Greece Pictures: Part 4

The next morning, we docked in Ephesus, Turkey! Famous rulers in history such as Caesar walked down the streets of Ephesus thousands of years ago, so it was amazing to see the ancient city! (By the way, one of the temples in Ephesus was one of the ancient seven wonders of the world.)

On our way to Ephesus, we got glimpses of modern Turkey:

(click all to enlarge)

And this is Ephesus:

The main street of Ephesus:

Some inscriptions:

Mosaics on the floor:

Intricate carvings on all of the columns and structures! (By the way, I had to do some retouching on this photo so you can see the carvings better.)

This is the ancient library of Celsus... absolutely stunning!

This is the Great Theatre of Ephesus. It was scary climbing up all those narrow, rickety steps, but it was even worse coming back down! The stairs don't really have any depth to them, so it's hard to get a strong foothold on them. We were nervously scooting down step by step... it probably took us at least five minutes or so to get down!

My teacher and her husband performed "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll on the stage at the bottom there. The acoustics were really nice. :-)

Tbe lands surrounding Ephesus:

Exiting Ephesus. Aren't these trees weird? I'm still wondering why the bottoms are white. We checked and they weren't painted or anything...

Because Turkey is famous for its rugs and carpets, we visited a carpet store where we got to see how their carpets are made. We watched a weaver at work and we also got to look at a variety of rugs and walk on top of them:

And we also went to the marketplace! We were told that Turkish shop owners are pretty pushy, and we were (kind of) taught how to bargain. I'm pretty bad at bargaining in general... I bought a handmade silk and pashmina scarf (red and gold AND reversible) for 20 euros, and I'm still not sure if I paid too much.

Either way, it was really fun and an eye-opening experience! We had a scary experience in a knockoff handbag store, where the owner kept taking us to more and more rooms and wouldn't let us leave. :-/ And everyone would keep yelling after us. One guy yelled, "Hey! Are you girls Indian?" We kept walking without saying anything, but later on, we all wished that we had yelled back, "No! We're Scandinavian!" :-D

Anyways, here's a shot of the marketplace:

In the afternoon, we docked at another small island (I think it was called Patmos). There wasn't really that much to do there, so we headed for the beach to swim in the Aegean Sea!

As you can tell by my expression, the water was really really cold. (And yes, I am wearing a swimsuit under there.) :-)

Back on the cruise, relaxing with ice cream: