Selçuk, Turkey

Hello again, this time from Selçuk, Turkey. The last three days have been somewhat paradoxical in that they have been extremely interesting - some of the coolest days on the trip - yet for all three I have been ill. I am not sure if it was something that I ate or drank or what, but it has not been fun. I woke up on Tuesday feeling nauseous to the point that I had to lie down in my hotel room during our morning class and miss the first part of the site that day. I tried to sleep in the bus to no avail, and I finally threw up. I say finally because whatever I threw up is what was making me feel so bad. I was able to go swimming at Hieropolis springs in the afternoon, but felt crappy again that night. The last two days I have had diarrhea, but I am finally beginning to feel better... please knock on some wood if it is nearby.

Last night a few classmates and I, after eating dinner, met a man who was selling carpets and he told us that his wife was from California and invited us in to his shop. We ended up chatting for nearly 3 hours with him and his wife. Apparently she met him when she was traveling five years ago and the rest of the story wrote itself, so she moved here and now they live a humble life selling carpets, among other things. We had many cups of apple tea (which is huge in Turkey) which they offered to us out of hospitality. It was a really great experience.

(The guy next to me in the Internet Cafe just let out a huge fart and nobody even reacted or said anything. My initial reaction was to laugh, but I decided I didn't want to take the chance to offend anyone by doing so. Perhaps I should offer the room my own personal fart as a tribute to my comfortability with this foreign culture. Perhaps not.)

We spent today at Ephesus, which is where Paul writes the letter of Ephesians to, and is also mentioned in Acts. The theatre there is the biggest one we have seen - in its time it would have seated over 24,000 people. We sat at the very top of it while one of our classmates read Acts 19 in a normal speaking voice and we could hear it perfectly, as if it were microphoned. Unreal. It rained today, which was a bummer, but it didn't take much away from the grandeur of the city. My photos will do the talking when I get back.

Tomorrow we visit the Ephesus museum and the Church of Saint John, and then on Saturday we fly to Istanbul which is where we stay for the remainder of the trip. It will be very bittersweet to leave this part of the world.

Can you hear me now? Good.