Thursday, January 24, 2008

Şile

Last Sunday, Ingo, Cat and I took a field trip to Şile. Şile used to be a small fishing village, but as it is only 70 km from Kadıköy, it is now a summer vacation spot for people from Istanbul. Because it was January, it was pretty dead (a good thing) and a bit cold, but it was sunny and really really beautiful. The photograph on wikipedia does not do it justice!

This is what it looks like:


The bus to Şile was a cross between a city bus and a nice long distance bus, and after some confusion finding it, the ride took about an hour and a half. After arriving in Şile we had lunch in this little place in the center. They had amazing bread right out of the oven. After lunch Ingo wanted Turkish coffee, and, by this point we were already the amusement of the day. But the coffee made us the amusement of the week. The guy said he would check if they had Turkish coffee, went digging in this cabinet and found some (who knows how long it had been there) and then he had to go ask another guy how to make it. The whole process happened a bit fast for real Turkish coffee, but Ingo said it wasn't too bad. We didn't really think much of the town, so we went in search of the sea.


We first found the harbor

and a bunch of boats that had been pulled up on land for the winter

We then walked around the harbor and I decided to see how cold the water was. Within two seconds I couldn't feel my feet. After putting on my shoes while balancing and trying not to fall in the water, we had our first "off roading" experience climbing up a hill to get a view of this.

Once again, I have concluded that the hardest thing is not going up, but the getting back down.

After we got down Ingo and I both came to the conclusion that ice cream was necessary and Cat was very easily convinced. The problem was finding ice cream. The Turks thing that it is bad to eat ice cream in the winter - it will make you sick or something - and so all the small stores with little freezers that sell ice cream in the summer unplug them, making ice cream very hard to find.

Failing to find ice cream at all the cafes near the harbor we walked up and around for the next view.


At this point we saw a cave, and decided we needed to go explore. So we went off the path again, went buy a bunch of guys smoking and drinking and doing whatever else in a crack in the rock, and had everyone staring at us. Eventually we decided we couldn't get down to the cave and so walked back up to the road and climbed over the fence. Walking back up on the road we found some stairs and climbed down them and did get to the cave. Victory for us!

The second victory came later, when after trying at least 3 grocery stores we found a small selection of ice cream, and then sat on a bench on the street eating our ice cream and having every person that passed stop and stare at us. One guy went so far as to stand across the street smoking, and not very subtly glancing over at us. I maintain that ice cream in the winter is a great thing.

As the sun was setting we got on a bus back to Istanbul. We took a different route though, one that went through lots of villages on a road that might have been well paved twenty years ago. For a large section of the trip we were driving on the left side of the road because it was more well paved. Nothing like a bit of pretending to be in the UK.

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