We set out today for my second trip to Ephesus, not a long bus ride today so that was nice. We stopped first at the famous Artemisium, which is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. I had seen it from a distance before but never actually wandered right through it. I walked right up to the last remaining column and saw the area where they found a hoard of the first coins ever minted.
Speaking of coins, Nigel had come across some random guy selling ‘Ancient Coins’ and saying that his father was an archaeologist and called me over to see them. It was so funny, as soon as he put the coins in my hand, I could tell they were fake. Even if the weight hadn’t thrown me, they Ptolemaic Egyptian replica was a dead giveaway. We all managed to have a good laugh at that.
After the Artemisium we went to the city, it was quite cool to see the reactions of other people to the site of the Celsus library was also cool that they had a little play on there about every hour. Nigel and I ended up going on ahead of the group and going inside the library. I showed Nigel the ancient brothel which was quite amusing, and he tried to get me to go down the tunnel behind a no entry sign. I might have if this hadn’t been the Fez training trip. We got our guide Xenap to take some pictures of us and then headed off to the theatre. Which we managed to almost get under, and Nigel insisted on having his photo taken behind every “No Entry” sign he could find.
We then went off to lunch, on the way taking pictures of the signs for ‘Genuine Fake Watches’
After our trip to Ephesus, we were driven to a little town called Sirinci, which apparently used to be full of Greeks before the great population exchange. It was high on a hill and all the streets were cobblestones. It had a pleasant little marketplace and didn’t seem overly touristy, which was nice, after the package deal bonanza we had just come from. We were taken to a wine shop and given glass after glass to try. My favourites were the fruit flavours that came out. First it was normal ones like mulberry and pomegranate, then came the strange ones like peach and kiwi fruit.
The mulberry wine was my favourite, it kind of tasted like Ribena. We hiked a bit further up the hill until we came to an old church, it was really nice and cool in there and there were still remains of a few frescoes. I managed to get upstairs and have a walk around and for some reason insisted on squashing myself into this really tight little niche, I can’t seem to remember why. We left the church and then went downstairs to where the monks used to live. This has now been converted into yet another winery, and we did some more tasting in there. They had it all decked out in the Victorian setting, and it was really cool underground in the heat of the day.
We were about to get back on the bus when Assim, our driver, dragged us all into this cafe. We may have been dragged in, but we had to be dragged out again. Talk about mellow. We just sat around drinking Efes on these lounges for about two hours, getting more and more relaxed. I think we were all disappointed when Vanessa told us it was time to go back to Kusadasi.
