Dell (UK) and wait about 3 weeks, or order from Apple, pay double my budget but get the computer in a week.  Hmmm, not liking those options.

And then, inspiration strikes: an ex-coworker of mine from the CNSC is coming to Vienna next week for a meeting. Maybe I can convince my good friend Hemendra to purchase a laptop cand bring it to me.  And, being the nice guy he is, he of course does so.

So now I have a nice new laptop (which I just discovered has a touchscreen. Why is that?), and also confirmation that you really should backup your files regularly, you never know when your computer will lose it!