Turkey - part 2 - Izmir and Ephesus

So as I stated before in my previous post, Izmir was not what we had expected. For one, somehow we had thought there would be beaches (we had planned to have at least one relax-on-the-beach day). Izmir was all browns and grays, dusty and hot and the water was completely surrounded with a dirty gray concrete wall. No beach. And the water looked odd. I don't know how to describe it, but every time I looked out over the water, I felt unsettled. Even this photo weirds me out...

Creepy water

So about 15 minutes after getting to our hotel, we sat on our beds, munching on trail mix and utilizing the free wi-fi to plan a short day trip to to Chios, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey. The coast was about an hour bus ride away, so we made our plans, looked up a Lonely Planet recommended restaurant, and headed out to eat.

Our best seafood meal - seabass stuffed with a Turkish cheese and grilled prawns. After thinking we had annoyed the owner with our attempts at Turkish, he ended up offering us tea on the house, so maybe his annoyed face was really an amused one?

The next morning, we woke up super early, took a taxi to the bus terminal, managed to find a bus heading to Cesme (where we were supposed to catch the ferry to Chios) and off we went.

Unfortunately the bus made more stops than we realized, and soon, we were glancing at the time every 15 seconds, willing the bus to move faster. We reached the town of Cesme, but not the ferry terminal and since we had about 9 minutes until the ferry left, we hopped off, haggled with another taxi, and zoomed away to the ferry terminal. We literally ran up to the terminal as I was pulling up our reservations on the my phone. A guy told us we had to have actual tickets and pointed us to the ticket desk...which was closed.   Turns out, we had needed to be there 20 minutes prior to the ferry leaving, not 5.

The ferry pulling away from the dock without us :(

Bummed, yet still laughing about our whirlwind trek to the ferry terminal, we walked into the town, which was very cute and stereotypically Mediterranean, got some recommendations on local beaches, haggled for some beach towels, grabbed a minibus, and headed to this beach for the day:

Gorgeous weather! The water was a bit chilly for me, so I mostly camped out on my lawn chair for 6 hours and read a really good book :)

Now pros at the bus system, we headed back to Izmir and awoke for an early morning walk to the train station to catch our train to Selchuk (about 1.5 hour away) to meet our tour guide for...Ephesus!

We booked the Ephesus tour through this really great Australian company called No Frills Tours. When we walked into the tour office, Erin recognized one of the couples there as being from her church, and I recognized a couple I had made friends with in the Izmir airport who were from Dallas. So our group of 6 Texans and 2 Australians was pretty chatty and friendly the whole time, which thrilled our tour guide (who was also chatty and friendly) and made for a great day!

The amphitheater in Ephesus

The library in Ephesus

Gateway from the library to the agora (marketplace/meeting place)

Terrace houses that they are still uncovering - mosaics, painting, and 1500 year old indoor plumbing still intact! Only about 3% of Ephesus has been uncovered...can you imagine what the place will look like 50-100 years if the archaeological efforts continued to be funded!?

Ephesus was incredible and was the place I was most looking forward to seeing on this trip. To think I walked along streets that Paul walked on, in the city he taught in...wow. So thankful and amazed to have seen part of the Bible come to life.