I’m currently sitting in seat 5B on an AnadoluJet flight from Ankara to Sanli Urfa in the southeast part of Turkey.  We’ve been moving rather quickly these past couple of days — while we were sitting in the airport in Antalya, from whence we departed just a couple of hours ago, we had to take a moment to reflect on the fact that we have been in the country all of three days.  It feels like we’ve been here much longer.

In all honesty, this program has gone much better than I had let myself hope.  The organization that I’m working with is somewhat legendary for packing the itineraries on these trips so full that at least half of the participants wind up having to sit out a day or two due to illness incurred from lack of sleep.  Hence, I’m rather pleased that it does appear that they listened to my pleas not to overschedule the program, even if at first glance it may not have appeared as such.

When last I checked in, I was on an early morning flight to Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city.  I’ve never actually been to Izmir, and that, unfortunately, didn’t really change this time either.  We were met at Adnan Menderes airport and boarded a bus from which we went directly to the Greco-Roman city of Ephesus, an hour south.

This was the group photo that we took that somehow I never wound up actually being in.  (“Hang on, I’m going to use my timer … where are you all going?”)  Oh, well.

There are, for the record, a lot more photos on my Flickr account.  As I’m doing most of my blogging offline, it’s very difficult for me to link to them from here, but check them out, OK?

Where was I?  Ephesus.  It’s a large old city, and I’ve been there before.  Still looks old.  The new attractions this time around were that the very large amphitheater was open (last time it was closed), although I walked in, took one look, and realized that I would have given myself heatstroke walking up to the top.  Instead, I discovered the other new attraction: Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruises pay local people to dress up like Romans and act out cheese-tastic skits for their passengers coming in from the nearby port of Kusadasi.

This appeared to be a swordfighting match – it was kind of hard to tell, since the two fighters just yelled a lot a la Conan the Barbarian.  I guess that’s what you have to do with such a multilingual crowd.

After Ephesus, we went up the hill to the Meryamane Evi, the house where it is reputed where the Virgin Mary lived her last years in this earthy existence.  Most of you probably do not recall (as I don’t think I blogged it at the time), but the last time I was at Meryamane, one of the people in my group pitched a complete and utter fit in the parking lot because one of the interpretive signs at the site said that Mary lived there “until she died.”  As good Catholics know (and this woman was a better Catholic than you, and wanted everyone to know it) Mary did not die — she fell asleep and was lifted into heaven by angels.  The fact that she had earlier sneered that Eastern Orthodoxy was still full of superstitious beliefs that had been removed from Catholicism was an irony lost only on her.

Anyway, as pieces of real estate went, Mary had a pretty nice one.  It’s set on a hilltop just outside where the walls of the city of Ephesus would have been located amongst the fir trees and pleasant flowering vines, and it catches a nice sea breeze coming in off of the Aegean Sea.  I should be so lucky.

Then came the visit to the pottery factory.  I’m always resistant to these sorts of “quick visits to a local factory” because they inevitably turn into sales pitches, but it wasn’t bad as these things go … and it turns out that membership has its privileges.  She knew the group we were with and offered us a 50% discount on the spot.  Unfortunately, that means that most of it was still out of my price range, but …

Purdy, ain’t it?

After that, lunch at a ranch … that turned out to just be a ranch.  No actual house there — we thought we had been invited to someone’s home for lunch, and that turned out not to be the case.  They did, however, have a random yurt in the yard, which got us going on at length about words that are fun to say — “yurt” being one of them.

Yurt!

So, after the yurt excursion, we did a double-shot in Selcuk to the site of the Basilica of St. John and the so-called Jesus Mosque.  The problem with the first is that they don’t actually know who St. John was — they’re not sure if it’s the Apostle, the one who wrote the Gospels, the one who wrote Revelation, or a completely different John.

It’s a prettier site than I remembered, though:

Next door is the mosque of Isabey.  Isa is the Islamic name of Jesus, but despite the fact that everyone said it was the Jesus mosque, it turns out that it was named for some guy who lived in the thirteenth century named — you guessed it, Isabey.  Close, but no cigar.

After that was our first visit to a school on this trip, which was interesting.  As of now, we’ve had three with a fourth pending.

Shortly after the school visit, it was back to Adnan Menderes airport for a flight to Antalya that arrived at 11:30 pm.  Exhausted,we trundled off to the Marmara Hotel, which turned out to be a five star deluxe on the coast (not to be confused with “the beach”).  But when your coast looks like this, who cares?

The day was fraught with various ventures: morning visit to the Antalya Museum, followed by lunch at a local school, followed by a walking tour of old Antalya that lasted for three whole blocks.  Again, when the blocks look like this, who am I to complain?

This was followed by the inevitable shopping excursion to a carpet store.  The guide was very sneaky on that front — after consulting with our hosts, the four of us had unanimously decided that there would be no carpet shopping.  Then prayer time came and the three of them went into a nearby mosque to pray …and so the tour guide suggested that a nice place to wait for them might be the carpet shop.  Ha ha!  I went into the mosque and sat in the air conditioning instead.  If I buy a carpet — and that’s a big if — I’ll do it in Istanbul at the end.  I’m flirting with overweight luggage flying domestically in Turkey and I don’t need that weighing on my conscious.

I’m going to wrap up this narrative here.  At the moment it’s half past midnight in Sanliurfa (see map), and although I’m wide awake, balancing a hot laptop on my stomach isn’t the best thing to do to get ready for bed.  More later …