or maybe you didn't....
In case it was ever unclear, inspiration for title, both of the blog and this post:
So it is now August of 2010. 8 Months after this post should have been written and almost a year after I was about to leave for Jordan. This post title brings that aspect of the blog full circle; see lyrics to "The world has turned and left me here" by Weezer.
I actually wrote a post in that hostel in Turkey on my last night after Nate had left, but the computer deleted it, and it had taken about 45 minutes to write, so I didn't feel like writing it again. Then getting home and christmas and getting ready for spring semester, and then spring semester all got in the way of telling the story of an awesome week in Turkey. This post will be different from the rest of the blog in that it will be written way after the fact; and will therefore obviously focus on the moments that really stuck with me, rather than passing amusements; it is unclear how much difference this will make.
After our last apartment dinner and goodbye's to everyone, I went home (dropped Daniela off along the way) and packed up my whole room in about 45 minutes. Then I checked everything for my flight to turkey and my flight home to the states, piled all of my big bags up in a corner and tried to get some sleep.
The next morning I said bye to Jourdan and the host family (though I would see the host fam. on the way back from Turkey) and met Nate at the Air Jordan bus station.
There is a moment here that is sticking with me. I was there first (as I have a terribly compulsive habit of getting everywhere that I'm supposed to be ridiculously early). As I waited for Nate and listened to music and thought about the semester, I got a text from Nate a minute after we had agreed on meeting saying something like "i'll be there in 2 minutes, sorry." Which jogged memories of another time when he had texted me at a bus station while he was off on a long bathroom break (really too long) saying "fine, eating." Which prompted Brianna to note that he seemed to know me very well and knew that I would be worrying. This very digressive paragraph is a longwinded way of saying that the people that I made friends with in Jordan seemed to just get me right away. Not just nate, but also brianna and daniella. Which was really cool.
Anyway, 6 month late melodramatic thoughts aside, we got to the airport, absurdly early again, (by which I mean 2 hours before our flight) but since there is relatively no one in Amman we were through security and like 10 seconds. I don't remember much of the flight, but we ended up in Istanbul. Nate and I had been talking about going to cappadocia since august (if you're reading this, at this point i've told you what cappadocia is in person, so I won't describe it yet). We both really wanted to go, so we had decided to get there right away by taking a night bus out to gerome the first night we were in turkey. We landed at about 11 am so we had some time though, since the busses didn't leave until 9 pm. We took the lightweight rail line to the bus station to buy tickets.
Turkey is way different than the rest of the middle east. While we were riding along the rail line it felt like we were somewhere in post soviet eastern europe. I've never been to post soviet eastern europe, so take that for what it's worth, but it was december, and we were on a really old train, riding through industrial areas and lots of concrete housing and stuff. It was pretty cool.
After we figured out our busses and stuff, we still had a while, so we headed into Sultanhamet; which is the main historical/tourist area of Istanbul, Aya sofia and blue mosque and all that (this is where Turkey makes sense as part of the middle east, the whole 'bridge between two continents and culture phenomena for you). We came back here after our trip to cappadocia, so i can't really remember what we did at each time, but I don't think we went into aya sofia or the blue mosque this time. We just sort of walked around and then sat down by the water for a little bit. It was cool because it was cold and wet and I felt like a real traveller.
After that we ended up back at the bus station, again really early, so I listened to NPR about Bill Clinton (fresh air courtesy of Mira). The bus ride out was pretty good, the bus was mostly empty and we actually got some sleep. We got to a station in Evshehir I think (something like that) and had to transfer at about 6 am and arrived in gerome around 7:30. We found the hostel that we had picked out, The Flinestone Hostel, checked in, had some breakfast and planned out our 2 days.
Gerome is a sweet little town. It's clearly all about tourism, but it didn't really bother me, because it's about the hiker, young people and old retired people who are actually cool and travel for the right reasons tourism. As opposed to boring ritzy rich people ad flashy tourism. Kinda like Hoa's place from Da Nang/Hoi An, this is the place where you meet the people and do the things that I want to traveling. Also, no one was there while we were for some reason.
It's a pretty tiny little town with a canal (but no water) running down the middle. It's in a valley and surrounded by the trademark Cappadocia rock formations. Above the town is Uvshivir (again, memory is leading to creative spelling here) which is a cool little mountain top place that reminded me of Weathertop (lord of the rings). But we didn't go there until the next day. Our first day we went to the open air museum. Which was a bunch of caves with really really old christian paintings and mural and artwork and stuff in them. Like 12th century cave people old. It was kinda cool, but kinda eh.
Then we continued up the hill out of town (my mental west, though I'm not sure what it really was) to hike down the rose/red valley. This hike was so cool. And I'm going to take a break now and come back and finish this later because I want to be able to do it justice, and I can feel myself getting tied of blogging.
[Edit] (7.2.2011)
1) It is now July 2011, I graduated, and this blog post is still not finished. I will hopefully do that now, drawing liberally upon an email I wrote to William Dean (frisbee freshman) a couple weeks ago, he's going to Turkey this summer.
So our hike is the rose/red valley was just down through a valley, but it was incredible, kind of a hybrid valley canyon with sandstone pires and walls all over the place, and at times a stream running through the bottom. Tunnels through sandstone that you could drive cars though, caves all over the place, that had various levels of evidence of human habitation, and then sweet fairytale esque forested areas. Awesome. We wandered our way down the valley and several times scampered up the sides and explored sandstone pires and the view. There were also just random pumpkin (I think) patches all around and some cave houses with glass windows and modern stuff, but it was super unclear if people were living there. At the end of the valley we found our way into another little town wandered through it to the huge sandstone pire natural museum thing and wandered around here for a bit. At this point we were hungry and getting cold, so we started back. Eventually we got a ride ( I think we paid for this one). The next day we clambered up and out of the gerome valley, probably not on the trail we thought we were to Uvshihir, which is the bit more ritsy tourist destination in Cappadocia from what I can tell, but it also has an awesome sandstone castle. This is the thing that reminded me of weathertop. We spent a lot of time exploring this, and watching an old man herd sheep on the hill. He was just yelling at them and hitting them with a stick and throwing clods of dirt at them to get them to do what he wanted. And he was probably about 65 and definitely fit the mold of "crotchety old man." This was definitely one of those times where you struggle to understand what it would be like to live your whole life in the places that we were visiting for 1-2 days, even though you had an example right in front of you.
Also, the view from here was incredible. Beyond my powers of description.
After spending about an hour and a half wandering around this tower, we found our way back down and realized that we hadn't really been in the real tower, which you had to pay to go into an explore. We decided that that was pretty dumb since we had just had a blast in this other side tower, so we left. We wandered down the next valley over.
My mental picture here is clear as day, though I realize it's not super clear to people reading it, so I'll try to describe. Uvshihir is up on a hill, probably about 1000 feet above Gerome, which is in one little valley. At this point we wandered down the valley to the left. The ridge connecting them had a road on top of it, and wasn't an incredibly divisive ridge, it sloped down as you went 'south' (again mental sense of direction away from Uvshihir) eventually these valley's disappear as the ridge dividing them disappears and everything opens up into a kind of plane.
So we walked down this valley until we got to the point where the ridge ended, and then started walking along a road 'west' so we could then come back up the 'Gerome' valley. We ended up getting a ride again, which was good because we were tired. Some teenager was driving a tractor pulling a huge trailer (think hay-bale ride's at halloween) and drove us back to Gerome for free. Awesome. Then chilled on a bench, ate dinner, checked out of the hotel, and sat at the bus station listening to another NPR podcast from Mira about FDR and some huge fire out west that lead to the creation of the park service something until our bus left at midnight. This bus ride was terrible. We were right next to a heater, but it was cold so we were alternative being freezing and waking up sweating. The bus was also super crowded, and stopped several times (maybe the one out did to and we just slept through it) but we were also a bit worried because there was a group of kinda young sketchy looking kids who kept looking at us and talking so we were a bit worried we would get mugged or something. But nothing happened, just lots of dirty looks exchanged.
2) I'm really upset that this is panning out such that I will not be able to use a title that I had saved up the whole time I was in Jordan, so I'll note that here: "Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople"
We then arrived back in Istanbul. Days here are in absolutely no way divided in my mind. Except the last two. So at some over the 2-3 days that Nate and I were there together we saw Aya Sofia which was absolutely stunning from the inside. The outside was incredibly cool given my tastes as well, though perhaps not as "elegant" as something like the Taj Mahal. I thought it was really cool though.
We also saw the Blue Mosque, which was more a cultural experience than anything because it was full of people coming to pray in this very special mosque, and is was clearly a huge deal for many of them to be there, but we were allowed in, no questions.
Next was the royal palace, which has been turned into a museum. The complex was cool, but I have trouble with museums. They just suck all energy and make me fall asleep. There was some incredible stuff here though if they can prove it is what they say it was. Like Prophet Mohammed's sword, and pieces of his beard, and I think David's sword, and definitely Saladin the Great's sword.
I think that was day one. Day two we took a boat up the Bosphorus, which was pretty neat to see the city from the water. We stopped at the entrance to the Black Sea and wandered around a little town up there that had a castle that was cool. I've definitely seen pictures of some of my facebook 'friends' at this castle since I got back. We ate lunch up in this town as well before heading back on the ferry to Istanbul and discussing physics. Nate and I had incredibly weird and interesting conversations this whole semester, about how we would design houses money was no object, how we would raise our kids, and in this case, how if I became some sort of crazy physics brainiac (I'm really not sure how/why we even considered this a remote possibility at this point) Nate would come to me with absurd ideas for stuff to build and do and have me be his consultant on how to make it work. When we got back, we went to the market, which was cool. Lots of bartering, a really long conversation with one young shop owner who posed the question of why we were learning arabic. Nate responded (appropriately for both of us) "We're not really sure, we had really good reasons when we came here (Middle East) in September, but now we aren't so sure..."
That was day two, the next morning Nate had to leave to get his flight back to the states, so I had one more day in Istanbul by myself. I took another ferry up to some Island and wandered around. Not terribly exciting, but I saw some cows. Then ferry back to Istanbul, bought some presents I think, and left the next morning. Light rail to Istanbul airport, flight to Amman, taxi back to the host site, shower, quick goodbye's taxi back to the airport (this taxi driver wanted me to stuff him in my suitcase and bring him back to the US with me) and again, got to the airport unreasonably early, they wouldn't let me go through security, so I just had to sit there and listen to music, and read, which I was sick of because I had been traveling for 12 hours at this point. Flight to paris (this is Christmas Eve by now). France can't design a city so that I could get from their airport to the Eiffel tower and back in a 6.5 hour layover (lame) and charged absurd amounts of money for breakfast (also lame). Flight from Paris to DC (maybe?) then to Pittsburgh, where Patrick picked me up and we drove to Bama's house in NC.
So that journey was hostel in Instanbul --> light rail to airport --> flight Istanbul to Amman --> taxi to host fam. (pick up bags) --> taxi to Amman airport --> flight to paris --> flight to D.C. --> flight to Pittsburgh --> drive to NC.
Excellent.
Thus ended my semester in Jordan, and also the end of a cumulative 26 of 28 weeks in foreign countries from the end of my sophomore year until halfway through junior year. It pretty much changed my life, which is a huge cliche, but actually did in a concrete sense in that I was pretty sure that I wanted to become fluent in Arabic and go work for the state department during my sophomore year of college, and that totally changed because of these 6 months, not because I didn't enjoy my time abroad (obviously parts were rough, but overall, good) but mostly because I found a certain incompatibility between the speed of political processes, and my desire to do stuff, and get things done. I loved learning Arabic, but struggled to see how it was an effective use of my time because so many people there are far better english speakers than I will ever be an arabic speaker. I also had issues with the fact that I was coming over as an American, who had no good appreciation of what really mattered in this part of the world etc. and was studying how people like me spent most of the past 400 years telling people in this part of the world what to do. And messing it up. I was a 20 something kid building the skills to talk about stuff, and I wanted to be building skills that would allow me to help these people do something that they weren't already more equipped than myself to do. I.E. engineering a la Jackie Stenson/Mike from winthrop, or medicine or something like that.
Since that time I haven't left the U.S. I explored different stuff in school and working, and have started to become really interested in global health and economic development. And now I will once again put those interests to the test of really experiencing them, as I am almost certainly leaving for Uganda at the end of August to do more health/development related work. Hopefully all the details and logistics work out and I really get to go, but if you've come across this post and are interested, keep your eyes peeled for posts from Uganda in two months.
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