Goreme Part 2: Nature versus Chris and Ashlyn

Good morning from Goreme!  Still living in a cave, and still wearing coats.  We woke-up nice and early today (5:30 AM) to take our balloon ride through Cappadocia, but after waiting for a couple of hours for the weather conditions to change, the flight was called off for the day.  We’re going to try to go again first thing tomorrow morning, but need to catch our bus to the next town at 9:30AM, so hopefully all goes well!  They pumped us full of coffee before sending us home, so I figured I may as well update the blog.

Yesterday we went to the Open Air Museum in town where they have a little ancient city that was carved out of the rocks.  It was pretty cool.  Here are a couple of pictures:

A pottery tree right outside the museum.

Us sitting at the table carved out of the cave.  The scene behind us was ‘the last supper’.

The landscape

Yesterday afternoon was pretty nasty weather.  It started to rain quite hard while we were sitting in our little cave.  It was hard enough for the power to go out in all of Goreme, and caves are pretty dark when the lights are off, so we sat around with our headlamps on.  Here is how cool we look with our headlamps on in a cave.  Hot stuff if you ask me.

Last night we went to “Turkish Night” which is a dinner and show all about Turkish Culture.  It was a pretty fun show to go and see.  Their basic strategy is as follows: Collect money from hundreds of tourists.  Drive them to a resturant outside of town.  Lead them down a long tunnel underground to a… wait for it…carved out cave!  Start brining out as much booze as possible and get everyone completely hammered.  Begin show.  That was the basic idea…and we loved it!!  Bad night to forget our camera.  It started with the whirling dervish dancers (not the real ones, but we got the idea), Turkish wedding ceremony (complete with a donkey that was somehow brought down this long tunnel), Turkish dancers, belly dancers, and knife throwing.  I think some of the artistic direction was inspired by the evening entertainment shows that they have at Mexican all inclusive resorts because it did involved a lot of black lights, which was a nice touch.  The other nice thing that they have adopted from the resorts is taking your picture and selling it to you.  Except here there is a special twist, they put your picture on a decorative plate and sell it to you.  Sweet!  So did we spend 10 Turkish Lira on a plate?  You bet we did.

This is the one we bought.  Ashlyn grabbed the wine jug to hold up in the picture (the wine came in huge jugs instead of wimpy bottles) and the Turkish guy was not at all impressed that we wanted to ruin the picture like that so made us retake two pictures his way (they looked like passport photos).  You guys know how much we like to ruin photos, so we thought this one was perfect!