Only about 12 hours until we're on a plane back to New York. This should be an erudite summary of our travels in Greece and Turkey, but we've been travelling for the last two days and aren't particularly inspired at the moment. Perhaps soon (although the next couple weeks back in the US is going to be crazy).
We arrived in Athens this morning. We had a very pleasant ferry ride from Rhodes; we found an economy-class seating area on an upper level that was completely unoccupied. We were able to stretch out on our thermarests and sleeping bags and actually got a much better night's rest than we did our last night in Turkey.
We wandered about Athens a bit this afternoon. It's definitely not a good time to be here. With the Olympics a year away, everything is under construction. The typically bad traffic is even worse, and everywhere you turn there are jackhammers and bulldozers. Hopefully, though, they'll be the better for it after next year.
One interesting anecdote from the last couple days: In Marmaris, the departure point for the ferry to Rhodes, we sat down for lunch at what looked like a fairly Turkish establishment (as opposed to tourist-oriented--i.e. with things like schnitzel, spaghetti, and hamburgers on the menu). They handed us a menu that had English and German translations of their mostly turkish dishes, at somewhat high, but not absurd prices. I paged through to the back, however, which was all in Turkish, and noticed that they had most of the same items, plus some others, at much lower prices (less than half). We were actually looking for something called a lamachun, which is a kind of snack-sized thin-crusted minced meat pizza, eaten rolled with lettuce and tomatoes inside. They're very good and almost always very cheap; this place had them for about 50 cents each--but only on the Turkish menu, of course. The waiter was surprised when he saw that we were looking at that part of the menu, and tried to redirect us to the English, but we insisted on the lamachuns. We ordered three (he was trying to tell us that three wasn't enough, although it was more than enough), plus a couple of ayrans (a traditional yogurt-based drink, also usually very cheap). He seemed a bit upset and asked us how long we'd been in Turkey; I guess they're used to people who just came off the boat. The lunch was good, and when we asked for the bill, we noticed our waiter talk to the manager and look in our direction. We guessed that they were going to try to overcharge us somehow, and sure enough they did. We asked the waiter to explain it, as it wasn't really itemized, and he kept saying it's ok, it's ok. We ended up just handing him the amount it should have been and walked away. He looked upset at having lost the battle, but accepted it.
Fortunately, this was not a common experience in Turkey. You just have to be careful in the bigger, more touristed towns; I think particularly port towns where they get a lot of people either just arriving or just there for the day. Outside of places like this, almost everyone has been very helpful and honest.
Anyway...our flight gets into Newark around 5pm tomorrow (Tuesday). As soon as we get settled, we'll start going through and pairing down the 500-odd pictures we've taken. We'll get them online as soon as we get to a decent internet connection (your office, Erik?). I think on our future trips we'll try to post them as we go, so we don't have such a massive backlog.
See many of you soon,
-b & j
Posted by brad at June 30, 2003 09:07 AM