Last Tuesday, I went to to a magical and amazing place called Kapadocia. The place was so completely and utterly alien from Illinois, that I felt as if I had been thrown into a fantasy book. There were mountains in the distance, valleys and gorges on all sides of us, and little to no vegetation anywhere. To top it off, miles off in the distance was a massive volcano which only reflected the sunlight off of its snow capped peak, so it looked as if it was raised up and presiding over the whole area. But lets tell about this crazy cool place with a time line.
Tuesday I got to skip school so that I could get on the bus at 9 am and take the 4 hour trip up to Izmir. There I took a dolmus (god's gift to public transportation. '$1.50 will get you anywhere you want to go). I took it to Ayhan's house where I was to spend the night. Ayhan is an extremely nice lady and a part of rotary. She fed, housed, and gave me lots of advice and directions to get wherever I wanted to go. I waited for my friends to get out of school and me and all of the exchange students (about 8) met up and wondered the city. We went home early as the next day we marched in the Turkish Independence Day Parade.
The parade was basically exactly like ours, only no candy, no bands and a lot of military involved. There were groups such as Rotary and Lions Club marching in it with the army and the Turkish national guard both leading the parade and bringing up the end of it. It was disappointingly short but I got a ginormous Turkish flag and all of us exchange students got free flags and bought Ataturk scarves. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the founder of the Turkish republic and basically Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin all rolled into one. He really does deserve the recognition and fame that he has here, his accomplishments are truly stuff that you could only find in books and movies. After the parade we all went home to finish getting ready for the big trip. We got on the train at about 8 o'clock and spent the next 12 hours tossing, turning, fidgeting, and grumbling all the while trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in. Nobody found one. But we still slept and the next day we had lunch in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, with the Ankara exchange group. This basically put all of the exchange students (25) in turkey together, except for the Istanbul kids. We met, talked, laughed and met their satanic supervisor Gulin. She prides herself on being more evil than Hitler himself, and loved to yell at us and constantly threatened us with locking us in our hotel rooms for entire days if we didn't move faster, sit down quicker, or stick to the schedule. She truly was like this, with no exaggerations, though I found that by the end of the trip she has her own strict rules for herself which make her easy to manipulate or appease. We jumped on a tour bus and began our trip down to Kapadocia, about 6 hours away.
About halfway there, a few of us noticed a huge lake running along the road next to us. It was a few kilometers wide and went along the road farther than our eyes could see. After a few minutes when we pointed it out to our friends our really cool tour guide Ali, whom we eventually nicknamed Ali Baba, informed us that it was a salt lake, and was in fact 50 kilometers wide at its biggest and about 80 long. This is the largest salt lake in the world, but that is not the most remarkable fact about it. The entire lake is only about 15 cm deep. As you can see from the pictures, we actually look like we were walking on water. The water is so salty that nobody wanted to wear their pants after this experience because the salt from the splashes as we ran across the water actually coated and soaked into our clothes to make them stiff and white. It was really amazing and Ill have to find some way to post a lot of pictures later. But afterwards, we went to the hotel in Kapadocia.
Immediately I knew it was going to be an awesome trip because I was in the big room at the end of the hall with 4 other cool kids from the Ankara group. After only 10 minutes people started to wander into our room. An Australian kid pulled out his guitar and random people started to play songs while the rest of us talked or just hung out. We did this basically every night afterwards.
The next day, Thursday, we headed out. This place was amazing and just as I described at the beginning. we walked between giant... lets call them thumb shaped landforms sticking up over 80 feet everywhere. We could be walking through a valley, and then instantly be on a precipice without moving up or down. The land flowed around and under us. Because it was made of volcanic ash on top of volcanic rock, it was like walking on compressed sand. A few of us were brave enough to try sand surfing on our shoes. We would run as fast as we could and when we hit a hill going down, we could slid on our shoes over 20 feet! It was a truly awesome place. There was a group of die hard adventurers and explorers that consisted of a girl named Deveney, 2 guys named Steve and John, and me who would see just how far out we could go and who could find the coolest things every time we stopped at a new place. Kapadocia is most famous for its underground cities. That's right, there are many underground cities in Kapadocia. Hundreds of years ago, Christians here were persecuted and the monks needed a place to live. So they went out into the wilderness and found this place and realized that the volcanic ash was incredibly easy to dig through. So they would burrow down and when more people joined they would expand both down and out. The city that we went to was 7 stories deep, completely hand dug. There was a huge well that went directly through the middle of the whole structure, all the way down to the bottom, with holes on each floor to lower buckets to the bottom where the water was. On the third floor, I looked into this shaft and we were already so deep that I could see neither the top nor the bottom of this massive shaft. The pictures of this place are far more descriptive than I could ever be.
Then there was this thing called Turkish night. It took place in this hug cavern that was recently dug out and turned into a restaurant. There was a hall with doors on either side leading into the side of a hill and at the end was the cavern. It had a massive chandelier and musicians playing. then branching off of the cavern were stubby, raised hallways where we sat and ate our diner. After we ate, whirling dervishes came out and did their religious dance. It was stunning and peaceful at the same time to watch these men, dressed all in white spin in circles for over 5 minutes straight as they held their hands aloft and stared up into the air as if looking at their god. For those of you who don't know what whirling dervishes are, they are a religious sect of Islam who believe in complete nonviolence and practice spinning in circles as a form of ecstasy or connection with god. Next came the traditional dancers. They performed an elaborate wedding ceremony that lasted half an hour and then invited everybody to dance in the celebrations. It was incredibly fun to dance with all of these new friends in the Turkish way, which can pretty much only be demonstrated, not explains. then all of the dancers came back out of their room with a chair and grabbed my friend Geena and made her sit in it, putting a veil over her face so she could barely see out. Next they had everybody sit down on the floor in a circle around her and clap to the beat of the music. Next they grabbed this really old Turkish guy with a massive white mustache and he danced around Geena, obviously about to marry her. It turned out to be a joke and they told the guy to sit down and instead, grabbed my friend John. He danced around Geena, and when he lifted the veil she was instantly surprised and they were married with an exchange of bracelets and kisses on the cheeks. After that we were given time to dance with each other and just have fun. We had to sit down after a while while a team of belly dancers came out and performed. They were really good, but the true professional was yet to come. We had another chance at dancing and then came The belly dancer. I was told later that she was brought in from Brazil to perform at our restaurant and she was really good. She danced around the room for 10 minutes and then brought out a saber which she continued to dance with while balancing it on her stomachache and head. It was a truly remarkable example of Turkish customs and tradition. We had another chance to dance for a few minutes and then the traditional dancers came back out. This time, while they were dressed in traditional clothing, they pulled modern moves and did everything from flips to the Russian leg kick. Everybody got up and joined them and we danced together for the next half an hour. It was the best night Ive had since coming to Turkey.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, but fun as we took another day out exploring the lanscape and played volleyball back at the hotel. The bus ride was full of sleeping kids, and the train was just as uncomfortable as the first time, only it was 2 hours longer than the first ride. I relaxed in Izmir, getting to skip out on another day of school, and arrived back in Bodrum the next Tuesday. I went to the rotary club meeting that night where there was another belly dancer. I danced with her, and got tipped by the audience, but that's another story I'll write later
