Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Sunday, June 29, 2008 Ankara

We’re finally in Ankara. After a most adventurous trip from Kapadokya to Ankara where our driver almost refused to take us to Ankara and was on his way to Istanbul, we finally arrived in Ankara and went to Bilkent University where we stayed in dorms.

Ankara was nice. The first day we went over to Gordion and walked around those interesting ancient ruins and visited King Midas’ tomb. That’s right. The tomb of the guy whose touch turned everything to gold. Apparently it doesn’t work when you’re dead because his tomb was of wood not gold. But now they’re saying that the guy they found in the tomb might be Midas’ father instead of Midas, so maybe the golden touch skips a couple generations. We were taken around the Gordion ruins by Ken Sams, a professor from UNC who’s been working on this site for quite some time.

The next day, we went to Anitkabir, the place where the man of Turkey, Ataturk is buried. I’d asked for my grandfather to take us around the place because he has many interesting stories and he kindly accepted and showed us around. After Anitkabir we went over to the castle and to the Anatolian Civilizations museum and walked and explored around that. The museum we toured with another professor friend of Prof Shields’, I don’t remember his name at this time but if I do I’ll re-update and note it.

The night of the 30th we took the train instead of the disastrous Fez Travel bus to get back to Istanbul. The next morning, we were finally back home. I had missed Istanbul.

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