Next our cruise took us to our first Turkish destination Kusadasi. It made an excellent first impression on us, and seemed much more organized and sophisticated than the previous locations we had visited in Greece.
We took a couple hours’ trip our to the ancient ruins of the city of Ephesus. The city although now quite far in-land was once a port city and the second most important city outside of Rome during the Roman period. The city ruins are very substantial, yet only represent what’s believed to be 10% of the former city – so far its taken archeologists 150 years to excavate to date. We saw the entry way to the old library and Hadrian’s temple. St. Paul from the bible lived here and preached to the predominantly pagan people of the city after Jesus’ death.
After this we took in lunch at a local Turkish carpet making school where we learned all about hand-knotted rugs. A nice silk one will set you back more than a few thousand. It was cool to see how silk is extracted from silkworm cocoons too.
After this we spent our afternoon shopping in a bazaar district in town. Here we learned the art of bargaining really is to walk away. The first store dropped the price of a knock-off shirt from 40lira (~$20CAD) to 10lira by walking 10 feet. After this we felt emboldened to shop for lanterns for our place. We had been planning to buy a couple of these on the honeymoon for months. We were able to find the perfect set of 9 and solo blue for our place – we even packed extra luggage to make sure we could still carry these on.
After wandering some quaint side streets, we settled in a restaurant called the Baclavatium for some Turkish pizza for dinner, then headed back to boat to head to our next stop, Mykonos.
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