Sunday, May 25, 2014
Hello!
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| We shared "mushroompan" |
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| R's lamb with baked potato! |
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| My great steak with aubergine pile! |
As I posted prior to dinner last night, I now need to
recount the wonderful meal we had here at the hotel! The restaurant is on the top floor, and we
went upstairs about 7:30 p.m. We walked
in, and wow, boy – turns out that in spite of the “no smoking” sign, they had
the doors open, which meant that it was OK to smoke inside! However…you know how I am, and when the staff
found that this was a real problem for me, they immediately told the offenders
to stop! Imagine, this was a table with
5 guys, and 3 of them just stood up and went outside; no problem! Also, I was the only gal in the entire crowd.
We started with a really wonderful bottle of dry Turkish
white wine, made here in Kayseri. It was
excellent! Then, for starters, we shared
something called “mushroom pan.” What
came out was a wonderful collection of mushrooms cooked with the Turkish sweet
peppers, and served in a cast iron pan – smoking hot, and maintained its heat
quite a while! For main course, Robert
had lamb shish which came with flat bread and a baked potato!! I had their steak in mushroom sauce, but as I
had no idea how to say “rare” I figured I’d get it how I got it. However, the chef (who is a real cutie, and
loves to cook!) cooked it rare, and that, along with the mushroom sauce and a
wonderful pile of cooked eggplant with tomatoes! It was wonderful!
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| My ice cream sundae! |
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| Robert's fruit plate |
And, we even had dessert!
Robert got a stunning fruit plate, which he
very much enjoyed, and I had Turkish vanilla ice cream with a hint of chocolate
sauce and walnuts on top – very, very good!
Back to the room and to bed about 10 p.m.
Up this morning in the 6-ish range, and down for breakfast
about 7:30 a.m. Lovely, rain-washed city
with sunshine and fluffy white clouds all around! Very good breakfast, and we were able to
answer email, as apparently the signal in the room (which works fine for my iPad!)
isn’t strong enough for Gulliver! We’ll
also head down there when we post the blog.
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| Kanes upper town |
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| Palace excavation |
Out the door about 8:30 a.m. and heading for our first stop
today – Kanes/Kanish, which isn’t far from town. The site of Kanes has been occupied since the
Chalcolithic days, and became the home of the largest Assyrian Trading Colony. It was then also for a short time the very
first capital for the Hittites before they moved operations to Hatusha! Something like 20,000 clay tablets were
recovered from the trading colony, along with legal and personal
correspondence. In fact, according to
one of the signs we read, Kanes was where Anatolian history really started, as
these were the very first tablets with traces of the Hittite hieroglyphs.
The site is actually in two parts, about 100 yards apart on
opposite sides of the road. The “higher”
part is the location of the palace and noble residences; the “lower” part the
area for the Assyrian Trading colony (kind of like a duty-free zone), and later
the “regular” people.
Fortunately, there is fairly good signage in English, with
some very good diagrams, as we tried to understand just what went on and
where.
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| A lot of upper town to excavate! |
(The individual artifacts
excavated we either saw yesterday at the Kayseri Museum, or in the Museum of
Anatolian Civilization in Ankara, where we went two years ago.)
Nice to have the site to ourselves, but boy,
where there foxtails growing everywhere!
We both ended up taking off shoes and cleaning off our socks!
Then to the lower town.
This was actually a bit more interesting, as there was more
to see in the way of residences and shops.
Very enjoyable visit!
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| Lower Town |
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| Lower town with flowers! |
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| Lower town |
Then, we decided to head to Fratkin and see if by any
chance, we could find the Hittite carving.
And believe it or not, WE DID!!
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| And we actually found it! |
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| King and Storm God |
Fortunately for us, somebody over the years had the sense to put up some
signage, and with that, plus the coordinates we got off a web-site, we were
able to go right to it!
And it was
FABULOUS!
We parked the car, then walked
toward the river (it was carved right at the riverbank) where we found an
actual flight of metal steps!!
Figured
that was a little clue, so we descended, walked around the corner, and WOW, was
about all that I could say!
(There is
something so odd about actually finding something that was written thousands of
years ago – chipped into the stone – and left outdoors ever since!
And having it all to yourself!)
There are two sets of carvings, both from the
mid-13
th century BC.
The
first is a carving of the King (Hattusili III) having a meal with Teshub, the
Storm God.
The second is a carving of
Queen Puduhepa and the Goddess Hepat; they were identified by the hieroglyphs next
to the carvings.
It was truly an amazing
moment, and we would just wish that more villages would put up a little
signage!!
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| Hieroglyph identifying Queen and Goddess |
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| Note stairs in the background! |
From there, we wandered through some truly beautiful back
country – followed the stream (Zamanti River) at Fratkin through several
beautiful valleys – absolutely stunning!
We got back to the hotel about 4, in a torrential rain
storm! (And where, of course, are our
umbrellas?? Safe and warm and dry in the
hotel, of course!) I’ll get the blog
posted – with some wonderful photos! – and get ready for another lovely dinner
upstairs!
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| Stunning scenery! |
Tomorrow we head about 2½ hours West to Aksaray, where we
will be for two nights. I figured that
since we do have time tomorrow, we would hit some of the Cappadocian sites;
there are definitely some lovely things to see!
More later!
m
xxx
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