An American in Turkey

There is nothing like heading out to one of these small historic ottoman towns for a weekend of quiet relxation. Me and seven of myh friends headed out on a three hour bus ride at 7.30 saturday morning. The town puts an impression on you as soon as you get out of the cab from the otogar. We picked a nice little hotel adjacent to the old Cinci Hamamı which was a converted Ottoman house. These houses are a little difficult to explain, quarters are tight but just comfortable enough to make it worth it with the historic appeal. The town has a ton to offer over a couple day excursion. There are three mosques that date from the mid to late 18th century, each in a slightly different style. There a hundred or so different arts and crafts shops that sell everything from ceramic plates to metalwork to textiles, much of which is made in or around the town. Also there are some interesting takes on typical turkish food. One typical dish which I sampled on sunday was the Bükme Pide, which is a baked dough with spinach, onions and walnuts. Also safranbolu has an almost unhealthy proportion of sweet shops selling special baklava with walnuts, lokum, which is a hard fruit candy, turkish delight, and helva, a sesame seed compound. Needless to say we ate our fill. The night life there was a bit subdued, being a more conservative town only the hotel bar was open and we were pretty much the only people there. It certainly was worth a weekend to get out of the busy city and whitwashed Bilkent campus to see some more of Turkey's color. This weekend is Göreme in Cappadocia, for sure there will be some fantastic pictures of rock churches and fairy chimneys. The pictures from this weekend can be found at the link below and I will try and post later this week on some of the requested topics (certainly if you have anything you'd like me to write about, let me know).

http://uchicago.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2019710&id=2903913&l=6c4fa