Kuşadasi

August 17, 2005

We got up early today and had breakfast, grabbing a bus to Söke, then a dolmuş to Kuşadasi. We quickly found our hotel and met Lucho’s friend Hasan. He is a really nice guy and encouraged us to get out to Ephesus (Efes) as quickly as we could, so we didn’t really talk to him much, but he gave us a pretty nice room and seems quite happy as his name, Mr. Happy would suggest.

We returned to eat another two kebabs; all three today were ½ the price of the Bodrum kebabs. We decided to walk around the city of Kuşadasi, but I was left unimpressed. The waterfront is beautiful and the hills surrounding the city are also great, but really the city has no feel. We ended up spending a lot of time up on the balcony of the hotel looking out over the water and the city. The view was nice, but after returning from the city the view couldn’t help the lack of feel the city had.

The man working the bar on the balcony is Hasan’s brother, nice guy, but his brother works him to death, starts working at 6:00am and off at midnight. I tried to talk to Hasan a couple times, but found it quite difficult because he was always running off to see something on TV or because he forgot something. Also whenever a customer came along he would help them. He is a very nice guy, but has even less patience than I. When I asked him what there is to see in the city he said that he wouldn’t tell me because I won’t have time to see it anyway and he wouldn’t want me to be disappointed.

Well I was off to bed, I haven’t felt well all day, I blame it on the first kebab I had before Ephesus, the 1 lira kebab… go figure.

August 18, 2005

After waking and eating, Hasan asked me to bring a kilim back for Lucho, however with my two purchases already I simply had no room for it and he could tell when he looked at me.

Breakfast was Turkish… not good, but on the roof and so the view was nice. I ran to the bathroom another couple times before we finally checked out, said goodbye to Hasan and headed off to the bus station. Unfortunately, I misjudged how far it was and so we walked longer than we would have liked, but we got an early start and all was good.