Thursday, January 23, 2014

Turkey, One Down, Nine to Go

If you opened the attached map you will have seen ten "circles".  Those are sites a Turkish woman now in the US told us we might want to go.

 

At about 6 PM yesterday we got to the first of them, Izmir, the upper left circle.  We had booked our hotel room online a couple of months ago.  As is said about many Turkish hotels, the lobby is nice, but don’t let it fool you.  Our room for two nights is exactly 8 feet wide and 10.5 feet long (as measured by my wingspan).  But it seems clean and it has an ensuite bathroom.  There must be 20 hotels within a stone’s throw.  I wonder what they are like.  Ours is right next to what appears to be a hooker bar, what a find!  I can hear the music from that venue right now as I sit in our room on my single bed composing this and Sandy naps on her single bed just a couple of feet away. 

Today was a day of roaming the streets of Izmir.

After a good breakfast at the hotel we started our day with a walk to Agora, a huge ruin right in the heart of Izmir dating back at least a few thousand years.  And, just a relatively few years ago in 178 AD, a major earthquake hit the place and the Romans rebuilt it.  It has gone into some disrepair though since then.

We had a great lunch of red mullet on the shores of the Aegean

followed by a visit to an archaeology museum and an art exhibition

in a huge park just north of our hotel.  By the way, Izmir has a storied history.  For example, Homer was born here.  In biblical and pre-biblical times, it was called Smyrna. 

Now we rest and tomorrow we travel 50 miles or less south by car to the next circle south on the map, Selcuk and Ephesus (as in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians).  We'll find a hotel there and look before we book.