Tuesday, June 12, 2007 9:00pm

We spent a few days in Izmir, getting to know the area and the culture a bit. Very few people spoke little to no English, so things were a bit interesting. We managed to track down an ATM, getting directions from a guy that spoke enough English to say “What is your name?” We found a nice little restaurant that sold some things called “pide (PEE-day)”. They’re basically like a long narrow pizza that is nothing but dough, cheese, and oil-- with heavy emphasis on the last two. Two of them are more than enough to fill you up! There was also a nice little supermarket where we were able to purchase some bread, jam, olive spread, and some veggies, which constituted our meals for the rest of the time we were there.

Our roommate was a really nice guy named Abraham*. He’s an Iranian SDA that is fleeing persecution in his home. He didn’t speak any English and we didn’t speak any Iranian, but we were able to enjoy each other’s presence and took pictures of each other before we left. On Sabbath all the “Michigan” people (the AFM folk) came over to our apartment and we had a nice little church service, granted it was illegal. Afterwards we had a nice lunch and I had a good talk with Daniel’s daughter, who is currently attending Southern. Then John took us out to see a castle built by Alexander the Great, called Kadifekale. In and around the castle is all a Kurdish neighborhood, which provided another new and unique experience. There was a great view of the whole area from up there, so we got a bit of perspective about where we were. Off in the distance we could see Greece, and we heard the call to prayer around 5 in the evening.

On Sunday morning, we didn’t really have anything to do, so I ended up sleeping most of the morning away. We went for a walk for awhile, bought some more pide, and got ready to leave. Our bus departed at 7:30, but we had to get to the little shop where we had purchased the tickets at about 6:15, because they had to shuttle us across town to the main station. After getting to the station, we had to figure out which stall our bus would be at, then we had to find it. We waited for a little bit, then boarded and left. A 13 hour bus trip across half of Turkey is indeed quite the experience! About every 3 or 4 hours we stopped at little rest stops, where we stayed for over half an hour. I finally got some sleep early in the morning, and awoke with the sun at about 5. We were in a flat, and I mean FLAT, deserty area. All around, as far as I could see, it was absolutely and totally flat-- except for one HUGE mountain. For a while we thought it may have been Ararat, but we soon realized that we were too far west. It was kinda cool seeing an occasional shepherd standing with his flocks.

We arrived in Göreme at about 8am, and made our way directly to our hostel, the Köse Pension. We’ve since decided that we picked a great place, partly from our personal experience, and partly because every time we tell someone in the town where we’re staying, they say, “Oh that’s the best place in town!” It’s a quaint little place. We’re staying in a little hut on the roof, and we have a great view of the surrounding valley. We’ve run into quite a few people traveling through here, all from many different countries. We’ve met Scottish, British, Australian, French, Pakistani, Brazilian, and many others. One guy we’ve talked extensively with is a 23-year-old Pakistani with a degree in Business. He has a great head on his shoulders. We’ve discussed politics, religion, sports, economics and many other great topics. We’ve had some great conversation with him about Islam and Christianity and found that we have a lot in common. One really cool thing he said was after we told him in a nutshell what we believe. He said, “So you guys are like the truest of the true Christians. You are the true orthodox Christians.” I thought that was pretty cool. We also had a great conversation over lunch today with a French guy that was the epitome of a postmodernist. We talked about life, meaning, truth, and all the other things that come up in that kind of a conversation.

Overall it’s been a fun experience so far. We’ve hiked around on some of the cool rock formations around here, which included Ricky getting quite a shock from a turtle in the grass. This is a very touristy area, so just about everyone speaks English to some degree or another. Today we went out for a full-day tour of some of the sights around here. The most interesting things we saw were an 8-floor underground city, a monastery built into the side of a mountain, and a nice canyon with a river and nice greenness in the bottom of it. Tomorrow bright and early, Ricky is going to go for a mountain-biking tour until around 2, then the both of us are going to rent some dirt bikes and go toodling around the area. Our bus leaves for Antalya at 9 in the evening, so we’ve got another nice, long, all-night bus trip ahead of us. We’ll arrive at 7 in the morning, and I’m going to waste no time in getting to the beach! So until tomorrow….