dried apricots from a cappadocian gas station.

this past weekend the entire BUSEL "speaking skills instructor" crew piled into a posh bus and headed out to a fancy hotel in Ürgüp for a carefully scheduled & guided group tour of cappadocia. our first stop was Tuz Gölü, or "salt lake," the second-largest "lake" in turkey (a.k.a. a deserted expanse of bright, damp salt.)



next was Göreme National Park where artistic remains from the Christian-Roman period cling to carved-out cave walls (somewhat similar to the ajanta caves in india, although less elaborate.) most caves were used for monasterial purposes, such as this nunnery:



there were also several quirky details, like these pigeon-home-holes (look carefully) made because (according to our guide) the ancient cave-inhabitants used pigeon dung for fertilizer, pigeon flight for carrying messages, and pigeon meat for eating:



many rooms in the caves were decorated with simple red-painted designs and often contained stone-carved ovens, caskets, clay-pot-holders, and various furniture including this last-supper-ish table:



others served as churches complete with vivid frescoes depicting mostly biblical stories, although in this case the woman on the left was mysteriously punished with a male body from the waist up for being a sex-worker:



after Göreme we wandered through the incredibly beautiful volcanic-eroded landscape of cappadocia at large, somewhat similar to the the south-west U.S. and, for me, emotionally reminiscent of hampi's surrounding landscape, , ,even though further inspection reveals the two aren't very similar at all:



nazar boncuğu tree



undeniably phallic "fairy chimneys"



low-quality panorama of the landscape

we also visited the pretty impressive underground city of Kaymaklı where multiple levels of underground cave-rooms provided protection for various people throughout time including early Christians and Greeks. there's room for thousands of people; large plaza-like areas have amenities like stone-carved ovens, stables, and wine presses. we skipped derinkuyu, the nearby larger complex.

the trip included some expected big-group disappointments such as visits to "educational" tourist-trap pottery/jewelry/winery shops and a stern saturday-night warning from the hotel management for being too unruly (the disappointment being directed towards the majority of the group for drinking too much prohibited alcohol even after the hotel set up an impromptu disco for us the night before.) three girls and i avoided the whole scene and went off for a walk through town which, at 2AM, ended swimmingly at a courtyard table with two turkish men, 3 smoked hookahs (or "narghile" as they're called in turkish), the spoils of about a half-dozen rounds of çay (tea), and a nod from the owner that our bill had been taken care of. by that time we were too tired to bother wondering which cultural nuance we had botched in exchange for our free ticket, but in retrospect the all-too-common american-tendency-to-smile-misconstrued-as-flirting is a good guess. nevertheless, we were carefully escorted back to our hotel by one of our suitors and all ended well. finishing into thin air on the bus ride home helped me come to grips with the fact that i'll probably never climb mt. everest. i'm now okay with that.

if you'd like to see more photos, feel free to visit my flickr page where i plan on uploading images throughout my year in turkey and possibly beyond.