Chilling with Atilla
From Athens, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Egypt in Selcuk, Turkey on Aug 13 '09
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After nodding off during the hour and a half trip from Samos Island to Kusadasi, we wearily woke and trudged through customs at the wharf. We had been asked by Rosie at Atilla's Getaway to pick up some bottles of duty free alcohol (funny hey?) so did that and then head to the meeting place where she said someone would pick us up to bring us to the hostel. We were picked up by a rushed cab driver who hurtled off out of Kusadasi only stopping once to pick up some meat pastries for his pregnant wife - which he kindly shared with his two starving passengers!
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Our room wasn't ready but there were wooden pavillions with inviting cushions sitting by the pool so we napped in there until we were woken up and taken to our room. It was a bit of a wipe out that day, I slept the whole time while James swam and lazed by the pool. I emerged for dinner and met some fellow australian travellers, Teghan and Sarah and also a lot of other nice people. Dinner was vegetarian, lots of food, it was ok but the beer was cheap - Efes, Turkey's own brew.
Next day was spent lazing by the pool again (I know, we're both sloths now) and then off to Ephesus for the afternoon to see the ruins, hear the story of Paul addressing the Ephesians and bypass the Genuine Fake Watch stores. James and I both got audio guides and they were in English (well James's second one was) but they were read out by Stephen Hawking or the computer voice anyway. Whoever had typed it up had made a couple typos too so we giggled our way through the streets, not learning much but perfecting our robot voices. We had been picked up by a lovely lady who had a carpet shop (surprise surprise) and she picked us up afterwards and took us to show us her carpets. We had apple tea while her Melbourne-born colleague Mike showed us all the different types of carpets. Unfortunately he didn't have a very receptive audience as James and I wanted a rug but weren't going to by it at the first shop we went into, and Teghan and Sarah really didn't want a rug at all. Teghan made a purchase for the team of two cushion covers, hee hee. Dinner at Atilla's was good, we ordered a tower of beer afterwards to share, then another and another. Atilla came and shouted us to some tequila shots and it went a bit down hill from there of course...
Audio Guide: "The wind-ding staircase of the lib-reary is through to be from the Hell-enic error."
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