Selçuk
We started in Selçuk, about an hour’s drive from Izmir, and about 2 km from Ephesus (Efes in Turkish). There we stayed in a pleasant and well-decorated hotel appropriately named Bella. Our first day in Selçuk was devoted to the ruins in Ephesus, followed by lunch, a visit to the local farmer’s market, and the Ephesus museum. Ephesus itself was gorgeous: a whole city of ruins, so that one could easily imagine a thriving metropolis whose denizens were obsessed with going to the gym. Not unlike DC, actually. The museum was somewhat lacking however, seemingly separating statues from their heads in an effort to spread the collection over maximum floor space. We spent the evening drinking tea while watching some people we had met play a tile game, obey 101, which was kind of a cross between mahjong and spades, in the sense that two teams of two used combinations of numbered tiles to form multiple sets of three, although after that the rules quickly became confusing. There was a lot of shouting in Turkish when one player either accidentally or not-so-accidentally was found to have an extra tile at the end of a game. It was confusing, but entertaining, and we’d had too much tea either to make sense of it or get a good night’s rest.
Below are my attempts at a) mapping the city and b) drawing the symbol everpresent in our hotel (I believe called a tughra):
