This is going to be a short entry, for the simple reason that we spent most of the day driving. I woke up feeling like I'd been hit by a truck, or possibly by a head cold. It was a miserable morning. I had an earnest desire to rip my sinuses out of my head and stomp on them (fortunately, Maeghan stopped me). However, at breakfast, a waiter was kind enough to make me tea with lemon and honey. It was extraordinary nice of him. Anyway, perhaps it was a good thing that the day was mostly driving - it gave me lots of time to curl up and sleep. Mmmm sleep.
We left Kahta early, and rolled into the town of Maras around noon. Maras is famous for its dondurma, or ice cream. One eatery, Maras Dondurma, is famous all over Turkiye. You can't go two blocks without bumping into one in Istanbul, although here it's known as MADO - a shortening of Maras Dondurma. At the restaurant, I had spaghetti with red sauce. It was rather like heaven. I hadn't had spaghetti with red sauce for a good ten months. And as a chaser, we all had ice cream cones the approximate size and weight of a basketball. In other MADO's, the ice cream is grossly overpriced, but in the original location, prices were delightfully reasonable. The cone in this picture would have cost me upwards of ten lira in Istanbul; in Maras, it was two and a half. And the guy scooping it was feisty! He decided he didn't like the flavors I was choosing and chose ones he liked instead. Little scamp. I asked for something like chocolate and caramel and wound up with something like pistachio and hazelnut. Which was still fantastic.
From the bus - a floating fish restaurant! I imagine the food is fresh.
The remnants of an on-bus camera war.
Bus food. I'm pretty sure we'd hauled this box of Turkish Delight around for the past week.
Garet, asleep on the floor. I told you that bus was cramped!
And Jime, Derick, Daza, Tinkerbell, and Mota snoozing in the back. It was a long day.
Snooooowcapped mountains! I believe Maeghan offered to pay me if I would stop singing songs from White Christmas.
Shortly after the snooooowcapped mountains, we found ourselves driving straight into a thunderstorm, so of course we stopped for pictures.
Can the Chaperon and our saintly driver:
Blase:
Moi (no one told me my hair had ratted while I was asleep! Maeghan, you traitor!)
The storm coming in.
And then it hit.
A few hours later, we stopped in a town that is apparently famous for its pastirma - a fatty, greasy, wonderful sausagy meat. Mmm. Here, Can the Chaperon extols its wonders.
Also, his belt was kinda funny.
Juliana, mostly awake:
Me, being fierce:
It was Valeria's birthday! At the hotel, Can the Chaperon super-secretly alerted the waiters, and they brought out a cake!
Jimmer, gnawing on a fork. Jimmer's funny.
Later, many people went clubbing. Juh, Blase, Maeghan, and I, wanting to actually, you know, sleep that night, instead elected to hang out in the hotel room like the dorks we are. Maeghan and mine's room was chosen as the gathering spot on the grounds that we could connect to the hotel's router from it. Can the Chaperon couldn't. He was kind of bitter about it.
Anyway, Juh and I fooled around with makeup, the photographic evidence of which I appear to have inadvertently deleted en masse (...) whilst Blase poked around online.
It was a good evening; we went to bed early (well, relatively - one in the morning, maybe?) and by the time I woke up, the cold was gone. Must have been the tea.
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