Brenden & Carissa Go To Turkey, Part 1: Trabzon

Brenden and I set off for Turkey a few days before New Years. The Georgian Black Sea coast (and the border crossing near there) is about a 6 hour journey, so on the first day, we took a marshrutka to Batumi, the 3rd largest Georgian city, and the city closest to the Turkish border. That was a long trip, but we made it safe and sound, and we met up with our friend Jeff who was flying out to Istanbul that night. After a late lunch, we continued onto our hotel where we watched a Russian version of “American's Funniest Home Videos.” We decided this show was amazing, because no translation is necessary. Cats being pulled by toddlers into bathtubs and grooms fainting at weddings because they locked their knees is funny in any language (although I probably wouldn't have thought it funny if Brenden had fainted at our wedding). Anyway, we planned to go out again to get dinner, but I ended up having a migraine, and we all know where that ends, so Brenden went to a local shop and bought some pretzels, chocolate, Coke, and water, and although I didn't eat anything that night, it turned out to be a great idea, because the next day would be a long one.

Sunday morning, we left the hotel at 20 minutes to 8am, and the receptionist clearly thought we were crazy, and said he thought there would be no marshrutkas at that hour. I could see why he would think that because it was as dark as midnight when we went outside, but there was one marshrutka waiting when we got there, and it just so happened to be the one to the border. Unfortunately, we didn't leave at 8am (as I presume we were supposed to leave), but one of the bebias (literally “grandmother”; used for any older female) on board yelled at the marshrutka driver, and soon we were on our way. It was just light when we got to the border, which was deserted. We walked over the border without incident, and there was one taxi on the other side, who first wanted us to pay $20 to get to the nearest Turkish town, Hopa, about 15km away. It was a very odd experience; all of a sudden our Georgian did us no good. Even simple things like negotiating a taxi price had to be carried out through sign language because our taxi driver spoke only Turkish (and maybe some Russian). We finally agreed to pay $5 a person, and wait for a third person to share the taxi with. However, as we realized it was actually only about 6:30am (since all of Turkey is 2 hours behind Georgia), we waited for about 15 minutes before a third man showed up. Then we were on our way along a tiny coastal highway. This area of Turkey is breathtaking: the Black Sea on one side and cliffs, with lush green vegetation, rise sharply on the other side.

The Turkish bus system is actually quite efficient and amazing, especially coming from Georgia (which is not to say that I haven't been impressed with the handiness of Georgian transportation on more than one occasion, but they don't have buses in Georgia like they do in Turkey). Anyway, we only had to wait about 10 minutes, which we took to eat our pretzels, and then we were on our way to Trabzon, a Turkish city of about 200,000 on the Black Sea. We had been told it was a 2 ½-3 hour bus ride, but it turned into 3 ½ as we stopped anytime a pedestrian appeared. As the highway basically continued through the towns along the way, that was quite a bit. We realized a bit later that not only was it very early in the morning, but also a Sunday, which was why the bus was so empty and we stopped so frequently.

We arrived in Trabzon around 10:30 (but 12:30 Georgia time) and first ate, then decided to explore the shopping opportunities. The guidebook said that Trabzon was a great place to buy leather, and mentioned one street in particular that had many leather shops. As I intended to buy a new purse and boots on our trip to Turkey, we set out to find that street. The guidebook's map of Trabzon is rather inadequate, as it leaves out all the unimportant side streets that are necessary for orientation, at least without major landmarks. We wandered around for a very long time, looking for this street. Eventually, we decided to take a cab to the street, knowing we couldn't be far. The cab driver pointed us to the correct street instead, as we were indeed very close, but it was no wonder we didn't recognize it as the leather street. There were 3 leather shops on the whole of the long street, and there were no leather boots and very few purses. The shopping portion of our Trabzon trip being a bust, we decided to see the sights.

We had already explored the whole of the city center area, but the Trabzon Museum isn't too far off from the main street, so we went there first. The Trabzon Museum is located in a house built for Turkey's leader following the first World War, Ataturk (although he only was there three times). He did, however, write the major portion of his will in this house, and it is filled both with artifacts from Turkey's ancient history (statues, clay pots, and so on) and more recent items of curiosity. I think Brenden's favorite was the gun room, but I preferred the beautiful Qurans and prayer books.

The Trabzon museum was a very interesting introduction to Turkey's long history. After the museum, we took a mini-bus to the Hagia Sofia Museum in Trabzon. Inside, much of the original details had been destroyed, but it was a beautiful room and a very good entrance into Turkish architecture, and the view of the Black Sea was beautiful..

After taking a mini-bus back into the center, we ate dinner at a small Turkish cafe, where I was introduced to the Iskender kebab, now my favorite Turkish dish. We marveled at the service (it was like the waiters actually wanted us there, and wanted to serve us, something we haven't experienced in Georgia except at expat restaurants in Tbilisi). We walked around after dinner for a bit, although we discovered that although it gets light in Turkey much earlier than it does in Georgia, that comes at the cost of it getting dark much earlier also (by 5pm, it was completely dark; it's closer to 6pm in Akh).

We got to Trabzon's airport a bit early and then just checked in and waited. It's a small airport, although bigger than the ones in Waco and Kona. We had a pleasant flight, but getting home was a major chore because we'd flown into Istanbul's smaller, domestic airport. We eventually found our street but we didn't get to sleep until around 3am (Turkish time), due to the bad location of our room (right next to the lobby, where there was an enthusiastic conversation going on). It was a bad night for a number of reasons, and I started to feel like our trip to Turkey had been a mistake.

But never fear—the next day dawned beautiful and clear, and as we set out to see Istanbul, I knew it would be a good trip.

 Carissa

P.S. Below are pictures of a Quran at the Trabzon Museum, the outside of the Hagia Sofia Museum in Trabzon, and the Black Sea view from the Hagia Sofia Museum in Trabzon. Due to the difficulty in uploading large quantities of pictures to the blog, larger numbers of our vacation photos will be uploaded to an album on Facebook instead. If you don't have a Facebook account but want to see the pictures, please email me or comment below, and I'll send you the link when I get things uploaded (and maybe later in the spring, when the Internet is better, I'll get a chance to upload more than a few photos to the blog).