The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

I took my first long-distance bus trip in Turkey last week, to celebrate Christmas with a couple of ELFs - it seemed appropriate. One of my neighbors in Malatya, Taylor, was planning a trip to Antakya (also known as Antioch - maybe you've heard of it?) and invited me to go along, especially after I told him there was an ELF there we could probably stay with. He arranged our bus tickets for late Thursday night/Friday morning and got us a ride to the bus station in Malatya. And then the fun began.

It turns out that, in Turkey, when your bus tickets says 00:30 23.12.2011, that actually means it's good for the next night, which is actually 24.12.2011. Well, sure! Who wouldn't realize that? Yeah, I'm not even going to try to figure out the logic of it - I gave up before I even started on that one. Luckily, there was an empty seat on the bus for me, and Taylor only had to ride in the jump seat for 2 hours before he got a seat too.

We left Malatya around 12:30, and were told we'd arrive in Antakya at 8:30. Our hostess, Margot, instructed us on where to get off the bus & told us to call when we arrived, as her apartment is just around the corner from the bus stop. Unfortunately, we arrived an hour & a half early, so I had to call & wake her up at 7:00 AM. She graciously came out to meet us anyway, rather than making us wait until a more reasonable hour.

The weather was less than ideal for seeing the town, but I felt right at home - it rained the whole time we were there. It was just like a Seattle winter! We spent the afternoon at the museum, which houses an impressive collection of mosaics - with only a few questionable translations and/or typos.

We ate some great kunefe, which is a dessert made of shredded wheat & cheese, drenched in steaming hot sugar syrup. Trust me, it's tasty, albeit super sweet. Antakya is known as the home of this particular delicacy, so everyone told me I had to eat it while I was there.

That evening, I decided to try to make egg nog. It turned out pretty well, though I didn't get the consistency quite right. No matter, with a little Jack Daniel's it was very enjoyable.

The next day we met up with another ELF, Rachael, who had flown in from Denizli (a city in the west of Turkey) and we all headed off to see what Lonely Planet claims is "the earliest place where Christians met and prayed secretly." It's a church carved into the side of a mountain, and, shockingly, the walls didn't collapse around me when I went inside. They hold a service in the evening on Christmas Eve, which Taylor attended with a whole group of ETAs who came into town just for that, but the other ELFs and I decided that just seeing it in the daytime was enough, so we had a quiet night in.

The next day was Christmas, but I didn't really notice. It's not really a big holiday for me anyway, and I spent most of the day on a bus going back to Malatya. Sadly, the trip home was not shorter than promised, probably because it was during the day & we made about 100 stops. OK, maybe only 80.

One nice aspect of bus trips in Turkey is the drink & snack service. Every so often the bus host will wheel a little cart up & down the aisle with tea, coffee, soft drinks, and usually snacks - although for some reason, I was on a drinks-only bus. They also have little TVs in the back of all the seats, just like international flights, so I had a chance to catch up on my Turkish TV watching. In all honesty, I napped & played games on my Kindle most of the ride, but there were other options if I had wanted to take advantage of them.

Overall, it was a nice Christmas weekend with friends, and I really enjoyed getting out of Malatya & seeing another part of the country. I have a longer trip coming up next month, and I hope to have many more adventures to write about after that.

So for now, happy new year to all!