Exploremak-ing

At some point this year while struggling through writing an essay for my Turkish class, I wanted to use the verb, to explore but I simply couldn't muster up the energy to look it up in my dictionary. Instead I added the suffix -mak to the end because every infinitive verb in Turkish ends with either -mak or -mek. It wasn't the first time we have experimented with Tinglish and certainly not the last, but it has a nice ring to it and Rebecca brought it up again this weekend when we were able to do a fair bit of exploremak-ing.

 Saturday afternoon Rebecca and I set out at a leisurely pace to do something a little bit out of the ordinary, to take the train to Tarsus. The train trip is a little under and hour and at about $2 you really can't find a better way to travel. Tarsus is the birthplace of St. Paul and is a very historical city though a lot of that has been destroyed in the past couple thousand years since St. Paul was there. We didn't have any idea where we were going but we had some idea of what we wanted to see and figured we would play the rest by year. We ended up stumbling across this ancient Roman road that I had read about in my guidebook. There we found a very unhelpful man working at a information booth, who while I the watered plants, retrieved maps for us. We also found our way to St. Paul's well where I stole some water, hopefully St. Paul won't take offense. We wandered through the old streets and were talked to everywhere we went. A group of women invited us to join them for tea and a little girl on her bike offered to give us a tour. We did join the women for tea and when the little girl left us she said that she was delighted to have done it, and she meant it. For such an ancient city they don't seem to see a lot of tourists, to me it sort of had a desolate, post-apocalyptic feel to me. We also visited Cleopatra's Gate which has little to do with Cleopatra herself except that it is said that she and Mark Antony met in Tarsus. At St. Paul's church (built in the 19th century, so also little to do with St. Paul) we ran into a group of Americans which was exciting!I got pretty sick on the way back, probably from not enough water and too much sun but nonetheless it was a successful day! 
The next day, we went on another adventure of sorts. One of the the AFS leader's husbands planned a trip for us to Karatepe National Park and the surrounding areas.It was originally planed for us AFS girls but because three of us are away visiting with our families that left just Rebecca and I, our host families, Kenzie's host family, and an assortment of other Turks. Karatepe itself is an open-air museum on a site which has been inhabited for almost 4000 years. It was a pretty beautiful little hike, though it was REALLY hot. Jeans were a really bad choice on my part. Though it was cool to see ruins that date back to the 13th century, if felt a little bit like a sculpture garden, all evenly spaced  out along the paths. We spent the rest of the day visiting ruins in their more natural settings. An unceremonious roadside stop led past some small houses to one of the most awesome arches I have ever seen. Through the arch you come to a big field littered with columns and other remnants of the Roman era in Turkey, it was amazing. The edge of the field meets steep cliffs that crawl up to a castle on a steep rocky out cove. We felt the presence of the Hellenistic period castle as Rebecca and I scurried around the hills surrounding it. The Turks gave us a hard time for being unsafe but we couldn't be bothered, it was so fun! We scampered from one unguarded ruin to the next like mountain goats enjoying the scenery and picturing what took place there hundreds and hundreds of years ago. It was terribly hot, but totally worth it. The best part was either laying down in what we believed to be thousand year old tombs or climbing rickety scaffolding to the top of the arch. It was a wonderful day and just went to remind me of how much Turkey has to offer!

On another note, home in less than a month!