5:50 AM: Welcome to Ephesus!

Alli leaves in about a month to go home, so we are trying to squeeze in as many touristy things as possible, with a visit to Ephesus at the top of the list. I visited Ephesus years ago on the cruise, and loved it then, so I was super excited to go back again. It was both amazing and kind of strange, you know? When I was here 7 years ago, I kept thinking, "Well, I'll only be in Turkey once!". How weird and wonderful that here I am, again! Anyway, we don't have a lot of weekends left, between other places we want to visit and our Sunday school commitments, so it was this weekend or never. And because I had to teach Sunday school, we decided to make it as short a trip as possible. So on Friday evening we boarded a bus at 11:30 PM, slated to arrive in Selcuk, the town Ephesus is in, at 6:30 AM.

Granted, arriving anywhere at 6:30 doesn't sound great, but we did the same night bus set-up when we went to Cappadocia, and it was fine. I don't think we'll do it again. I was awakened by the (bus steward, bus attendant?) that we had arrived. A minute later Alli and I were on the street, blinking sleep out of our eyes, and trying to figure out where we were. It was pitch black, and cold out, no people in sight. We had been helpfully dropped off at the Tourist information center, which of course would not open for another 3 hours. I had visions of us falling asleep on the benches out front, waking up to crowds of tourists laughing... Instead we decided to find the bus station, where there was sure to be light, a bathroom, and people. We found it, but it contained none of the above. Like everything else, it was still closed. Luckily, the bus station was near the market place, which was bustling with humanity, setting up for the day's market. And a nice looking man approached us and asked in English what we were looking for. He told us about his pansion and invited us to make ourselves at home there for a few hours. With no other available options, we decided to trust our guts and go with him. He was a blessing! We settled in to the lounge at the pansion (Nur Pansion - if you're ever in Selcuk, stay there!), and read for a few hours, then had breakfast. All the staff spoke English, as did the two other guests. Good conversation over breakfast - one of the men is an movie actor, and has actually been in some movies that I have seen, like Michael Clayton, and another that is coming out next year with Angelina Jolie. We ended up splitting the shuttle fee and shared a car up to Mary's house, and back down to Ephesus, or Efes. When I was there before, I fell in love with the trees around Mary's house, because they reminded me of home. Sadly, there was a huge fire 3 years ago that totally wiped out all of the vegetation on the hillside, so it looked completely different. It is a strange feeling to miss something in another country, in a place I only imagined to visit once in a lifetime.

The weather was amazing! The clouds were dark and very windy, very blustery, and rain threatened many times. We lucked out though, because it didn't actually rain while we were walking around Efes. It finally poured when we were having dinner, and while we were walking around St. John's Basilica. At one point we had to run into a mosque to take cover from the heavy rain! (Don't worry, it was open to tourists.) As we visited all these places, it was amazing to think that John the Disciple, and Mary the mother of Jesus actually lived parts of their lives here.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around Selcuk. We visited the Temple of Artemis, or what once was the Temple of Artemis. Now it is only a single column, standing in a field of ancient marble rubble. We went to the Efes Museum, which I remembered from when I was there before. Because we were only staying for a single day, we didn't get a hotel room, so we had to plan carefully to maximize our time for sitting down indoors. Our bus didn't leave until 10:30 PM, so we had to fill the evening until then, and there's very little daylight now. We had planned to go to the library in town, and we found it, but it was closed. Such a bummer, because there is only so much tea you can drink, buying time in coffee shops. But it was beautiful, and that made it great! After dark, but way too early for dinner, we found ourselves without a place to go, so we found some benches under some trees near streetlights, and waited. We laughed a whole lot! Finally we decided it was time to get some dinner, and we spent about 10 minutes trying to decide between two restaurants, only to get inside and find out it was actually one large restaurant. Then while eating, the power went out. That is why you should always have candles on the dinner table! It added ambiance though, and took away the soccer game playing on the TV in the background. After dinner we found some dessert in a pastanesi, and ended up spending the rest of the evening talking with a Kurdish carpet seller in his shop.

The bus came promptly at 10:30, and we gladly got on and fell asleep. We arrived back in Antalya in time for a few hours of horizontal sleep and a shower before church on Sunday. We were a little zonked for our Turkish lesson that afternoon, but the trip was well worth it!