Hello from San Juan! I’m writing from a Notepad window actually, because the wifi connection here is SO flaky. Once I’m done writing I’ll try to connect again and again until I upload it.

Our flight down here was just fine. I had a chatty person next to me on the way to Fort Lauderdale. She was sitting on the aisle, and chatting with a guy across the aisle who had the whole row to himself - I have no idea why he didn’t just move over and take the window seat and let her have the aisle on that side. I managed to sleep for a great portion of the flight, fortunately, but toward the end I woke up and she chattered at me a lot.

The Fort Lauderdale airport is absolutely dismal. We were in Terminal H and the only thing I was able to find to eat that was timely, inexpensive, and not really bad for me was a granola bar. The flight to San Juan was fine, I slept about half the trip; this time I had the window so when I woke up I was comfortable and not next to some chatterbox. We landed uneventfully but had a hard time getting our luggage because the carousels weren’t properly marked. Once our flight’s luggage finally started to appear, ours came up fast and we got a cab to the Coqui Inn. The cab driver was a complete ass, though. We had spotted the hotel from a ways away, and we were surprised when he blew right past it, so we said something. He said “oh, well, you obviously know better than me” and then dropped us off in front of something else that was also labeled with our hotel name, but was actually a BACK entrance. We had to drag our suitcases back down the block to the door we had gone past in the first place…the cabbie was an asshole and didn’t deserve a tip.

Our hotel is really cute and charming, there are murals everywhere that I will have to take pictures of! Our first room had a slow leak in the toilet, though (I discovered this before using it, fortunately), so we had to switch. We ended up in a slightly nicer room, and unpacked all our stuff. I did some school work (despite the crappy wifi) and we ordered pizza and watched X-Files. Then we decided it was too late to catch the A-5 bus to Old San Juan - it was 6pm when we were thinking of leaving, and the bus only runs till 9pm; after that you have to take a $20 cab back. So we decided we’d just walk to a nearby grocery store instead. It rained part of the trip but we found safety in a bus shelter and chatted about things. We continued on, and bought a bunch of stuff. I had to get a new bottle of continous spray sunscreen - we’d accidentally left it in the carry-on, and it was more than 3oz, so they threw it out in DC. We also got some diet champagne cola soda, which is impossible to find back home - you can get the regular kind, but never diet! We also got a $7 bottle of vodka and some juice to mix it with, plus some snacks, and then we came back to the hotel.

We were hot from walking, and A beat me into the shower to cool off. Unfortunately, while in there, she discovered…there was no hot water in the shower. So she went to the front desk and they offered us a couple of other rooms, one of which had better wifi than this one, but the rooms overall weren’t better. So we’re still in the room with no hot water in the shower, but it’s a nice room and very Caribbean-feeling. (One of the others we were offered felt like a dorm room.)

I think tomorrow we are going to the Arecibo radio telescope, assuming we can get a rental car. I was surprised that there was no public transportation out there, but I guess it’s too far. I am going to have to take stock of my schoolwork tomorrow too; today was long and hectic but tomorrow I want to make sure I can keep up with everything. It’s essential that I keep up.

I have a connection at the moment, so I’m going to upload this. I’m pretty tired anyway! Tomorrow I will be taking pictures even though I didn’t today. Oh my god, A just went to get up from the bed and said “Oh, a nasty roach!” This hotel may be charming but it’s a little scary! So now we are making sure all food goes in the fridge!

Right now I am searching the USA Hotel Guide trying to find hotels for Anaheim. My wife has decided that we should stay there for the first couple of nights and go to Disneyland, and then return to El Segundo for her training. I worked up the package pricing to stay in a Disney “Good Neighbor” hotel, which is $440-512, and now I have to figure out if there are ways to do it cheaper. The Los Angeles hotel guide found the Super 8 right by Disneyland for $80/nt, which comes to $446.20 including theme park tickets and parking. The Motel 6 “Good Neighbor” hotel is slightly cheaper, but there is a fee for the wireless Internet access, whereas the Super 8 has free access. They’re both walking distance from Disneyland, apparently.

I love playing travel agent.

Today can probably only be described as a disaster. We made it to Seattle in the end, but there were catastrophes along the way. We were almost to BWI Airport when my mother realized she had left her retainers at home. Fortunately FedEx offers same day service - it was $275 but she now has her retainers. The flight from Baltimore was fine, we had a three hour layover in Denver that was fine, and the flight to Seattle was fine even though I was in the middle seat. When we touched down I turned on my phone…and I had voicemail from Travelocity saying our reservation had been screwed up and I should call the hotel. So I did, and we’d been moved to a somewhat nicer sister property down the road. I told her a FedEx package would be coming there, and she promised to call. I was saved a mile (RT) walk because the FedEx courier was willing to drive it over. Now I’m exhausted from a screwed up day and I’m going to sleep.

Travel and Miletus

The first bus ride of the day was fairly short: we went to a carpet-making school. We saw the entire process in reverse - the girls working at the looms, how the yarn is dyed and what natural items are used for what colors, and the process by which they unwrap the cocoons. The man who dyes the yarn doesn’t speak any English, but he memorized a speech about his work, complete with jokes. He showed us the indigo vat, and lifted out some of the yarn. It was yellow when he removed it, but within a few seconds the whole thing had turned blue. I know it was just oxidization, but it still looked like magic. I also learned that silk is actually worm spit: their cocoons are made with saliva. The school owner provided drinks for all of us, and showed us several dozen rugs. There was a small silk one we really wanted to buy, and it would have been wonderful in our house, but we just couldn’t afford it - so we took a picture. Another member of our group ended up getting it for $1900. The next bus trip was a couple of hours. I tried reading on the way, but had to give it up after a while because I was getting carsick. I’ve determined that I don’t like bus travel. I do just fine on planes (which is good, or the transatlantic trip would have been even worse) and trains, but on a bus I tend to get sick. I’d like to find some Dramamine soon, because we still have a lot of bus time ahead of us. We finally reached Miletus to look at the ruins there, but the first thing my girlfriend and I saw was a mother dog who had come to greet the bus. We had been snacking on cookies, so we gave her a couple - she was very grateful. As our group climbed the stairs into the theater, someone heard squeaking and pointed out puppies off in a corner. When our guide finished the lecture in the theater, we went and took pictures of the puppies. At our next stop, Didyma, I got to carry a stray cat around the entire Temple of Apollo. He was absolutely filthy, in desperate need of an ear mite treatment, and he shed a lot of fur all over me - but he was so very sweet. He kept mushing my face and purring at me; a couple of times he climbed onto my shoulders and at one point I had my arm extended horizontally and he was clinging to it as if it were a narrow tree branch. The rest of the day was spent driving, and we didn’t get to Pamukkale until 7:30. We put on our bathing suits under our clothes and had a quick dinner before heading to the thermal pool. They keep it at 48°C (which is about 118°F), but because it’s indoors all the steam stays close to the water and it’s hard to breathe. So we didn’t stay there long, but it felt very good. It was hard to get to sleep because there was a party going on somewhere (and then they brought our laundry back at 11:30 when we weren’t expecting it until the next day).

From Kusadasi

I had seen Adaland on the way into town the previous night, but got a better view of it in the morning. It’s a water amusement park - we didn’t get to go, of course - but what’s remarkable is that it’s on the side of a mountain. There are numerous water slides, and it’s obvious they offer great views. Our first stop of the day was at Meryemana, the house where the alleged Virgin Mary allegedly spent her last days. I wasn’t terribly impressed - it’s almost completely a reconstruction. At Troy I could at least tell myself someone was there, but at Meryemana there are no ruins - just the reconstruction. I don’t believe most of the story about Mary anyway, so the site just didn’t interest me much. (To calm the shocked, I acknowledge that there could have been a person or persons who might have done some of what is attributed to the character “Virgin Mary,” but I don’t believe in any of the religious aspects. I believe there was probably a person who may have vaguely resembled Jesus in actions, but I believe he was a respected person and teacher - I do not believe in his divinity.) Our next stop was Ephesus, and we spent a considerable amount of time there. Before entering the site I made an impulse buy of an $8 shirt - fortunately it looked good on me when I got it back to the hotel to try on. Our guide led us carefully through most of Ephesus, but there were so many other voices that I found it hard to concentrate on his. I heard a number of different languages and kept listening to them, and even other English-speakers (guides and tourists) distracted me. But his lectures at Ephesus are a good example of how amazing his knowledge is. Everything - names, dates, purposes, explanations - is all in his head, and he can recite all of it in his second language. My main impression from Ephesus is that it’s big, crowded, and dirty in parts - I got dust all over myself because I tried to scratch an itch on my lower leg through my pants using my foot, and got the brown dirt from my shoes onto my black pants. I did enjoy the site, though, and as I was eager to find a good souvenir I went to the shops at the exit. The sellers there were really aggressive there, but their favorite phrase was “looking is free.” Unfortunately, they said it so many times that I wanted to say “okay, thanks, now shut up and let me look.” With just a few exceptions, they all have more or less the same merchandise; everything is probably priced the same anyway so I paid $1 for a pack of 12 postcards (that’s been standard throughout Turkey) and $8 for a book - probably more than that volume is worth, but the one I wanted is $18 and I knew I couldn’t afford that. I bought some earrings at the restaurant we visited for lunch, and then we moved on to our afternoon tour. We visited a small village called Sirince, which has become a tourist spot - their primary income is now from tourism. There’s a 19-year-old boy there (he’s to join the army next year for his compulsory service) named Selçuk who has taught himself fairly good English and likes to greet the tourists as they arrive. He invited all 30-some-odd of us into his home, a habit his mother must be annoyed with by now. The house is 300 years old, you have to go outside to get to the kitchen, and the stairs are alarmingly shaky; the accents in their main room are family pictures and a small Furby toy. At the hotel my girlfriend was pretty tired, but I had seen the room service menu the night before and we’d agreed I could get something because it was so inexpensive. The menu indicated they had a variety of ice cream flavors, but when I called they only had a few so I ordered caramel. They brought it fairly quickly, and we shared it before my girlfriend fell asleep.

Travel and Pergamum

We woke up early again this morning and got back on the bus. I was more awake than the previous time we had to be up so early, but our guide didn’t say much early in the trip so it didn’t really matter. We had gotten some snacks at a grocery the night before, but I wasn’t as eager to tear into them as I’d expected to be. Instead I did some puzzles and tried reading a bit. I believe the trip from Çanakkale to Bergama was longer than the trip from Istanbul to Bursa, but I’m not sure. At a rest stop along the way, I found a book called “La Vie sexuelle des ottomans” and paid $15 for it. They didn’t have an English copy, but I figured with a dictionary I’d manage okay. Pergamum was easily visible as we approached Bergama, as it’s situated atop one of the higher hills in the area. I really enjoyed the Pergamum ruins. There were signs throughout the site explaining both the structures and the restoration process. The city is entirely on the hill, so the builders didn’t have much space to work with: the theater is much more steep than other Roman theaters because they didn’t want to cut into the rest of their space. I was a bit surprised to learn that some of the column sections are modern replacements, but apparently that’s common with sites this old - they just can’t find everything, and there wouldn’t be a good way to present what they have found if they didn’t fill in the gaps. Some of the sections are a dull gray (original) and others are bright white (modern), but I’d never have noticed if our guide hadn’t pointed it out. We didn’t spend nearly as much time in the ruins as I would have liked, but toward the end of the tour I realized I’d lost my earrings. I had been wearing a dress shirt over my t-shirt, and when I took off my earrings I put them in the breast pocket. It was warm and sunny at Pergamum, so I took off the shirt and carried it with me…and of course the earrings fell out. So somewhere on a hilltop near the Aegean, surrounded by ancient marble, are three pairs of small earrings. I looked for replacements at the vendors near the entrance, but the pairs I liked were all too expensive. I also came across a book called “The Sexual Life of the Ottomans” for $15. I really wanted it, and the guy agreed to sell it for $13 (fortunately his English was pretty good), but I declined and got back on the bus to wait for the others. After a few minutes, though, I changed my mind and ran back out to buy the book - so I now have two copies. We had lunch in Bergama, and I bought some yarn and a crochet hook from a shopkeeper who spoke no English. The ride from Bergama to Kusadasi was fairly short, and we rode through Izmir which I found interesting - it’s a rather modern city, as it was completely destroyed by fire in the not-too-distant past. Kusadasi seems exceptionally modernized - it’s a beach resort, and all the hotels are very fancy. They crowd the shoreline, of course, but in between the hotels are run-down little shacks. I liked our hotel a lot, though - we had a suite, there was a channel guide for the TV (I like to catch English news shows so I don’t lose touch with the world while on vacation), and both rooms had a balcony with a good sea view.