Travelpalooza 2.1

10th May 2009 : Konya- Antakya Departure from Konya to Antakya . Arrival to Antakya and c/in hotel

This is from the itinerary, and this...is not at all what we did! In order to make more time for more adventures! we drove from Konya to Antakya, visited the Archeology Museum and the Church of St. Peter, and made a side trip to the mysterious Iron Wall. All of this was previously slated for the 11th. Antakya is also notable because it's allegedly where Daphne, pursued by a lusty Apollo, prayed to the gods for deliverence and was turned into a laurel tree. Which...I suppose can be considered a win.

It was a very full day, and there are going to be an awful lot of photos. Consider yourself warned.

We started off with a long, long drive from Konya to Antakya. Which of course involved rest stops. Turkish rest stops are pretty cool. They have the standard bathrooms (which range in grossness from Not Really to Run Screaming), but also a lot of food and, generally, gift shops. Which is where I found this little guy: a half-dehydrated Snoopy snow globe.


It's kind of heartbreaking.

Also, there were birds nesting in the bathroom. The Americans and Canadian thought this was pretty cool. The Mexicans and Brazilians were grossed-out (a phrase I'm pretty sure I haven't used since seventh grade and will hopefully never used again).


This is Adana, a city we drove through. It's famous for its kebab, and also because my host mom is from here. More so the former than the latter, although if there were any justice in this world, it'd be the other way around.


I think this was at another rest stop. Jimmer is cooler than you.



And then we came to the museum! This museum is allegedly famous for its mosaic depicting Achilles departing for the Trojan War. For reasons that passeth understanding, I do not appear to have a picture of this particular mosaic, or even any recollection of it. Oh well. I was always more of a Hector kind of girl anyway. (I wasn't a huge fan of Iliad. It would have been a lot shorter if Achilles had just gotten over himself already and given that the main plot point came from an arguement over who got to rape a prisoner of war, I didn't have a tremendous amount of sympathy for any of the primary characters.)

But I digress.


Various mosaics:



I kind of liked this guy just because of how bored he looked:


More mosaics:






(I'm pretty sure these are Garet's hands)




I'm pretty sure this is all the exchange students who were on the trip (Amanda, Hannah, and Emily - we missed you!), except Garet and I, because we were taking the picture.




Yes. Um. This would be me.


And Garet:


Thaaat's right, Tinkerbell. Go on, be that fabulous.


Artifacts:





I am 99.99% sure there was a picture of this in one of my Latin books.


It's possible that the sun was getting to Maeghan at this point.



In the statue garden:



I am almost sure that Sharon Stone's dress at the premier of Inglorious Basterds at Cannes (stop looking at me like that) was modeled after this statue. Good fashion never dies, although it does, at times, seem to lose its head. And limbs.


Still, it was a good museum.



No, I totally am not horsing around with priceless artifacts...


(I asked the guard if I could touch it first. That's how hardcore I am)

BASEBALL.


I fail to recall precisely whose sarcophagus this was, or why it was important (in my defense, the museum was a little lax on their labelling system), but it was pretty, and fun to take close-ups of.


I kind of love these figures. The figure on the right is like, "All right, who put an ice cube down my tunic?!" and the one in the center is like, "one-two-three NOT IT!" and the one on the left is all, "Srsly, kids, grow up."


I have a bad feeling about the dog's chances in this particular encounter:


And I like the (headless) rock'em sock'em cherubs.


I believe these were the skeletons found inside the sarcophagus. I never did hear why their skulls were stuffed with aluminum foil. I'm pretty sure it's not to block alien mind probes. I don't recall this being addressed on Bones.


And on that note, we were off to the Church of St. Peter. This...is important. Wikipedia says it's one of the first Christian churches. Turks will tell you that it's the first Christian church, and anything else is fightin' words. The church - a remodeled cave - is high in the hills. It's quite a hike, and the hillside is riddled with caves and tunnels that could be used as hiding places, in case a speedy exit was needed. The townspeople sheltered the early Christians, and they're very proud of this. The hillside leeches water into niches in the church's interior - trace amounts now, as earthquakes have blocked older passages, and this water is considered sacred. I crossed myself with it. Old habits run deep.

Church exterior:


Church interior:



Maeghan in the doorway.


Blase in the preists's...ready room? Changing room? A tunnel exit used to start from this room, but it's since collapsed.


And the prerequisite one of Your's Truly at the alter. We all took turns.


The Christians weren't the only ones to use the caves - many other, earlier religions, civilizations, and cultures inhabited them at some point. Case in Point is the head of Charon, carved into the hillside like a smaller and much older Mt. Rushmore. It predates St. Peter's Church, but aside from that, we don't really know why it's there or who made it. Juliana models beside it.


Following the Church - which Turks refer to as the Church of St. Pierre, interestingly - we took a side trip to something the guide wanted to show us. And I really don't know what it is. She called it the "Iron Gate," and said it had been constructed 3000+ years ago to block snowmelt from flooding the town in the valley every spring, but I can't find any information on it online; everything I've found just says that it's south of St. Peter's, which is true but not terribly informative. Turkiye is so full of monuments and artifacts - it can be very difficult to find information on a specific one, unless it's major or has been converted into a museum (or both).

And with that, I give you the Iron Gate.

Or rather, the mouth of the valley leading to the Iron Gate.


Here's the Gate itself. Unfortunately, it's really hard to get a sense of scale from my pictures, but - you see those arches? If you stacked two human beings, they would just about reach the top of one of those arches. This thing is big.


It also happens to have lots of goats around it.


Also, exchange students, although there isn't much of a difference. We'll eat anything, scatter like dust in the wind, and enjoy jumping around on precarious rock formations:


(Also, we occasionally smell funny)

And it was from here that I called my mom to wish her Happy Mother's Day.


The walk back to the bus from the Gate:









The view from the hotel at sunset was pretty spectacular. My photos don't do it justice.



Aaaand exchange students.

Maeghan and I:


Clockwise around the table - Mota, Danza, Jimmer, Juliana, Fernanda, Valerio, Valeria, Jimena, and Tinkerbell (Jael):


Blase and Garet + Garet's Crazyface:


Can the Chaperon and Derick. Also, the piece of mint ingeniously hiding in Derick's teeth (it was on purpose, I promise):


Also worth noting is that the balcony (!) off Maeghan and mine's room had a swallow nest. With a swallow fledgling. Which had either jumped ship a little too early or seriously ticked off his mama, because he was fluttering around the floor of the balcony and going nowhere fast. Until, of course, we foolishly opened the door connecting our room to the balcony and he came bouncing in. Garet cornered him in the hallway with a drinking glass and a hand towel from our bathroom and deposited him back on the balcony.

After dinner, he was still there - namely, not in the nest - and huddling up to the door for warmth. We consulted Can the Chaperon (not to be confused with Can the Rotex from the last trip. New guy, and not a Rotex, although still pretty cool). Can the Chaperon told us, with a sort of merciless glee, that mama birds only push baby birds out of nests when they think baby bird isn't going to survive, figuring they might as well kill the young'un off early. If we managed to get baby bird back into the nest, he said, mama bird would just push him back out again.

Can the Chaperon was kind of bitter that Maeghan and I had a balcony when he didn't.

Maeghan called her dad. He started with "In the cruel realities of nature..." Maeghan hung up.

I called my dad. He pointed out that natural selection probably meant that baby bird should bite the dust, but Fortune had delivered baby bird onto our doorstep, and the worst that could happen was that mama bird would push him out again, and then baby bird wouldn't be any worse off then he was now.

This is why my dad rules.

And hence commenced the operation.

It's kind of hard to describe - Maeghan has most of it on video - but the gist of it is that we couldn't open the door to the balcony, because then baby bird would fly back into the room. So Maeghan, Garet, Blase (who'd joined the operation), and I had to climb onto and out of the balcony through a window. Once we'd finally caught baby bird again (thanks to Garet's dexterity with the drinking glass/hand towel technique), the nest was too high for Garet to reach. So we passed a chair through the window. Still not high enough. So we passed a stack of pillows through the window, and braced Garet with he, bouncing gently, attempted to knock baby bird out of the glass and into the nest. In the dark. While avoiding bird poop dripping out of the glass. Baby bird was having a bad night.

BUT thanks to the dedication and wilyness of Your Heroes, we finally got baby bird back in his nest, and come morning, he was still there. And mama bird was feeding him.

Take THAT, Can the Chaperon.

After all that, Maeghan laid down to "take a nap" that lasted until the wake-up call the next morning.