I'm in Mardin, the final stop before Syria. Perched on the side of a hill, crowned with a castle containing an immense radar dome spying on the middle east on behalf of NATO, packed with historical honey-colored houses lining crooked streets, Mardin is a real beauty. At least the old city is. There's the obligatory concrete sprawl, but it's kept in the back so as to not ruin the view. And the view is beautiful: an unspoilt plain, stretching out as far as the eye can see and beyond, into Syria. The weather has been clear for the last couple of [View Full Entry]

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Greetings to my loyal following. The past few weeks have found me extremely lazy and/or too busy to sit down and blog. Now that I finally find time to do so I don't have any pictures with me (left them all in Istanbul), so this will be a boring blog without pictures (which means Baybora won't be reading it). Since I last blogged I have: Been to Cappadocia Cappadocia was awesome: Goreme, with deserted valleys full of phallic towers with houses and churches carved into them, trudging through knee-deep snow all day long, occassionally taking refuge in a cave (which, I [View Full Entry]

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Bedreddin's adventures are now featured on the "Highlights" section of the main travelblog.org page. Yeah, baby! The roughly 2 weeks since my last blog were spent in the stupor that comes over me when I go to Istanbul. During that time I met old friends, sat around a lot and picked up a new time-killer pastime: learning the Ottoman script. The Ottoman empire used (a slightly modified version of) the arabic script, but Ataturk did away with that with a wave of the omnipotent hand. The result in practice is that people nowadays are unable to read family albums dating from [View Full Entry]

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Hitched across rolling fields and afternoon fog through Eastern Thrace to Edirne, less than 20 miles from Bulgaria and Greece. My hitchhiking fortunes have vastly improved since my comparative inexperienced days a month ago. Being offered a ride while not hitching is no longer an uncommon experience, and I don't think I hitched for more than 15 minutes before getting picked up. It may have more to do with the drivers in Thrace than anything to do with me. Edirne was the Ottoman capital prior to the liberation of Istanbul, and home to many mosques and other historical entities. The old [View Full Entry]

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So finally, after 5+ weeks of traveling, I made it to Canakkale, no more than 500km away from Istanbul where I started off. A record-setting pace. Yeay. After Bozcaada I head over to the ruins of Troy. I daresay it was a bit much for my untrained eye. There are the ruins of 9 levels of city (Troy I-IX), from different periods, all on display simultaneously and more or less undistinguishable (and unremarkable). The informational signs (as usual) obviously didn't have the casual traveler in mind and didn't help me visualize what things must have been like. Definitely needs more work. [View Full Entry]

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So the holy month of Ramadan is here: muslims are commanded to fast while the sun is up throughout the month. Today was the first day and I'm a little anxious about what this will mean for me; finding open restaurants may be problematic in the more devout portions of the country. I was drunk last night -- I'm going to hell in a handbasket. But more about that later. I've been busy since my last blog at Ayvalik, but I didn't want to post without having pictures, so I've been holding out. Now I'm on an island, and the only [View Full Entry]

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I ended up really liking Ayvalik so I'm still here. I think I'll leave tomorrow and head down to Izmir. Note I still claim to be on my way to Canakkale (even though I'm heading south instead of north). My first daytime assault on Cunda failed miserably, as I realized I was getting sick as soon as I arrived, and after a short face-saving walk around the town I was forced to head back and spend the rest of the day in bed. I was feeling much better the next morning. My second attack started in the early afternoon. I am [View Full Entry]

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Ayvalik. An inseperable part of the Turkish national homeland(!). Signs all over point out that it was here that the first military resistance was formed against the advancing Greeks back in 1919. I daresay I'm a bit puzzled. By all indications this was as Greek a town as any in western Anatolia. I spent all day walking down the quiet narrow alleys, among unmistakably Greek houses, spotting the occasional unmistakable church. One sign on a shop read "Rum evleri tamir ve yikimi yapilir" (lit. "We fix and demolish Greek houses"). This is yet another town fallen victim to the forced population [View Full Entry]

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Finally made it to Ayvalik. (I don't have my card reader with me so the pictures will be uploaded asynchronously). The road here was interesting. I took a minibus from Bergama to Chandarli (a small vacation town on the coast, slightly south and west of Bergama), checked out the Genoese fortress there, and got many giggles from a group of 4-5 teenage girls. I swear, if I could only get 1/10th of the attention from chicks within my age bracket... I decided to walk to Dikili (which didn't look too far on the map), taking the coastal route, convinvced that I [View Full Entry]

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I finally made it to Bergama. It took me roughly a day (24 hours) to hitchike from Balikesir, including a detour that took me way out of my way to appreciate Assos for an hour. The sheer quantity of historical artifacts is astonishing. There's an enormous pagan temple built in honor of some egyptian god: the Christians built a church inside of it, and the Muslims converted one of its towers into a mosque. The acropolis at the top of the hill is impressive (despite the fact that the Germans disassembled and carted away the most impressive parts of it which [View Full Entry]

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