Out of town for more ruins!

Monday, May 07, 2012

Hello!

Up this morning around 7, and into our incredibly odd looking shower compartment. There are water sprays everywhere, and while R found the button to produce steam, I found the button to turn on the radio – there are, of course, speakers built into the shower compartment…so…very refreshing from the overhead and side sprays of water…whatever! Breakfast here at the hotel – not the best, as it seems for some reason hotels (even the wonderful Yacht Classic!) do NOT use fresh squeezed orange juice! Why, we wonder! This morning we tried the Tang-like o.j. and I had a glass of some reddish mixture; R thinks pomegranate, but it was actually absolutely tasteless! How odd! So…after breakfast, we headed out of town to see sites. This time, with the wisdom of experience and Emmy, we were able to find our way out of the labyrinth of crooked streets and on the road out of town!

Our first visit was to Perge, which is only a couple of km out of town. Even though we were there about 9:15 a.m. there were already several tour buses in the parking lot (what time did those people have to get up?). However, the site itself is so large that it wasn’t too hard to avoid the majority of groups, and see the site. The legend is that Perge was believed to be founded by Greek settlers shortly after the Trojan War. There are bits of Hellenistic, Roman and even Byzantine architecture on the site. St. Paul and St. Barnabus visited Perge on their first missionary journey.

From Perge, we headed to Aspendos, which has a really lovely theatre that still hosts yearly concerts and festivities. The city was founded in the 4th century B.C. and has remains of a stadium, as well as the aqueduct used to bring in water to the city.

Our last site of the day was Side (pronounced Sea-day) which turned out to be more than a little surprise! The guidebooks say that Side the modern city is built around the remains of Side the ancient city – and they are everywhere! On the road in, we saw the most incredible display of literally “over the top” apartment buildings and hotels – now we know where all the Brits, Germans and Russians go when they come to Turkey! It was unreal – rather like Las Vegas moves to the sea shore! Robert took a couple of pictures as examples, but some of these places need literally to be seen to be believed! Most of them are labeled as “resort hotels” and it definitely looks like the resorts are trying to top each other with their water slides and water parks! Unreal! And an incredible amount of building already under construction! No housing market crisis here, I’m sure!

After driving along the beach front and viewing the hotels with dismay, we were suddenly, without warming, in Side itself! And it’s BEAUTIFUL! The town has literally used the ruins wherever they happen to be – restaurants, shops – no problem! Come see what’s in our back yard! We parked the car at the autopark in the town center, and decided to look for lunch. R’s idea was to walk down to the water, and look there – and we found a great place! Can’t remember the name of it … oh well! We started with a small mezze plate of dips and munchies – dill and yogurt dressing, sautéed eggplant, tomato spread – and then R had sea bass – according to the waiter (who could have sold ice to Eskimos…), it came off the boat this morning! I had a green salad with a vegetarian pide – a very, very good small one-person pizza loaded with all sorts of veggies, including corn, to which R objected; said corn wasn’t supposed to be on pizza – I figured if it was a veggie, all was all right! Figure that this will be our big meal of the day, as can’t imagine needing anything more than a Magnum Classic to round out the evening! We then took a walk around the end of the peninsula, seeing more ruins and very much enjoying the lovely breeze blowing in off the sea. Made it as far as the Side amphitheatre (yes, each town seems to have at least one!) and decided we’d seen enough – as our feeling is that Side may definitely be on our “return to” list sometime in the next year or so!

Back to the hotel, and this time, got here flawlessly, thanks to Robert and Emmy! Yipee! R now napping while I blog. Problem with the hotel’s WiFi, though, which they are hoping to solve shortly…hope so, as if not, we’ll be heading out, computer in hand, to get a good connection!

More later!
m
xxxx