Let’s see, if this is Monday this must be Selcuk. Salihli was not really a tourist town. They had one site several miles away. So the accommodations were not very good. There were one low-end place and two middle to high-end hotels. Selcuk seems to have a lot of hotels and much more competition and as a result it is a lot easier to get a comfortable room.

The one thing that seems to be a universal problem is that the covers do not really cover the bed. A little tossing in the night and your legs or arms are uncovered. The other problem in many places is that you cannot sit straight on the toilet. It is too close to the wall or the sink or the cutoff for the bidet so you have to sit at an angle. These are all minor inconveniences.

Selcuk is set in a hilly region. Mary Lynne asked someone yesterday the name of these mountains. Turkey has mountains and they are name. This is just a hilly region and there is no name for the hills, they are too insignificant. It is interesting, but none of the people want to be in the European Union. The people I have talked to are all relatively pleased that the country was rejected. They think that the country has resources that have not been tapped yet and the do not want to give them up to the Europeans. They think that the country can become rich if it stays on its own.

The film Prince of Darkness was about alternate interpretations of Christianity and it talked about a mystical “Brotherhood of Sleep” who knew the true purpose of Christianity to fight an evil force. I wonder if the inspiration came from the local Grotto of the Seven Sleepers. The legend says that agents of the Emperor Decius, trying to suppress Christianity pursued seven Christian boys. The boys hid in a cave where they could not be retrieved. The pursuers could not get the boys so the cave was sealed so the boys could not dig their way out. Two centuries passed. One day there was an earthquake and the wall blocking the cave crumbled. The seven youths arose from a sleep and walked to town to find their friends and food. Instead they found the town was now Christian, but all their friends were long dead. They lived out the rest of their lives with these strangers and when they died they were buried in the cave. This could also be the inspiration for Rip Van Winkle.

We hear the people just outside the door going to breakfast. They sound Australian. It is funny how few Americans we see here. I guess it makes sense that we would see a lot of Australians and New Zealanders, but I would have expected to see a slightly higher proportion of Americans. We ran into one set of Canadians (whom I consider to be “Americans” coming as they do from North America, though they don’t use that term to apply to themselves) but I don’t think we have run into many other travelers from the US. At least none long enough to talk to for long.

We have to ask at the desk if there is a bus to the ruins at Ephesus.

We go up to breakfast. Everywhere Turkish breakfast seems much the same. It is bread, hardboiled egg, tomato, jelly, honey, butter, cheese, and in this case cheese. I am eating it leisurely and the owner comes to our table. You have less than five minutes before your ride leaves. Okay. I have a ride? Well they did say something quickly about a shuttle to the ruins. I had thought it was an option. Suddenly I have a ride leaving in minutes. Evelyn says to send them on, she cannot possibly be ready in five minutes. “Well, maybe we give you a little more time.” I have a ride? Well, I am ready to go in the five minutes and it takes Evelyn a little longer but we are the in the lobby and there is a woman who will take us to the ruins. “We must hurry because there will be crowds at the ruins.” It is just us and the Sammons. So we pile into the van and in a few minutes we are at Ephesus.

“We pick you up in two hours and take you to my carpet shop. I am married to cousin of owner of your hotel. You don’t have to buy. You buy, we smile. You don’t buy. We smile.” So that’s it. As far as I have been able to tell, since Turkey was rejected from the European Union, the government would like better economic relations with the United State. The individual Turk has his own desires. He would like that Mark and Evelyn Leeper would come and visit his carpet shop. Right now the economic plans are on hold and the country is working full time to get Mark and Evelyn Leeper into carpet shops. Turkey has more carpet salesmen than the US has lawyers but otherwise the two professions have the same standard of ethics. In the US lawyers actually have to chase ambulances while in Turkey carpet salesmen just lay in wait under the nearest rock for a tourist to come by.

Pat and Mary Lynne take over this delicate negotiation. “But we don’t know how long we want to be at Ephesus.” “That is Okay, two hours is plenty.” “We want to go at our own pace.” “Then we cannot know when to pick you up.” “We don’t want to be picked up, and we don’t want to go to a carpet shop.” “Will you take my card if you change your mind?” I take the card.

A street boy is selling books and maps of Ephesus. He wants a million for a map, I offer 500,000TL. I get the map. On the way in we see at the admission box the same map is selling for 750,000TL.

What is Ephesus? It is the best-preserved Roman Empire city in the world. If you want to know what life was like in the time of the Roman Empire, this is the place. It recovered from an attack by Cimmerians in the 7th century BC to become prosperous in the 6th Century. It was ruled by the Lydians and the Persians. Alexander captured the city with no resistance but when he died the city went to Lysimachos. He brought the city to new artistic heights. Rome later ruled Ephesus but it was attacked and destroyed by the Goths in 262 AD.

Our first stop is at the theater. It was built in the third century BC. It held 24,000. It was built in the shape of a huge parabolic reflector. The structure is good for the view and better for the acoustics. It was used for plays and for more violent entertainment like gladiatorial fights and wild animal fighting. We first sit up in the peanut gallery but also stand on the stage. Voices really carry to the audience and back. After a while we move on. We were wondering however how they convince a slave to die on stage. They used to really kill a slave for realism.

The next biggee was the Library of Celsus, built 117-120 AD. It is a big two-story affair with a facade with two layers of pillars. Across the street from the library was a building identified in all sources as a bordello. On it are signs saying it was falsely identified as a bordello, but was really just a fancy house with a lot of rooms. You can believe whom you wish. Being right across the street from the library may have led to interesting dilemmas as to which way to for knowledge.

The alleged bordello was where excavators found a small statue of Priapos, a little man with an enormous phallus. A little further on there was the Latrina. There are no dividers between the seats and commoners and Emperors used it alike, though presumably the Emperor on the go could go to the head of the line for immediate seating.

The academic baths feature rooms to heat up and cool off after baths: a tepiariam, a calidarium, and a frigidariam. Most of the third floor has disappeared, but the lower floors could be identified. By this point the other tour groups were beginning to be a pain.

We walked further ending up going through a field where we saw a particularly well-armored thistle. Mary Lynne looked at it and dubbed it a triffid. Evelyn and I looked at each other. “She knows about triffids.” A triffid is a particularly nasty carnivorous plant from a novel by John Wyndham. One of my supervisors at one point asked me what the novel I was reading The Day of the Triffids was about. I stupidly said it was about man-eating plants and she sort of gave me a sour look. But actually that is not really what it is about. It is about societies and what makes them work and fail. A huge disaster leaves everybody but a handful of people on earth blind. Civilization immediately falls apart and small societies have to reform from start. Round 1 is whether your society falls apart of its own weight. Some do, some don’t. Societies that are entirely unselfish and altruistic fail, for example. Round 2 is whether your society can survive conflicts with other societies. Then if you have survived the first two rounds the question becomes can you survive really nasty disasters out there, worse than people. That is really where triffids come in. It is a really good novel that was the basis for a very mediocre film version and a very good BBC television version.

The thing to do if you have to push past a group is you say “Pardon,” in French with a French accent. If the group is French they know you are not, but they will like you because you are at least speaking their language. If they are German they do not forgive you, but at least they blame the French.

Toward the end of the visit is another theater, this one was at one time covered and had a capacity of about 1500 people. This one was used for concerts and for meetings. We were sitting in the theater when it started to rain. Evelyn and I whipped umbrellas out of our photovests. Mary Lynne was impressed. “Where did you hide those umbrellas?” I didn’t tell her my canteen was in the same pocket. My vest carries a water bottle, an umbrella, field glasses, a camera, a walkie-talkie, spare batteries for my camera and palmtop, earplugs, notepads, a palmtop and the Lonely Planet guide, and I can stash my jacket in the back pocket. I may be missing something. But it all comfortably fits on me. I feel like Batman.

Well, from there we start walking back to town hoping to see the Cave of the Seven Sleepers and the Temple of Artemis along the way. It is a long walk in what becomes the hot sun. If that were not parching enough, I am still on antihistamine. Very quickly my mouth goes dry. When I take a drink of water it feels like pudding. Mary Lynne is shorter than we are but Pat is over six feet with longer legs. He sets the pace. Often he is a fair distance in front of the rest of us. He says he can’t walk any slower.

We find the cave of the Seven Sleepers eventually. We cannot get inside as there is a grate blocking the way. We climbed up above the cave and looked down at it. People had written prayers on cloth and tied them around the grating above. On the way down we got some cold water. It was a bit overpriced at 250,000TL/1.5 Liter but it was good cold.

It was an even longer walk to the Temple of Artemis. The temple did not look its best today. In fact it had not looked very good since it was burnt down in 356 BC by headline-hound Herostratos. He wanted to be famous and he was like the guy who killed John Lennon. This was once one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It is lost to us in large part because it was disassembled by Christians who were building the local St. John Basillica. There appears to be a belief that of you are stealing for your religion it is really okay. A lot of our history has been lost by plunderers trying to please their gods.

A tout selling flutes asked me what country I was from. It is always a mistake to tell since they have a spiel in your language, whatever it might be. I looked at him strangely when he asked in different languages. I finally decided to tell him. “Magyar Repooblic. Hongary.” Mary Lynne said smiling “Buda-Pesh.” There was a little too much grinning and he knew we were lying. Well, lying is a strong word. My mother’s mother was born in Buda-Pesh. Her father was born in Baja. That is Baja, Hungary. But the flute salesman knew no Hungarian.

We continued our walk to town. It was not a lot further beyond the temple. We wanted to go to the museum, but lunch came first. I had Haydari and Octopus Salad. I mean, where else can you get octopus salad? Evelyn had Kofte. We continued on to the Museum of Ephesus. This is a museum to display the are found at Ephesus, as excavations are continuing. The exhibits include statues found at the site. Among the ones more familiar was Eros on a Dolphin. This motif could be familiar to the reader for the Alan Ladd, Sophia Loren film Boy on a Dolphin. Well, they couldn’t call the film Eros on a Dolphin, now could they? There is also the Priapos with the large phallus. There are various carved heads. There is an Ethnographic Section with exhibits of life in the country. There are farm implements, there is a barbershop, that sort of thing. There is the head and arm from an emperor statue seven meters high. It is truly of impressive scale.

We got some small gifts for people at the museum. Outside we sat around waiting for one person or another. A shoeshine boy came up to me. The material of my shoes is leather, but not with the usual finish and I would not trust a shoeshine on the street. The boy asked me where I was from, again I was from the Magyar Republic. He wanted to give me a free sample of what he could do for my shoes on the top of one shoe. Of course once I let him do that the shoes would never look right unless he did this to the whole of both shoes, perhaps not even then if he did not know what he was doing. This struck me as a particularly bad idea. I got up walked away from him. After all there is little point in getting these shoes polished if tomorrow they would just look dusty again.

The rest of the day does not bear a lot of description. It was farbling over what we would do the next day, what Pat and Mary Lynne would do, etc. We had different ways to do various sites to choose from. From about 6pm on we were in our room writing.

I finished writing about 10pm and read some article I had brought and saved on my palmtop.

The door latch is really two large wooden bolts, either or both of which can be drawn from the inside. One of them has a rod sticking through a slit in the door so it can be manipulated from either side of the door. On the outside if you lock the door using this rod it will be far enough to one side that you can drop a vertical retaining bar through two screw eyes, holding the bolt in the locked position. The retaining bar is widened at the top so it does not fall all the way through the screw eyes. It also has a hole through it near the bottom on which you then put a padlock. Et voila, your door is locked from the outside. It has all the standard capabilities of a door lock but it is implemented in an entirely different way. Sort of low-tech.

The toilet has a problem. Toilets are the highest technology objects that come in any room you rent and are almost always the first thing to break. In this case when you pull the chain it has a tendency to flush but then go into an unstable state. It ends up squirting water for four or five seconds, then stopping for two or three, then starting again, repeatedly. It drives you crazy. The other problem is true all over Turkey. Toilet paper falls apart in use. I won’t go into detail, but it is a real pain.

Breakfast is standard except the olives are incredibly salty. Then we have a walk to the travel agent with the Sammons. There were six people signed up for the tour. It was the Sammons, a nice New Zealand couple, and us. That should keep it nice and small. Right. The mini-bus takes the six of us to a pickup point. I ask the New Zealand couple what they do. When they finish traveling they will go to England and will work. Their field is Maths and Statistics. Oops. Wrong thing to tell me. Shall I let them enjoy their day or should I tell them about the function I discovered and other math I like to play with? I tell them that Evelyn and I were trained in math but I show them some mercy and do not show them my work.

We get on a larger bus and go to more stops. There are more and more people who will be on this trip. The majority are hung-over New Zealanders who are late for the bus. They are 20-somethings who it turns out want to shop. This day is not going well. Then the capper. I know that on this trip I sound like I have one ailment after another. But this really is the capper, I hope. Back in 1981 I had a kidney stone. In fact, the cancelled vacation that year was why we were able to do China in 1982. Once since that time I had a pulled muscle and it was right over the kidney. And it felt almost the same. Well, I got that self-same pain a third time. Turkey is not a place I want to get a kidney stone. Medicine is supposedly good in Turkey if you go to a hospital, but can you guess how I feel about that prospect? The odds are against something serious happening to you medically when you travel to very different countries, but there always is the risk and you can be a big loser. If this was serious having it happen while I travel made it doubly serious. I found myself sweating all over my body.

At about 10am we got to the Pigeon Valley. The most remarkable thing about it was that it had no pigeons (for the moment) and it wasn’t a valley. It was really a crevice with holes dug into it for the express purpose of attracting pigeons. That makes it a sort of local cheap fertilizer factory. In this chicken shit existence the local farmers put pigeon shit on their crops. Our guide, whom you could never tell if what he was saying was serious or not, was telling us in his more serious moments that Cappadocia means “place of beautiful horses.” He then let us loose to take pictures pretty much as long as we would like. Most of the people on our tour went into buying frenzy at the stands. All was not well. Our next stop was at Derinkuyu a sort of underground city dug into the stone. It goes down eight layers or something like 55 meters. He asked us several times if we were claustrophobic. And with good reason. This is a real tough place to get out of in a hurry. It is whole caverns dug into the stonework. They were sort of hiding places dug for living two or three days at a lime when enemies were near back in the time of the Byzantine. If you are coming for a visit, I suggest a bringing a hardhat. I hit my head on the ceilings many time, often in rapid succession. I discovered the secret was to keep my hands on my kneecaps. This was not comfortable, but it cut by 90% the number of head-bangs I got. My mind was still mostly on other pain and my possible kidney stone. When we got out it was raining to make matters worse. It took a while to leave as two of the Kiwi women had gone off shopping.

We stopped to take pictures of a nice volcano view. The volcanoes were the reason for the interesting geology. There were a couple of nice volcanic cones. They looked almost like Mt. Fuji. By this point the rain had stopped at least and it was only cloudy.

About 12:45 we get to Ihlara Village over what looks like a great canyon. There is a seemingly endless stairway down the side of the canyon that passes a Byzantine church with mostly worn-away frescoes. From here we were told it is a simple walk of about an hour along the valley floor. Now it is sunny again.

Parts of this so-called “simple walk” were through small holes in rocks, climbing over big rocks. I cracked my knee on a rock. Great. I needed this on top of the pain in my back? My back? What happened to the pain in my back? My back felt just fine. It either got a lot better or endorphins were just masking that pain. But suddenly this walk sounded like a much better idea.

I didn’t think that this walk was very well managed. The group kept getting strung out going through the obstacles. Eventually they pulled us all together in a sort of clearing with rocks to sit on. It was beautiful. I was sort of grooving on the fact that my back had stopped hurting. Eventually we got to our bus and headed out.

The next place we stopped was to shoot at a distance some Star-Wars-looking scenery. One reason this place looked like something out of Star Wars is that it was. Scenes like when R2D2 is captured by Jawas were filmed against the sandy backgrounds of this area. Surprisingly the film did not use some of the more unearthly topography. After what the tour guide called a Japanese break. That was for taking pictures.

By this time it was about 2:30 and we stopped for lunch at a local restaurant. We are all sitting at a long table. I am sitting next to the woman mathematician. I ask her if she does her own mathematics. I show her some of what I had done with the function I discovered and some of homeomorphic equivalents of means. Well, at least it took only a few minutes. For my beverage I ordered Cappy Cherry. The waiter was not sure if it was available. But Evelyn looked at his list of beverages and found it. Unfortunately it came in a tiny bottle. Pat Sammon saw me drinking it and asked for a bottle for himself. He also discovered he liked it a lot.

The guide gave descriptions of the dishes. The problem was the descriptions did not jive with what waiters called dishes. And there were confused requests for drinks. Actually I was not very hungry and ate only about half my meal, in spite of the fact they had some excellent fried fish. After dinner the staff brings out musical instruments. A few of the New Zealanders dance. The rest of us sit embarrassed or bored.

This first stop after lunch is the Ag`ziarahan Caravansary. This was a stop on the Silk Road. Traders from the East brought silks and spices in caravans to these stops and traded with local merchants and traders. The guide’s description is superficial.

Next we go to Avanos for a pottery demonstration. A fellow on the potters’ wheel makes a vase and top forming and reforming the clay. We are each given unpleasant tea. Mine is apple, but it is just sour. After the vase is complete one of the Kiwis is given a chance to form something on the wheel. Then our host announces, now is the time to shop. I tag along as Evelyn looks a little bit, but we both are unwilling to pay their prices and we go outside to talk to the New Zealand mathematicians. Pat did not go in the first place because he refuses what is obviously a sales pitch.

Our last stop is the Valley of the Fairy Chimneys or at least one such valley as there are several. It is a valley punctuated with many volcanic chimneys, though few have been unspoiled by being turned into churches or by having the churches defaced by Moslems who believe that the Christian decorations have been destroyed by Moslem zealots. You can climb up into homes dug in the chimneys and see church function rooms. I wanted our guide to tell us how the chimneys were formed, but he was in the back of the bus on the way back talking to the Kiwis. The music the bus driver put on can best be described as “Turkish Salsa.” As we got off the bus the guide asked us if we had forgotten something on the bus, like our memories. I think he was actually suggesting we had forgotten to tip him. Actually the day was okay but usually worked better the less the guide was involved.

Well, this was Mother’s Day. I rather think that my mother had never received a phone call from Central Turkey. The Sammons also wanted to call their family so we went over to the PTT office to call home. This was now past 7:30 and the office was closed. There were, however, several phones outside, and we tried to make a call from them. We tried several different ways with home calling cards and with local calling cards. Eventually we decided that it was not to be.

We made a stop at the grocery. I picked up a new canteen sized bottle of water, half a liter; a stock bottle, one and a half liters; and two cans of Cappy Cherry for the room. Pat got the same except the half liter bottle. But he liked the cherry drink and got two cans for himself.

Then it was the long, hard climb up to our room. This was something we had not taken into account when we got the room. It is a real pain just climbing up from the center of town to get to the hotel and to get from the lobby level to our room is no picnic either. We got to the room to find out that this is the kind of place where you rent the room and then only get clean towels. Nothing was done for the bed. Well we can live with that. Actually what is a pain is that the only switch for the only light for the main part of the room is over by the door. That means that you have to get up and walk over to the front door when you want to go to sleep. By the time you get back, who knows if you are still sleepy.

The BBC short-wave band was running a documentary on the founding of Israel and its side of the story since this is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Israel and the Brits are being made the villain in a lot of retellings. The BBC is only slightly more favorable to the British. Everybody agrees that they made conflicting promises to the Arabs and to the Jews as to who would own Palestine. They asked for compromise and the Jews were willing to compromise on the offer. Better half of Palestine than none at all. The Arabs wanted it all. Both had lived in the area reasonably peacefully together for many centuries but the Arabs did not want to be told that part was not theirs. The Jews were anxious for what they could get and were willing to concentrate their people in half of the territory. In the end Britain found that it could not appease both sides. They could not win or break even. All they could do was get out of the game. They announced that they were going to pull out of the area and let the newly formed United Nations make the same decision they had been asked to make. The UN voted for partition. Israel claims that it tried to get the Arabs to stay; the Arabs claim they were forced out. (As I understand it the evidence seems to be that both are telling the truth on this one. In the chaos of fighting a war in the first hours of its existence Israel could not implement a completely uniform policy. In some areas Arabs were asked to stay but did not want to live in a Jewish state. In others Arabs who would have stayed were told to leave.)

The short-wave reception has been extremely fringey and I had to hold my hand on the short-wave to hear the half-hour BBC broadcast. It was now 8:30. I did not make it until 9. At 11 Evelyn started going to bed. I woke up. I suggested because I was now awake we might sleep one night with the light on so if I woke up and could not get back to sleep I would not wake her up. She readily agreed. I was up in the night and got a little more writing done.