Martın en iyisi (The best of March)

As Will pointed out recently, March was a pretty dry month here in Buckville, the online home of my musings and narrations. Do I have anything to show for the time I could have spent posting here? Well, yes and no. The biggest internet time-wasters for me over the last month have been choosing my March Madness college basketball bracket and participating in three fantasy baseball drafts and managing my teams. So far, I'm in the 99% percentile nation-wide for the March Madness picks and in first place for two fantasy baseball leagues, so I've got that going for me. But if my memoirist calls someday to chat about my glory days, let's all agree to focus more on the following:

-My trip to Olympos was superb, in all aspects from weather to company (although the return could have been timed a little better; usually I like to try and turn in before 4:30am on worknights). I'll admit, even my Andy Dufresne going to Mexico-esque hope and anticipation for the voyage was waning a little bit as we waited in the smoky BK Lounge (our friendly local Burger King at the bottom of the hill) from ten to eleven on Friday night. It was raining harder than it did for everyone's favorite Shawshank escape during pretty much the exact interval it took us to walk down to the rendez-vous point. Once we got on the bus, there were two stops in the first half hour, one to buy cigarettes (I can only assume that's the reason we were at the gas station for twenty minutes without filling up) and one to smoke them. An anomaly? No, we pretty much stopped at least once an hour all the way to the coast for cigarettes. The driver was badly in need of a Skip Gates-style coffee thermos. Employing the help of some ear plugs, I made it there fairly well-rested but with a neck that made bubblewrap sounds every time I stretched it.

The coolest parts were definitely the ancient city, the beach, the chimera fire, the beach, and the boat tour, a.k.a. everything we did. Setting out from the tree-house hostel (we actually stayed in bungalows, but it was still really cool) in the late morning, we took a walking tour of the ancient Lycian city of Olympos that lay between us and the beach. We passed a group of mountain-climbers practicing on a rocky, over-hanging part of one of the hills, but they didn't return our waves, even with their dangling feet that obviously weren't being used for anything else. The necropoli in the hills were again one of the highlights of the site, and I gotta say, seeing so many of them surviving from the ancient world is making me think twice about the Donny Karamazov method for my interrment. As you can see in the one on the right, trees, grass and shrubs were coming up on a lot of these suckers, and most were covered by some form of plant growth not recently planted by loved ones.

After passing through the Roman theater (capacity about 1,000, no-smoking sign still intact), where I pretened to be playing a hard-core AC/DC solo (you're not hard-core unless you live hard-core) for a bunch of robed ancients in the stadium seating, we made it out to the beach. As you can see from the picture on the left, the scenery is even nicer than the Bilkent reservoir that my room looks out on. My only complaints were that it was more rocky than sandy and there were no bbq grills built-in, ala Winlslow Park, so Freeport is still safe in getting my vote for future family gatherings. The beach was also fed by a beautiful but frigid stream of fresh water that wound through the rocks and created a nice pond-sized pool just behind the water.

In the evening, we wound out way up through the hills to the Chimera fires, a place where natural gas seeping out through the rocks has created a permanent natural fire for thousands of years. It was a very picturesque spot at twilight, and was frequented by locals as well as us yabancılar, so I guess its appeal doesn't wear out too quick. We had to walk a kilometer up the hill when we got out of the bus (haha, take THAT smokers), so seeing the fires poke through the trees as we came up was a very revelatory way to encounter them. Walking up beyond where you see the fire in the background in the picture on the right, I was able to get a view of the whole area below, stretching a few kilometers out to the Mediterranean, with just a few lights from various houses and hostels along the roads.

Sunday we took a glass-bottomed boat tour of the ruins of another Lycean city whose remains are now ninety percent below water. Unfortunately, the water was a little too turbulent for getting a good look at the ruins, so the best part of that trip ended up being swimming off the boat for about twenty minutes during a break. Mark it as the first time I ever went swimming in the Mediterranean on Easter. Hey, Martin Luther King Jr. had the Penn Center, I've got Olympos.

Four of our coleagues here, Ananda, Colleen, Alex and Lauren are leaving after this course, so I'm off to say goodbye to them this evening. However, I'll write again soon about the highlights of March, including my trip around Ankara with Mom and some books I've been reading on history and the theology of MLK.