Manual

We’re learning first gear today. A little gas and less clutch. We’re driving from the apartment building where we’ve been boxed in for six months. Fourteen floors, not counting the first one. No balconies. Just a creamy red monolith where there’s a living room-kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom that we call home.

First gear is a gear we’ll come back to, to contend with its complexities.

In second we watch the traffic rules we knew well back home get thrown out the window like a beer can from a “sad” man. Muslims only drink when they’re sad, a coworker told us. In the hills, on the dirt roads outside the city, there’s evidence of a lot of sadness. The hills are alive with the sound of cars parked, Turkish music pumping, cigarettes being drawn from, and older gentlemen resting their bottles on the trunk of the car having a gran— sad ol’ time.

Our progress with third gear is halted by, for lack of a better term, a Turkish round-about. It’s the type you’d see in Britain, but with a traffic light at each of the roads coming into the round-about and at each of the quarter turns around the thing. While it’s easy to criticize these things of being symptomatic of the lack of logic applied to civil engineering, doing so feels hypocritical. Who am I to say anything? Doesn’t my life have about as many traffic lights that flicker on and off at inopportune times at each indecisive juncture?

Are we staying another year here? Maybe. No. Probably not. Yes, but only in the eyes of those who are pumping us for an answer so that they can make a prediction about next year’s numbers and so that we can have a safety net.

Before our drive yesterday, I blamed my wife for our indecision. Graceful as she is, when my tantrum was over, she said that she thinks that I see elements of myself in her and that she’s a scapegoat for my own frustrations.

We’re both tall. We both have blue eyes. Sort of. We both take about a thousand invisible trips around the block when we’re deciding whether or not we should even take one.

In fourth gear we’ve made some progress. Our speed is up. On the highway it’s easier to live in a foreign country. You can pretend you have a place to go. You get just as many stares as you would on any highway anywhere in the world during that moment of passing. It’s relaxing. Containing.

In fifth gear, there is an illusion of flying. Transcendence. The moments in the day when you could make this life work for as long as you want. This feeling comes on the walk back to the office after a good class. It comes on Saturday when you’re returning home from a day trip with friends. It comes when the sun’s red light rests on the edge of the horizon, and you’re not worried about what’s to come.

You’re never in fifth for long. Realities disguised as those well-lit round-abouts are bound to appear. The man carrying sticks on his back steps into the highway. The dog trotting in the shoulder gets something thrown at it by a car going eighty.

Reverse is the same as first gear but backwards. Just like they told you in your driver’s ed., put your right hand on the back of the passenger seat, look over your shoulder, and then give it a little gas as you let off the clutch. Stall. Don’t worry. There’s only about fifty cars headed for you, waiting, expecting, glaring. They want you to get your shit together and get out of the way.

I wonder about my sense of objectivity. As a traveler, do I ever see the world for what it is? Or, is it the local people who see my wife and me wander around like lost chickens; is it them who get the most candid glimpse into our beings? And is that why the stares are uncomfortable and why we are embarrassed to accept the help that is sometimes offered us? We by nature of our language, our skin tones, our hair colors, our values, our way of reasoning are inadaptable. Especially during this first year. Especially at first.

Aynı Tas Aynı Hamam

"Aynı tas, aynı hamam" is a Turkish idiom that means "same bucket, same bath." Its English counter-parts are "Same old, same old" and "Same shit, different day. This idiom was taught to me by my officemate Salim.

Salim has also told me stories about visiting hamams on special occasions, like for bachelor's parties and coworker parties. He told me two particularly strange and funny stories--one that involved him scrubbing our former director's back while the director scrubbed a new hire's back. Apparently, the former director made a joke, saying he was "investing in the future of the program."

Another story involved the delivery of çig köfte into the hamam. Çig Köfte is a Turkish food that is made from bulgur, tomato paste, and spices. The köfteci (köfte-person) squeezes the tomato-y bulgur into ergonomic nuggets that are complete with ridges from where the bulgur began to come out between köfteci's fingers. He then drops it on your plate. You eat this stuff raw by wrapping it in iceberg lettuce leafs or a lavaş (tortilla). If you want, you can squeeze some lemon on it and put some pomegranate sauce on it as well. I thought it was disgusting at first because I couldn't stop thinking about how the bulgur had tried to worm its way out between some dude's fingers before it got to my plate. But once I got over that, I realized that it's actually pretty tasty.

However, it gets disgusting once again when you imagine this stuff being consumed at temperatures above ninety degrees by a group of really sweaty, nearly-naked men, sitting on a hot marble slab while people are getting lathered and scrubbed nearby. You can just imagine how the çig köfte got warm, how it's shape didn't hold up, and how it began to crumble and drop onto the marble floor, hopefully to be carried off by the open Roman-esque channel drainage system. Ew.

Needless to say, when I was invited on a Friday afternoon, to join some coworkers for a trip to the Hamam after work, I said I wanted to go if for nothing else than to see where this boss-scrubbing and çig köfte eating had taken place.

Because I had just bought a car that was slightly bigger than everyone else's, one of the four other guys volunteered me to drive. In a normal situation, say on my home turf, this wouldn't be a problem. But everything's different here in Turkey, of course.

The five of us packed into the car, three of whom are good friends who act like a never-ending comedy show. One Turk, one American, and one Brit. Then there was me, and there was Paul, two of the newest coworkers.

So imagine driving stick-shift when you haven't done so for ten years, except for a week-long trip in Germany. And of course you're doing this in your new car that is less than five-hours old. Used, but new to you. And imagine you're driving during rush-hour in the waning dusk in downtown Kayseri with, like I said, a car-full of jokesters. Finally, imagine that no one in the car knows exactly where to go.

Jena looked at me before we left and told me to be careful with her car. I said "Of course." I violated that promise big-time.

In Turkey, there aren't really any rules to driving, except that you generally stop at red traffic lights. Getting to the hamam meant swirling through Turkish round-abouts (a topic that warrants its own blog post entirely), cutting between giant city busses (despite the fact that another coworker had told me to stay away from them at all costs), and shooting down streets that are just barely the width of your car while pedestrians and bikers and trying their best to psyche you out so that they can share some of the road as well. (In Turkey people on foot or on bike have no right of way, so it's actually dangerous when you try to give it to them because everyone gets confused.)

Somehow we found the damn hamam. While we were driving in circles searching for it, the Americans suggested that we just park and find it by walking. This idea was vetoed by Savaş, the Turk, because Turks have this intense belief that the cold will make you sick if you even think about going out in it, especially after you've been in a warm place like a bathhouse. They're also deathly afraid of drafts from things like slightly opened windows. This causes many conflicts in an office environment where some of the Americans prefer to let some fresh air into the office once in a while.

With remarkable luck, we found a parking spot that was about fifty feet from the hamam, and this distance was good enough to please Savaş.

From the sidewalk, we went down a narrow staircase and into a large domed room. There was the faint smell of cigarettes held by the humidity, and chairs with a seventies-color scheme lined the square shape of the room. Three guys were sitting there, wearing only towels, watching a soccer match. Two were eating çig köfte. While Savaş made arrangements for our bath, I inquired about whether this was the place where the çig köfte from Salim's story had been consumed. "No," Gareth, the Brit, told me. "It was in a hotter room."

When Savaş had finished, he led us up to a balcony. Along the wall were tiny changing chambers with ceilings that were about six-feet high. We put on these pieces of canvas-like fabric (similar to a sari), and headed down a marble tunnel to a room with slabs for scrubbing. From here we wove into another room with a huge heated marble slab. And from here we went into a sauna.

Once there we sat and sweated for a while, and then we went back into the hot marble slab room. Hot and cold water splashed into little basins. Perched on the faucets were metal bowls that you used for pouring the water over yourself.

We hung out there for a while, talking about things like shaving and how to get yourself clean when using a Turkish toilet (without toilet paper). Eventually, a fully clothed guy came in and asked whether or not we wanted anything. He offered water. We said yes. He offered other beverages. We said no. He offered çig köfte, and finally I understood that this was the place at last. Although it wasn't as hot as the sauna, I was still sweating like crazy. On the opposite edge of the hot marble slab two guys in their forties or fifties were scrubbing dead skin off one another with a glove-shaped wash cloth. Adding çig köfte to this situation would have been disgusting.

To make things just a bit stranger, when the server guy came back with our water, he also brought a plate of lemon slices and insisted on feeding them to us with his fingertips. "He's hoping for a big tip," Savaş said.

Since we had arranged professional scrubs, we each got scrubbed by workers, one after another. Paul went first, and someone in our group had the ingenious idea for us all to sit in the room, about three feet from him, to watch the scrubbing take place. I appreciated getting an idea of what would be done to me. I did not, however, appreciate seeing these bluish rolls of dead skin coming off his arms.

When it was my turn, I laid on the flat marble slab, with my head on a hot water bottle. The professional scrubber scrubbed me down. He would sort of slap me on the back when it was time to turn over. In order to scrub me nearly everywhere, he had taken off my sari and turned it into a roll. This covered my butt when needed and my front side.

We each opted for massage that followed the initial scrub, and it was more like a full-body shampooing at first. The soapy cloth he used felt like a jellyfish with steel-wool tentacles that swam across my back. Following this, he gave me a massage, and somehow knew to focus on my crazy tight quads and the golf course-like mounds of knots in my back. I groaned with pain when he jabbed his elbows into these spots. Some stupid bit of macho-ness had kicked in, and I didn't want to tell him to ease off.

Following our scrubs, it was time to wind down. We wandered back into the first room that we had seen, the one with the seventies chairs. There, we leaned forward while different worker guys rubbed cologne on our backs and our chests. I opted out of having them rub cologne all over my arms and face because eczema is my arch-nemesis. Then they used towels to wrap up our shoulders and heads in such a way that we all looked like kids in a nativity play. It was time for some pictures, which I have yet to receive.

Following the hamam, we went out for dinner where we ordered Adana kebabs and iskender, followed by künefe for dessert. The latter is deep fried hot cheese covered in pastry crumbs with cream and a sprinkle of pistachio-nut-dust on top. Delicious.

As we walked back to the car, Paul and I were a little ahead of the others. By then the haze and the magic was wearing off. We were full of food, and the heat of the hamam, that which we still held in our bodies, was dissipating into the night. I was thinking about the order in which I'd drop everyone off. Shops were closing down and everything was getting darker except for the bridal boutique that shown brightly at the corner where my car was parked. Paul looked at me then and said exactly what I wanted to hear: "I could really go for a beer."

We dropped the other three guys off, and when we got back to my place, we coincidently found Jena hanging out with Paul's girlfriend Cece. We cracked open a couple beers, and the girls forced us to tell them everything. "Details," they said, "more details. What the hell were you guys doing. You were gone for such a long time."

The Bizarreness Continues

It's been a long time since I've written.

Today I'm inspired.

Jena and I returned to school this afternoon to an onslaught of "Hayır olsun's" and "Güle güle kullanın's" from our coworkers. The phrases more or less mean "Congratulations" and "Use it well," though the second one has a literal translation of "Use it while laughing."

While we were gone from work for the afternoon, it seems, the news had spread that we had gone off to buy a car.

My officemate Salim said to me, "That was fast. You just started talking about getting a car two days ago." I agreed. I told him that Jena and I were having trouble following through with our plans. First, we wanted a new apartment, and although we looked at one at one point, we didn't like it and gave up our search soon thereafter. Our next half developed plan was to find out whether we could rent a car every other weekend for six months for a good price. After looking into that, we realized it wasn't particularly cost effective. Our most recent plan to spice up our rather dull lives--a dullness that set in quickly after we returned from a refreshing trip to Germany during our week off--was to buy a bunny. Technically we aren't allowed to have dogs and cats in our apartment, but we thought we could get away with a rodent. We debated this idea for at least a week, and even though we couldn't come up with a good exit plan for the bunny when we move, we still thought it would be a good idea. We made a list of things that we would need--a pen, a bunny rug, a litter box, hay, leafy vegetables. We sat there on the couch, waiting for one of us to make the first move to take the bus downtown to the pet shop. We stared at the list again. We decided, actually, maybe it wasn't a great idea.

A day after we had gone an a great day hike and to lunch with some friends, we decided that buying a car might be the way to go. While Jena was doing the dishes, I pointed out that we hadn't followed through with any of our life-improvement plans thus far. I suggested, "We need to be more strategic."

Jena said, "What does that mean?"

"We need to have concrete steps to follow and a deadline. I'm thinking the end of February. By the end of February we should have a car."

That was three days ago. Now we have a car.

If there's something Jena and I are good at, it's working ahead on projects that motivate us. You should have seen how early we completed assignments in graduate school.


Our car is dark red. It is a Hyundai, which I always considered a poor man's Honda. I think I developed this notion because we always had Honda's growing up, and the prices of Hyundais advertised on television were relatively low. In any case, I'm happy it's a Korean car because of it's potential longevity.

The thing about a car here in Turkey is that it's like driving a chunk of very, very slowly depreciating gold. We put a lot of money into it because used cars here aren't cheap they way they are in the US. But everyone you ask says that you can expect to sell it for nearly the same price that you bought it for. Some people say you might be able to get more. This sounds good, but it also makes me paranoid because my money has been converted into a big metal shape that could easily get smacked around in an accident. Banks are more secure parking lots. But in the end, I guess you have to live a little sometimes and take a risk.

I plan to go hiking this weekend. I don't care where we go, whether it's to Cappadocia or to one of the canyons around Talas. I'm just psyched to be able to get into a vehicle and get out past these apartment buildings quickly and efficiently, instead of doing it laboriously with a 45 minute walk.

My dad used to drive to trailheads to go running. On some level I never understood that. Why not run to the trailhead to get more exercise? As a runner, I know now how it feels to be wasting away on sidewalks and at intersections when the only place you want to be is in the mountains. Running is more than the sum of the exercise that you put in. It's a peaceful feeling of being alone in a setting that you enjoy.

The year of our new car is 2007. Jena pointed out that it's significantly newer than either of the cars that we had back in America. Mine a 1998 and her's a 2000. 2007. Was it a good year for cars?


In 2007, I drove my mom's white minivan back to college during the middle of our winter break. I drove through a snowstorm. When I got to my house in Colorado, I got snowed in and only braved the road once to pick up a friend at the airport. He bought me dinner and suggested that I get out of the house more.

During the second half of my senior year of college (2007), I used the car to drive to Classic literature readings at a professor's house. I drove to concerts in Denver. I eventually packed up everything and set up a bed in the back. My plan was to drive back home to Utah overnight. I would pull to the side of the road and sleep in the back when I got tired. I never got tired. (Well, actually, I did, but I didn't stop driving.)

Toward the end of senior year, when all of us were talking in uncertain tones about their future plans, I decided to throw my plan to move to Denver into the wind. I would live in my minivan instead. I dropped my things at home, worked for a month, and on the Fourth of July, I took off on a road trip that involved touring through the West, eating canned vegetables straight from the can (my vegetable-hating father donated these foodstuffs to my cause), staying overnight at rest areas where I could find free electricity for my computer and free light to read by, and a visit to a sparsely attended family reunion Nantucket where I wondered what the hell I was doing and why I had left my only means of escape, my car, on the mainland, twenty-five miles away.

It was during this time that I spoke to a friend and decided to move to Portland, Oregon as soon as possible.

Then, before the year ended, I decided to move from Portland, down to the sunnier climes of Arizona. I met up with my parents in Utah, and I happily volunteered to transport our family dog Walter to Arizona where he and I would live together in Flagstaff.

While driving through the winter barrenness of Utah, an hour or two or three south of Provo, I looked into the sky and saw a metallic object. I fixed my eyes on it as I drove. It remained stationary in the sky. Slowing from 75 miles per hour, I pulled over on the highway and stopped. I pushed past Walter who was copiloting my minivan, and when I looked into the sky again the object was gone.

I almost swore it was a UFO. Then I called my father. He said that it wasn't unusual for the military to potentially fly experimental aircraft over that part of the country. And besides, B2s can do crazy things like like practically hover in the sky. My UFO became a possible IFO. Not nearly as interesting.


So yes, 2007 was a good year for cars. It was a good year for my minivan, anyway. My minivan kept running until 2014 when I sold for 800 dollars to a solid guy in Flagstaff who promised that he'd try to keep it running until it reached three hundred thousand miles. Now that's a car. (It needed about twelve hundred dollars of repairs, but I think they guy actually did them.)

All of this has very little bearing, I realize, on my new car, but we will take it on new adventures. Our adventures may not be as reckless as running around the US from coast to coast while sleeping in the back (I want to keep my money in better shape than that). But I'll be happy if once in a while the car gets us out into the world where we can feel that 1950s sense of freedom, empowerment, and wind-blowing-in-your-hair mobility.

My Newest Song

I'm proud to present the song that I made for Jena for Christmas. Of all the songs I've made recently, I've spent the most time on this one, and I think it's the best one yet. There are musical references to Explosions in the Sky as they are one of my main sources of inspiration for this type of music along with El Ten Eleven, the new Pink Floyd album, Godspeed You Black Emperor, and Tokyo by the Books.

You can listen to the song here.

More Music

For Christmas, I made my family some songs. I want to share them here as well.
Song 1
Song 2
Song 3

Happy New Year

Hmm. It seems my last post detailed a trip to Cappadocia. This one will as well. In the words of Justyna, "I think this one was one of my favorite New Years celebration."

After three days of intense brainstorming about how to celebrate on New Year's Eve here in Kayseri, a place where there's not a whole lot going on to celebrate the beginning of the New Year, we finally decided to go to Ürgüp, a city in Cappadocia.

Right after work, five of us packed into a car--Paul, Cece, Justyna, Jena, and I--and headed to Cappadocia. In two other cars, a six other friends from work came along as well.

We cruised out to Ürgüp, which is more charming than Göreme in my opinion. There's a main square, and although it's very touristy, the buildings around the square create more of a small town feel than the small splatter of civilization that is Göreme. (This opinion was not shared by all of us, though. In truth, both Göreme and Ürgüp have their appealing attributes.)

We got a hotel for a reasonable price. It was half-cave, half-brick. The rooms had these pretty arched ceilings, and each room had a nice sitting area where we shared a few beers before heading out to find a place to eat.

Because our group was rather large, it was difficult to find a place that appeased everyone, but when we did, we had a nice Turkish dinner. A few people ordered Testi Kebab, which despite the hilarious name is an interesting dish. They bake meat and veggies inside a sealed clay pot. When it's served, it's brought to your table, and the pot is broken open with a knife.

With filled bellies, next we went looking for a place to ring in the New Year. Some of the members of the group were looking for a club-atmosphere. I was not among the people interested in this setting. As it turned out, I guess they gave up their hopes, and we wandered back to one of our hotels where half the group was staying. In the parking lot, we shared some beers and I danced to keep warm while we counted down the end of 2014.

As anti-climatic as it was, I found it splendid. From where we were were--up on a hill--we watched fireworks explode, and we saw candle lanterns float up into the sky. I tried to run after one after it burned out and fell, but it landed on the roof of a nearby mosque.

I might add here that I am not a huge fan of quick getaway trips with large groups of people because the task of making little decisions about what to eat and what to do involves a lot of negotiation to take everyone's interests into account. Fortuitously, when Paul and I surveyed everyone to see who was interested in night hiking, only five out of the eleven were. Two of those who weren't headed back to Kayseri; four others went to their hotel rooms. This left Paul, Justyna, Jackie, Salem and I to head to my favorite part of Cappadocia (close to Göreme) where there is a 1-2 km tunnel carved into the trough of a valley. This time our goal was to explore the entirety of the tunnel.

After a ten-minute drive, the five of us stormed into the valley and down into the tunnel, at times ducking below the shrinking ceiling and at other times reaching out to the narrow walls to keep our balance through the twists and turns. Throughout the tunnel there are sky-lights so at times we looked up to see the moon-lit sky. Salem had brought a tiny portable speaker into which he plugged a flashdrive. With this he was able to play old American blues songs. As strange as it sounds, I think the music kept everyone calmer during the more harrowing portions of the hike. After the 1-2 km of tunnel, the trail dumped us into a slot canyon where the walls reached heights of 100 feet. Scattered across the walls were entrances to carved-out rooms. While leading the group, I rushed ahead at one point and found myself at the edge of a ten-foot drop. Initially, I thought this would be the end of the hike, but there was a wooden ladder nailed into the rock. It was the first of two similar drops.

The slot canyon finally widened, and we looked up to the rock formations on the ridge where there were windows in the stone. The pale black of the moon-lit sky shone through them. We clambered toward the formations and to the road to begin the long walk to the top of the canyon to return to the car.

The thing I absolutely love about night hiking is that the darkness adds a simple layer of excitement to what would normally be a standard hike. Everything black spot of the landscape is a bit more frightening, and the ground is just a bit more uneven.

Four of us took the road back to the car, but Paul climbed along the ridge. While I wanted dearly to join him, I felt of pang of responsibility for the other three. I knew the area best as I was the only one who had been there during the day, and based on my friends' reactions to the difficult parts of the tunnel, I'm not sure they were ready to follow Paul and me on the narrow, ledge-laden trails simply in order to get back to the car.

Once we were back at the top, in the car, and safely on our way home, we decided to stop off for a night cap at the Ramada. The bar was still open at 2:30 in the morning--it never closes, they said--so most of us had a drink and relaxed before completing the journey back to the hotel.

The next day, the first of the new year, we had breakfast and explored Ürgüp. Our group diminished to the original five who had ridden in the car together, and we set out to explore Red/Rose Valley. It had the familiar feel of Southern Utah and Sedona, Arizona. We explored valleys and climbed fairy chimneys until a rainstorm set and we headed back to the car. We took back roads as we returned to Kayseri, enjoying the hilly pastoral landscape of the heartland of Turkey.

In the end I, for one, thought this was an excellent way to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of the next. It was both adventurous and relaxing, and we spent it with people whose company we really enjoy. Similarly to our last trip, we arrived home and looked at the clock, realizing we had only been away for twenty-four hours. Still in that amount of time we packed in most of the great things that Cappadocia has to offer.

Cappadocia Round Four

Six-thirty on a Saturday night. Jena and I had had a glass of wine. Then, thanks to a last minute idea and a phone call, we were in a car, headed to Cappadocia. The idea was to get a couple rooms, watch the meteor shower, and do some hiking the next day. The sky was clear and we could see Orion as we drove.

Other motives for the trip included the possibility of going out for Indian food and going out for some beers at a bar.

We easily found a hotel in the center of Goreme. Since it was the off-season (and possibly because it was nine o'clock at night) our cave rooms were 30-35 dollars. Cave rooms are those which are carved into the rock. Based on our previous experience in a cave hotel, I expected our rooms to be warm, but they were cold. Fortunately, Jena found the hotel cat to help heat our room up.

After Paul (of Paul and Cece, our couple friends and coworkers) took a few photos of the sky, we headed out to find the Indian restaurant.

Upon finding that the restaurant was closed, we had some Gözleme for dinner in a hole-in-the-wall place. Gözleme is a lot like eating a stuffed crepe, though the Turks like to call it a Turkish Pancake. While we waited for our food Jena and Cece left to look at rugs in another store, so when their food arrived before ours, we ate a few pieces of their Gözleme and replaced the pieces with food from our own meals before they returned.

After dinner, we brushed our teeth and headed out to a bar with a dance floor. It was on the second story of a building, and although it was incredibly loud, the overall feeling of the place was a major improvement over the only other bar in town, which we had visited on an earlier trip.

The beer in Turkey is bad. When we entered the bar, we asked them whether they had Bomonti. Unfiltered Bomonti is akin to a light hefeweizen, and it is easily the best beer available in the country, though it's like a bad Blue Moon. We were told it was available when we entered, but when it came to ordering, they said they only had Efes. It was like hearing the bar was out of everything except Keystone Light.

After our beer, which was 7 dollars per small bottle (they have large and small bottles here), we hit up the other bar for a game of Scattergories.

The other bar was more economical, as we knew it would be. This being my second time there, I can say it's an interesting place with pretty bad service and a horrible atmosphere. It's kind of like a dive bar in a run-down strip mall, and the interior has a bunch of bench tables like, as Jena put it, a crappy Pizza Hut. In it's own way it's kind of a fun place to be.

Feeling warm we headed out into the night to retrieve the car. We hoped to find a place just outside of town where it was dark enough to take pictures of the stars. Unfortunately, clouds had crept across the sky while we were at the bar, so those plans were foiled. Instead, we drove a little ways out of town to go on a couple night hikes. It was about one forty-five a.m.

First we explored a road that seemed to end at a field with white rectangular shapes sticking up at evenly spaced intervals. The light sensor and flash from my camera was my only source of light, so I announced that it was a graveyard. Upon further inspection, however, the shapes were merely sun-shades constructed for tomato or pepper plants.

We then hiked down into a valley that Jena and I had explored before. I led our group to a three-kilometer-long tunnel that dips into the earth for sections of one hundred feet or so at a time. Paul with his headlamp lead the way, and Jena and Cece stayed behind. We didn't go too far for fear that the girls would get cold waiting for us, so we soon headed back. At that point, we decided to call it a night.

After our breakfast the next morning, Paul and I went hiking while Jena and Cece did some shopping. On my way up a steep face, I lost my footing and slid down face first for about ten feet. I felt like Indiana Jones, and I had my wits about me to pull my hands up from the rock so that the forearm of my sleeves took most of the scraping, though I came away with a bloody wrist, elbow, and hip.

Later that day we headed to a new valley to explore, and we found old carved out dwellings that had multiple rooms, a stone door, and two long tunnels leading into and out of a chapel.

After working up an appetite, we headed back to town to try the Indian restaurant again. Finding that it was still closed, we settled for a Turkish lunch of manti (similar to ravioli), durum (similar to a chicken wrap/burrito), kofte (similar to meatballs), ayran (similar to yogurt and saltwater), and French Fries (which are very popular here).

As the day ended, we were back in the car and made it back to Kayseri at about five o'clock. The whole trip had taken less than twenty-four hours.


I can easily say that this was the best outing I've been on here in Turkey. It included good food, good friends (including the dogs and cat we befriended), a little drinking, a little riskiness (night hiking/tunnel exploration), and a little pain (sliding down the rock). I feel incredibly grateful that we have friends here that are willing to explore with us, and I'm lucky that our playground, Cappadocia, is so close by.

We hope to have more adventures in Cappadocia as the winter continues, and I can assure anyone who might visit us that they will be whisked off to help us explore this barren and beautiful landscape.