no, you're a turkey!

We left Kavala on the morning of March 18th and headed into Turkey. As soon as we entered the country, it was evident that there is a lot of Turkish pride. I think I saw something close to 16 million Turkish flags all over the place. Our bus even had one hanging in the back window. Once we got into Istanbul we saw a lot of mosques, as well. It was pretty ridiculous. We spent two nights in Istanbul and we looked at all of the normal stuff: Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, and a big museum. It was all good stuff. Our first night there a small group of us went out to a little restaurant and drank apple tea and ate chocolate cake. They might have been a little upset that we didn't get any real food, but it was all good. The second day we were dropped off at the Grand Bazaar to do some shopping and that was a lot of fun.

We also went to Nicea, which is where they had some of the Ecumenical Councils a long time ago. It might sound interesting, but all we did was go see a tile factory and it was actually a little boring. We went to some other places but it's really not even worth noting.

We went to Troy the next day and it was very crowded. I'm sure most of you know basically what happened at Troy, at least I hope so. As far as describing what it was like there, I really can't. It was cool. A lot of ruins. Check out the pictures. The whole city isn't uncovered yet, but I know that Schliemann did a great job when he started to uncover it as he went around, tearing things up and assuming things were something they weren't. Best archeologist in history!

We stayed that night in Izmir. The next day we had a free day, or at least they called it that. We still had to get up relatively early and head to some restaurant across town to eat lunch. Then they gave us something like 3 hours to do whatever. So what is there to do in a big city like Izmir for three hours? Some people chose to go shopping, others went and just walked around, but Mark, Cody, and I went with the more obvious choice of going to go see a bad Dennis Quaid movie called The Horsemen.

The next day we went to Ephesus, which was one of my favorite parts of this trip. I've said before that these sites are never what I expected, but this one was even different from that. Ephesus was huge, and there was a lot of it that was preserved fairly well, mostly the library (which I took pictures of). The library actually looks more like a movie set than ancient ruins, but that was pretty cool. After we had spent something like 2 hours walking around here they told us that they still have only uncovered something like 10 percent of it. It was pretty awesome. At the end they gave us some time to walk around and a lot of us went to a spot where I'm sure we weren't supposed to go. We climbed around on the ruins and then went down to pet some horses that were tied up near to the ruins.

We stayed in Kusadasi that night and got ready to leave on a cruise the next morning.