Selcuk/Ephesus

We woke up in the morning and had breakfast on the terrace of the hostel. It was the same sort of breakfast that we’d been having all throughout Turkey – watermelon, hard-boiled eggs, bread, tomato and cucumber. Since the weather was quite warm, the hydrating fruit and veg were very good.
The terrace of the hostel had a fantastic view of a local fort, situated on a hill about 500 metres from where we were seated.

As we were heading downstairs, Jimmy and Juju asked us what we were doing for the day. We told them that we were heading to Ephesus to check out the ruins, and they offered us a lift there, but we would have to make our own way back. They asked us if we had a hat and water, which we told them we did, even though we hadn’t gotten our water yet, Doolittle’s hat was looking the worse for wear, and Lapzang didn’t have one.
Their father drove us to the entrance of the ruins, and as we jumped out, we had one of the store owners come across and ask us the same question. He escorted us into his store, and showed off his hats to Doolittle and Lapzang, who both bought one, and I ended up buying a tourist book of Ephesus, since we didn’t want to get a tour guide to show us around the ruins.
While I was waiting out the front of the shop for the other two, I noticed that many of the places were selling rather phallic statues. These were basically men with huge erections as big as they were, and they came in different sizes (the statues, not the erections). There were two statues about 6 inches tall standing next to each other, one white and one black. One of the locals wandering past gave me a tap o the shoulder and pointed to the white one. “Bush.” He then pointed to the black one. “Obama.”
I had to laugh.
Once Doolittle had bought a wide brimmed sun-hat, and Lapzang had bought one that looked suspiciously like an inverted pot-plant, we headed to the gate of the ruins and paid our 20 Lira to enter.

Once inside, we could see that the ruins were of a massive city, and overheard one of the tour guides saying that historical experts estimate that they’ve only uncovered about 13% of the ruins. One of the first things that jumped out at us as we entered was a large amphitheatre, which was apparently where the local council would meet to discuss governmental things.
They had signs that showed what the fascias of different buildings would have looked like, with the ornamental carving and sculpting.
There was an ancient bath that stood three stories tall, a manor house that had previously been thought to be a brothel, a street lined with statues of the heroes and leaders of the times, and the public toilets which had running water to wash all of the waste away. A tour guide was telling people that often people would come down and just sit there for a while and gossip and talk about things for extended periods of time. As the tour group walked off, there was a group of 3 young Americans, two of whom sat down and the third had a video camera. They explained to the camera what the tour guide had said, and then one of the two sitting down turned to the other and started asking him if he had read the latest Grisham novel, what he thought about the news in the newspaper, and other such things. The guy behind the camera and myself were both laughing pretty hard, and I had to commend them on their joke.
These were the good Americans. There was another group of four that were wandering down the street, chatting with their tour guide who didn’t speak much English. Actually, they were telling the tour guide what they had heard (all completely wrong) and the tour guide was just nodding his head and going “Yes, yes.” At one point, one of them turned around and said “You should put a restaurant right here”… I’m not quite sure that they got the point of the ruins.
As we walked a little bit further down the road, we came to the massive library, which stood almost 100 metres tall. This was by far the most intricate building, with many statues and carvings on the walls. I was agog looking at this building, thinking that it was build 2500 years ago, and just wondering what amazing feats of engineering they would have had to pull off to erect this building.
We weren’t too far from the end, and as we were walking towards the exit, we saw a MASSIVE amphitheatre, which had been designed to hold the whole population of the city. Imagine the southern stand at the MCG… and then some. I’m not sure of the capacity, but I would not be surprised if it could hold up to 50000 people. All of this built before machinery was there to take the load off them.

As we exited Ephesus, we noticed that there was an ambulance sitting there, with the med officers sitting inside. We discovered why everybody had been asking us if we had water and hats. Well, given how hot the day had been we could understand, but apparently between 5 and 10 tourists each day suffer from sun-stroke and are taken to the hospital.
We had about 5 people approach us trying to sell us coins from the ruins, but as Lapzang and I inspected them we were able to see the mould lines around the edges of the coins, realizing that they were fakes, as all of the coins of the past would have been pressed rather than cast… ok, I’m being a bit of a nerd here. There were also plenty of stores that had signs proclaiming “Genuine Fake Watches.” I wasn’t sure whether they meant their watches were genuinely fake, or whether they were fakes that looked genuine.

We returned to our hostel and had a refresher shower. Doolittle had a tactical kip while Lapzang and I headed to the terrace and had a few tactical beers. I headed downstairs to have a rest myself for an hour, Lapzang went for a wander.
When I headed down to their room an hour later, Lapzang was furious and Doolittle was laughing loudly. I asked what had happened.
On his wander, Lapzang had barely made it 20 metres from the hostel before a man approached him and asked him if he wanted to have a drink with him. “Share tea with me, for once we have shared tea and talked, we have shared the tears!” the man proclaimed. We had read that as you move further away from Istanbul, the Turkish people become less likely to hassle you and are genuinely friendlier. Lapzang decided to put his cynicism aside, and give the guy the benefit of the doubt. He headed into the guy’s carpet store, and shared a tea and made small talk.
After about 5 minutes, the carpet man’s business partner came in, and started to talk about carpets, pointing to pictures and educating Lapzang on what was involved and what the different styles were. When he looked up, Lapzang saw that 4 children had now come into the store and were arranging piece of carpet on the ground for him to look at. He realized that he had become the latest victim of a Turkish carpet show.
The show progressed, and the two carpet men’s wives came in and also helped with the arrangement of the carpets. They two carpet men ended up the show telling him about a buy-back scheme that was in place – when foreigners bought these Turkish carpets, if they had an old one at home, the carpet could be sent back to Turkey to be recycled into other carpets. These patch-work carpets were put together in the east of Turkey, where most of the ambitious people had left, and since everybody was a cousin over there, the newer generations were all autistic inbreds who needed work to stay fed, yada yada yada.
Lapzang felt quite impressed by the song-and-dance that these guys had put on for him, so he told them that he would come back with his girlfriend for her to see the carpets.
“My friend, I hear people say that to me every day. I would rather you just tell me that you will not come back, otherwise I wait and I wait, and it gets dark, and my heart breaks when I realized that I wait for nothing!”
Lapzang ended up buying 2 cushion covers.

After Lapzang had calmed down, we headed out to have a drink at the bar we had gone to the previous night. Since it had been dark last night, we hadn’t realized that the bar was the ‘Pink bar’. Doolittle had commented that the owner had been the campest Turkish person we had seen, and at this point the penny dropped. He also did magic tricks, which were pretty good. I was sitting next to Doolittle, with Lapzang on the other side of the table, and he asked me why I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring when she was. I might have been a bit too expressive when I told him that I wasn’t engaged to her, it was my friend… he took quite a liking to me after that. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get any free beers out of it.

We had dinner at one of the local restaurants, and headed up to the terrace for a few end of evening beers. I was able to chat with a friend of mine on MSN that I hadn’t spoken with in ages, which was good, and we chatted with a few of the others up there. Juju managed to convince a Canadian staying there to break out the guitar, and he accompanied the bad guitar playing with a bad singing voice. I couldn’t wait for them to stop – fortunately they only played about three songs.
Doolittle and Lapzang headed off to bed, and missed an interesting turn of events. I turned around and saw Jimmy the hostel owner walk out onto the terrace with a rifle, and I almost shat myself, until he cracked it open and started putting BB pellets into it. He fired off about 20 shots at the massive flocks of starlings that were nesting, and I think he also took a few crack shots at cats as well.

I decided to head off to bed at that point.