Sat, 26 Apr 2003

author Liz	location Cricklewood, London, England
posted 19:00 BST 27/05/03	section Europe2002/Asia/Turkey ( all photos )

Pergamum ( 34 photos )
Ok, so I know we've now been back from Turkey for quite a few weeks, but our London lives have been busy of late, so I am only just getting towards the end of our time in Turkey. I last left off at the end of Anzac Day, in our hotel in Ayvalik, so here is all about the rest of our adventures in Turkey from Saturday 26th April:

The night before, we had gone to bed without our luggage, as it had been marooned with our bus a couple of hours away. So when we woke up, Tim went down to the lobby to discover our bags all piled in a big heap. The joy of clean clothes!!
Next was breakfast in the hotel. All the breakfasts in the hotels were pretty much the same: hard boiled eggs, cucumber, tomato, cheese, olives, bread, jam, honey, tea and coffee. This is a fairly typical Turkish style breakfast, and it was a nice change from the usual cereal and toast we have at home.
We got back on our bus which had had its wheel fixed and was back to working order (at least for now), and drove a while before coming to Pergamum. This is an ancient city (originally settled in 8th century BC), and it is up on top of a very high hill, which now looks out over the city of Bergama.
The old city has a lot of stone work, some of the best sections being huge marble columns or the library passage - all of which remains are a long row of the column stumps. Even better is the steepest theatre in the world, with a capacity of about ten thousand. Sitting at the top made me feel very giddy, and I foolishly decided to walk all the way to the bottom to take some photos, and then had to drag my puffing body back to the top. It was very, very steep.
The view overlooking the city of Bergama in the valley below us and of the surrounding mountains was really beautiful, and the nice sunny weather made the view even better.
After stopping for lunch in Bergama, our next stop was at a Turkish carpet weavers warehouse. We learnt all about how the wool or silk is prepared (they even show you how to get silk from the silk worm cocoons), and how to weave a carpet (at least we watched it being done), how many knots are tied on different carpets, the length of time a carpet takes to make (a silk carpet 30cm x 30cm takes about a year to make!), and what the various patterns and colours mean.
Then they sat us all down and served us drinks and showed us hundreds of different carpets and kilims. It was obviously to try and sell to us, but the information the gave about each carpet was great, and the number of different styles and colours was mind boggling.
I came very close to buying a beautiful carpet, but decided the money could be better spent on travelling. I will just have to get back to Turkey one day when I'm rich, and spend up big on a couple of nice carpets!
Back on the bus, and we had a long stretch of driving ahead of us, so for a few hours we entertained ourselves with games and jokes and getting to know more people.
We arrived in Kusadasi and found ourselves in another beautiful resort. After dinner, we went outside to the beach where the hotel was holding a party, complete with bonfire, music, games and fire twirlers. We spent the evening chatting away to people and warming ourselves next to the bonfire.

(customised)