Nazlihan Assos

Selcuk and Ephese. When we drove into Selcuk and stopped at the St John Basilica to get our bearings for one of the recommended hotels a bookseller came by and told us to go to the Akay hotel just a few hundred meters on the same road. This proved to be an excellent choice, a very nice place with beautiful rooms, a little courtyard with a swimming pool (summer only, of course) free wireless, free transport to Ephesus and very friendly management. We were ...

... issues of my personal habits and wanderings I never got around to moving. I regret that my Turkish is insufficient to explain the subtilties of my idiosyncratic life (its not so easy in English, either); that it wasn't a "snub."

My pay agreement was to rent without the usual breakfast included. But I was later invited to breakfast anyway. Still, as good as it was, I often wanted to start ...

... bus as about six or seven of the passengers exited--a set of young teachers. Then we proceeded on to Assos, where I got out.

Walking up through the village, passing shuttered pensions and restaurants, and vacant tourist chachkes stands lining the ancient stone street to the acropolis, I came upon a statue of Aristotle, who once lived in Assos. Beneath the statue was a local resident. And I thought, Aristotle, he'd be so proud.

The ...

... books such as Allen's are correctionist history. Frank Calvert, a British archaeologist, and also, by the way, served as the United States consular agent, was the main guy. Now, in my enthusiasm after finishing the book, it is hard to restrain from quoting almost the entirety of the book jacket:

The relentlessly self-promoting Heinrich Schliemann took entire credit for discovering Homer's Troy. For over one hundred years that credit has been ...

... occurred. New elements ... the appearance of handmade ceramics after some 1000 year's use of the potter's wheel. Among the ceramic types is a strikingly crude ware decorated with ridges and knobs (=Buckelkeramik") for which analogies can be found in southwestern Europe. [Epilogue: I later found that this piece was of the Roman era, and probably a tile associated with roofing.

Well, some archaeologist I would make. I left the piece there against the ...

... not even the turkish tourist crowd was in: just a quite village. nobody spoke english. the environment is right out of homer with fields and low fruit trees and a dry intense heat with a strong sea breeze. but assos wasn't always so sleepy. the place is known for the temple of athena which sits on top of the hill that the main village is on. for a time the local king was a former student of plato who encouraged philosophers to move in ...

... stage we also were a little bit off the beaten track and another friendly person directed us back the way we`d just come - back up a big hill. At the top of the hill was the busy highway to Izmir and we could see it got steeper and more windy in the distance. Uh Oh! No match for a flat tyre. Never fear however, I used my famous `feeling lucky` powers and hitched us and our bękes a ride in a ute to the Troy turnoff. We limped the last ...

... boats going in and out. The girls and I had a delicious 'special waffle' from an ice cream shop. The waffle way shaped like an oyster, with the ice cream inside. We watched the sun set and went back to our hotel. One of the big attractions of this place for the girls was an indoor heated swimming pool. The three of us (Jess demurred) went for a swim and then back to our rooms to get ready for dinner. We weren't ...

... the modern town, are the remains of the celebrated library, a steep and impressive theatre, the temples of Trajan and Dionysus, the monumental altar of Zeus, the sanctuary of Demeter, a gymnasium laid out on three terraces and the Agora. This was such a huge site which like all the others blows you away when you are there, not just the heat!! We were guided around the site as we explored it but what we were seeing was only such a small part, there ...

... neat to be there. And it would have been a huge let-down if it had been at the end of the trip. There were much better things just around the corner... Metin's first name means 'strength.' He told us his mother named him this because he was born about 2 months premature, and she thought he needed all the help he could get. It worked, because he's a big fella!