Turkey Revisited

The weather was not promising during the marshrutka ride between my village and Zugdidi a day before my trip to Trabzon.

I don't know if graduating from college magically made me spontaneous or if I was simply waiting to graduate college to be spontaneous, but my decision-making process has drastically changed in the past year and a half. In that time I've: bought round-trip tickets to Boston, a one-way ticket to London, a Eurail pass, a one-way ticket from Berlin to Tbilisi, bus tickets to/from Istanbul (and most of these were bought at random times). I also moved across the globe to a country I knew very little about and am currently speaking with a family in Sweden to be their au pair. I bought the ticket to London not knowing when I was coming back, I bought the tickets to Istanbul not being able to speak the language and not knowing if I'd have enough money, I bought the ticket from Berlin to Tbilisi just because I needed to make a decision at that moment about when I wanted my program to buy my ticket back to America. Basically, my new modus operandi appears to be: Do everything without knowing what's going to happen. Then again, it's given me some amazing trips so I'm not complaining!

At the beginning of March we had a Thursday and a Tuesday off, so most of my friends were taking the Friday and Monday off, making it a six day holiday and going to various foreign countries or far-off cities. I didn't have any plans to go anywhere, because I didn't think I had enough money for a big trip. That is, I didn't have any plans until three days before when I talked to my friend Pauli and he told me he was going to Trabzon. I loved Trabzon the first time around when I was only there for a few hours, so I figured I'd give it a good test and spend the weekend there.

I packed my bags and took a marshrutka to Zugdidi on Wednesday after school to go to a European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM) party that night, then I was off on Thursday mid-afternoon to Batumi. Pauli met me at the marshrutka station and we went to a cafe where we ran into a couple people from the newest group. Coincidentally, they were also planning on going to Trabzon that weekend, so we ended up increasing our numbers quite a bit. They had school the next day, since they're good workers, but Pauli and I left in the morning to take the earliest bus we could.

I'm making sure to get as many shots from moving vehicles, as a friend once had her photography professor tell her that was a silly thing to do and I personally think that's bull-crap, because half of my pictures are through windows and they're sometimes my best. This is the coast of Turkey from my bus window.

The drive was just as beautiful this time as the first time when I took it last November, and I was happy that our bus was relatively empty so I could sprawl across a couple seats to watch the coast fly by. The weather had cleared up so we had beautiful fluffy clouds spread across the sky and reflecting in the water as the sun rose higher over the mountains behind us.

I hadn't really given much thought to what we would be doing in Trabzon. We only had a day and a half, but wiki-travel told us to see the Hagia Sophia and we chose to do that on Saturday. Neither Pauli nor I had a map and we didn't know where we were when we were dropped off (man that's a lot of 'w' words), so we had to set off wandering. I used my amazing skills and internal map to get us to the main square where Sarah and I had wandered the last time, because that was where we needed to be not only for our hotel (which was not booked) but also to meet up with the others. Once we found the square and a hotel to drop our bags, we decided we needed lunch and a map. From there we could wander and get an idea of the city before our more intrepid city-hiking the next day. For the rest of the day we walked the city without having any sort of destination, except to see the pier for a little while.

We met up with Matt and Kelli at the main square once it started getting dark, with a little help from the Internet Bench which was the only place we could get a wireless signal for some reason and was literally just a bench at the convergence of two pedestrian walkways. Unfortunately, we managed to lose Peter, the fifth traveling companion in the group. He had taken a bus right after Matt and Kelli's but none of us had phones that worked in Turkey so we'd been relying on e-mail/facebook which we accessed via Pauli's phone and the Internet Bench. Complicated, but it worked for the most part. We never did find Peter that night, though we wandered around the area we thought he'd be dropped off, asked in a couple travel agencies if he had come through and waited outside McDonald's (the most obvious meet-up, due to those well-known golden arches). At some point we gave up and went back to the hotel to crash.

Taken from a random bridge on our walk through Trabzon Friday afternoon. The cities along the coast of Turkey all seem to be designed this way. They wanted access to the coast, but the mountains are right there, so they simply built up the mountains.

The next morning we got up and went to McDonalds, hoping to meet up with Peter. Pauli had sent an e-mail to him saying we'd meet him there at 9 AM. Kelli and I got coffee and we stood around chatting until Peter showed up with a new German friend leading the way. Apparently, Peter had run into a group of Uni students who were studying abroad in Trabzon and spoke English and they had invited him back to their dorm and let him crash on their couch, use their internet and then help him find us the next morning. It's times like that when I realize just how amazing people can be. Once we were all together we made a plan to walk the city. We'd spread out our map that morning and marked the places we wanted to see, so we set off from McDonalds. My Creative Writing teachers always griped at me to, "show, don't tell," but I think they had in mind vivid descriptions rather than photos. Oh, well. This is Trabzon:

One of the first things we did was walk to the coast. It was great timing, because the sun was still rising over the water.

There will always be graffiti. We were walking through some back alleys to get to the fortress when I took this.

The fortress turned out to just be a hunk of wall with a flag from the local soccer team hanging on the front. That kind of ruined the feeling of age and history, but it was still cool.

Hagia Sophia of Trabzon. Not as large and impressive as the one in Istanbul, but it was set on a hill with an absolutely incredible view.

Walking through the Hagia Sophia to get to the view on the other side. I took more pictures inside, but frescoes aren't as exciting to me as sea coasts.

Like I said, I really just prefer the view to the frescoes. Why spend your days inside when you have this to look at?

Picnic lunch on the beach. Fresh bread, cheese, sausage, fresh oranges and apples, jelly, water and, of course, juice.

On our way to get baklava, walking on a bridge over a massive park.

I love mosques.

I got a little carried away with pictures in this one, I'll admit to that. But it's difficult to pick and choose these days. Some of the pictures I've taken in Georgia and Turkey have been the best I've ever taken. I have never been so glad to have a camera.

Those pictures pretty much sum up our Saturday in Trabzon. There was a lot more wandering of side streets, some wandering in and out of malls, some shopping, some kebab eating and some bookstore browsing, but most of that was after it got dark and I stopped taking pictures because I was too busy walking. We also ate more baklava than I thought humanly possible.

We walked the entire way and by the end of the day my feet felt like they were going to fall off. Luckily, that night we had a Juice Party. One thing about Georgia is that juice is incredibly expensive (well, for Georgia it's expensive). You can buy a 2 liter of beer for the same price as 500 ml of orange juice. For me, that's deadly. I can drink a gallon of orange juice in two days and it would only take that long because I would stop drinking to sleep. Turkey, however, has much cheaper juice. Over the course of our two and a half day trip to Trabzon, I believe I drank four 500 ml cartons of juice: sour cherry, peach, orange and grape. That doesn't include the 'mixed drinks' I had at our Juice Party. A Juice Party, if you hadn't guessed by now, just consists of buying as many types of juice as you can and drinking them with snacks on the side. That is my kind of party.

You would think by the sheer about of writing I have done about Turkey that I have spent more time there than Georgia. (Coincidentally, at this point I kind of wish I had spent more time in Turkey than Georgia, but that is another story altogether.) The reason, I think, for all the Turkey posts is that it is a vacation for me and much more interesting than daily life. I have gotten so used to my life in the village that it doesn't seem worth it to write about sitting by the wood stove eating or walking to school or hanging my clothes to dry or not having water/power. I don't like to complain on this blog, so there hasn't been much to say about village life. I will, however, have an entry about my host brother's birthday, simply because of the cakes.