A diverse day

10.2.12
We spent our first full day in Selcuk riding dolmuses. A dolmus is a minibus which is the main form of transportation around here. We took the first dolmus to a town called Tire (Teer uh) which has a huge once a week market. I thoroughly enjoy a good local market. I like to discover fruits and veg that I have never seen before and mixing with the locals in this environment is always fun. As we entered the market we ran into an Italian couple we handmade friends with while waiting for a shuttle the day before (I got to practice my Italian!). They were staying in the same town that we were, but we were all in the market town 50 minutes away!!! (can you hear It a Small World playing again?) At the market I was quite the hit with my camera. Lots of people wanted to pose for me and demanded I take their picture. One guy even asked if I was the Paparazzi! Someone else asked me to make him famous. We bought a few souvenirs and only fruit and freshly roasted garbanzo beans that we could eat as we walked.

After the market we took another dolmus to the beach at Pamucak. It is on the Aegean and it gave me the opportunity to swim in a sea that I have already swum in, but in a new location. I collected my sand and we were off for Ephesus.

Ephesus is the big daddy of ancient Roman ruins. I have been to many ruin sites, in various forms of completeness and repair and I have NEVER seen anything like this before! The sheer magnitude and size of the place blew me away. It has more statues and carvings of things (rather than mostly marble columns) than I have previously seen, and the size of the theater and the streets was almost incomprehensible. You can imagine that Tom and I had a photography field day! There were also many, many attention hungry cats running around and lounging on marble slabs, so Tom enjoyed that too. After that it was a delicious dinner and then bed. Seems to be our routine because we are absolutely exhausted at the end of every day. This traveling thing ain't for sissies :)