Boğazkale - Gün 1

Well, it should have been a day trip...


A view from our bus to Sungurlu
Torben and I headed to Hattuşa, the ancient Hittite Capital, about 3 hours away from Ankara. We were dropped off at the side of a highway in front of Sungurlu, a town where people still travel by donkey & cart. We ambled around, and boarded a crowded dolmuş to Boğazkale. The man sitting next to me reeked of goats (i.e. the whole dolmuş had a nice country feel).

We showed up to Boğazkale at 3:30pm (3 hours later than expected), leaving us not nearly enough time to do the 12km walk that is Hattuşa and Yazılkaya. So, we checked into a pension.

"Where is your luggage?"
The owner asked, and we laughed. We brought next to nothing- cameras, jackets, guidebooks, cell phones, and various dictionaries.
Yok.

We visited the small museum down the road, which was only in Turkish and German. Sometimes, it's good to bring a German along to translate everything. Afterwards, we went to a small bakkal and a bakery and bought ourselves some necessities.


The view at lunch
We found a side road, and settled down to have a late lunch out of the public eye. Right now is the middle of Ramazan, so many Turkish people are fasting, and eating in front of them would be rude. Perhaps bread and peach juice can hardly be called a meal, but it served its purpose. It wasn't long until we realized the river below us was receiving some of the village's sewage. That was a pleasant discovery. Maybe that was why the children in the house nearby were waving at us? Maybe not.


It started raining, and we took cover under a porch. Some village children began talking to us in broken English (while we communicated in broken Turkish). One of them managed to bum some cookies off of us, but failed to get a cigarette out of Torben.



The people-watching was good from the porch, the cow-watching too. We met a man who had worked in Germany for 12 years, and found that the owner of one of the nicer houses still works in Germany. Any nice house is apparently attributed to "German money." Everyone seemed to look at us like we were insane. We were the only tourists spending the night in the town. Maybe we were insane.

The owner of our pension made dinner for us (it's Ramazan during an off-tourism season; no restaurants are open), and we would have followed up with a visit to a cafe, but none allowed women (i.e. old school Turkey). Given the outbreak of the bird flu in Western Turkey, I was kind of iffy about eating our dinner which had chicken in it- but I'm not dead yet.

After dinner the village was dark and we decided to take a walk. Everytime we would get somewhere nice, there would be dogs to chase us away. We even walked up into a bit of Hattuşa, but the dogs quickly barked at us there, too. Walking through the village (and the ruins) by moonlight was really quite beautiful. At some point, we found some snails crossing the road (I'd never seen snails before).

It was a good night, if mind numbingly cold.

N'haber Kız?

Today, a little schoolgirl yelled at me from the school-van as she was passing.

She said: "N'haber Kız?"
That's the equivalent of, "What's up, girl?" (literally, "What news girl?")

İstanbul - Gün 3

Pazar (Sunday) was full of...shopping.
Our hotel wasn't more than a block from Istiklal Caddesi (above). The side streets are quite nice- if you wander far enough you can find where the locals go to eat.

I bought myself two books at Robin Son Crusoe books, since they cost the same as they do at home: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and The Davinci Code.

The other exchange students had breakfast at a Chinese Sushi place, but I opted for a Turkish pastry and some fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice. I figured I'd save my ailing stomach the trouble of digesting fake Chinese food in the morning.


We ended the visit at a nargile cafe in Ortakoy (another section of Istanbul), resting on the bean bag chairs.

After a bit of hunting, we found a bus company leaving for Ankara at 8pm. We took the servis to the station, and began our journey home. At about 9pm, we still hadn't left the borders of Istanbul, so we asked the stewardess when we were supposed to arrive in Ankara. She said On iki which means "12". We didn't leave Istanbul till an hour after that. I think the problem was how our bus slowed everytime it saw a group of people on the side of the road, and yelled "ANKARA" at them, trying to get them to board the bus. A long story short, we arrived in Ankara at 3:30 am, several hours after midnight. But I'm home.