It is finally sinking in that I'm actually in Turkey. So, the first full day in Turkey...
Well, let's start with yesterday (or Thursday night into Friday). Thursday night we went to the airport and boarded a plane. 12 hours of flying and 7 time zones later we arrived in Turkey. We got our visas at the airport (a highly sketchy process in which we handed a guy our passports and a "crisp, new $20 bill' (those were the exact instructions we were given) and in exchange they ignored us and put a sticker in our books. No questions, no discussion.) and boarded a minibus for the 45 minute ride from Izmir to Selcuk. Surprisingly Turkey looks a lot like upper southern California. Think like a combination of Topanga Canyon and the area around San Louis Obispo. Then we checked into the hotel. Most of our group is staying in the main building. Four of us (Haley, Ginny, Calissa, and me) are staying in a separate building that must have been finished minutes before we arrived because it still smells like oil-based paint. The hotel was built/rebuilt this year and so it's very nice.
Sidebar: everybody keeps complaining about how nice the hotel isn't. No, it's not a five star resort. It's not a Holiday Inn. It's Mediterranean/European. Everything is new and, sure, it's arranged differently from how things are arranged in the states, but it's clean, and well-kept and the owners are super friendly. We have a weird roof-top porch right outside our door and they brought us furniture for it. They didn't have to do that. Maybe things are damp, but it's a rainy, humid place and stuff gets damp. It gets cold at night. Put on a sweatshirt. They feed us a really nice traditional Turkish breakfast every morning (tomatoes, cucumbers, breads, jams, cheese, coffee, fresh-squeezed orange and pomegranate juice, cereal). Suck it up. We're in Turkey. If you wanted familiar things you should have stayed at home. End rant.
After we checked in we went to see the library we're using for resources, got cash from the ATM, and then we went to dinner. The food is really good. Lots of fresh veggies and dip/sauce. Lots of different kinds of cooked meats (sardines, chicken, lamb, beef). Lots of treatments of eggplant. Deep fried goat cheese. Then we went home and I passed out.
One of my favorite parts of traveling is seeing all the different, pretty money, especially coins. The dollar is really strong right now, so the exchange rate is roughly 2:1. I got a 1.5L bottle of water for 50 cents. This is additionally good because today we started out the day by going to the Saturday market. I got some really pretty textiles that include beads to warn off the Evil Eye. The Evil Eye warding symbol is everywhere here. Hung up on buildings, embedded into the cement on sidewalks and into the plaster ceilings of stores. The market was full of spices, nuts, dried meats, baked goods (baklava!), candies, vegetables, fruits (so many oranges...they grow as decorative plants in highway medians) -- pretty much all the foods that you could possibly want. It was also full of knock off purses, shoes, weird socks, Jack Daniels tshirts, and a whole lot of other crap I wouldn't buy at home, let alone travel halfway across the world for (side question: why would you bother traveling all the way around the world -- you'd just end up back where you started). One vendor was selling fresh squeezed pomegranate juice. For 5 lira you could get 2 glasses of it. So good! Then we had lunch (rice and beans in a thin tomato sauce) and went to Ephesus.
Ephesus is a hard thing to describe. It is only 15% excavated (the Austrians/Germans have been working on it for 100 years...) and a lot of it is on the ground in chunks. But once you started to really look at stuff you could begin to see what it might have looked like at one time. It's situated between two mountains (really big hills) and goes down to the harbor where the Aegean Sea used to be. I did all the readings for the class, but I still didn't feel prepared. During today's lecture I found out I'm more prepared than I thought I was. I remembered what the professor was talking about from the readings! One of the things we talked about today was why there were different foundations for columns than there was for flooring at one of the temples. Um, you can't set stone columns (on which the stone roof sits) securely on rubble foundations...duh. If that doesn't make sense to you I'm pretty sure there's a kids' song about the wise and foolish builder...and I have some ocean front property for sale in Arizona that you might be interested in.
It's really interesting to think about the other religions that were happening in Ephesus alongside Christianity. The temple we focused on today was (probably...as best as archaeologists can tell) dedicated to Egyptian gods/goddesses. To look at the ways that these temples would have operated and then compare them to early Christian practice (especially initiation rights, since I'm also taking a sacraments class and we've been talking about early Christian baptism and the intentionally mysterious rites that surrounded it) was really strange and neat.
After we got done at Ephesus we came back to the hotel for a bit and then went out to dinner. We just wandered until we found something that looked good. It was this tiny, tiny place -- all 6 of us barely fit in it. The food was soooooo good! Turkish appetizers are called "mata". I'm not sure on the spelling, but if you ask for it they just bring you plates of delicious mystery. Apparently the place we picked is our professors' favorite, "well-kept" secret because they looked really sad when they showed up and we were already there. "How did you find this place?" "We walked. It's on the main street." It was weird.
Tomorrow we're going to three places that aren't Ephesus to look at other religious sites. It is also another day that begins at 7:15, so I need to go to bed.
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