Day 4: Kusadasi, Turkey/ Ephesus

Today was our day in Turkey. We docked into the port at 7 or some other similar insanely early, like at six. We got ready and went up to breakfast. Because it was so early and our family is most definitely not a morning family, we were all very cranky and spent most of the breakfast snapping from each other. At some point we sent Andrew downstairs to put away his sweatshirt because it would most definitely not be needed that day. We told him to meet us in the theater on the fourth floor.

We walk down to the theater as a group and there is no Andrew in sight. We wait five minutes. Still no Andrew. We get the stickers to put us on a bus. Still no Andrew. This is starting to become extremely problematic. We send our Gianni to go find him on multiple occasions, but he is still nowhere to be seen. Eventually Gianni and I go to the front desk to see if we can page him, but were told that we can only page someone in the case of an emergency.

We come back and they start sending us out to go to our buses. We are worried that we still cannot find Andrew, but both Mia and I are convinced that he has done the same thing he loves to do, which is end up wherever our destination was by some stroke of luck while holding a beverage of some sort. We were half right.

We eventually did find him on the first level of the boat, where everyone disembarks. Then, we promptly made fun of him in front of everyone for running away and not coming back to the theater. Now that we had found him successfully, however, we could disembark the bus and then go load the bus for our excursion. On the way out, I did manage to trip on absolutely nothing and fall onto the ground. I think I was distracted by the troupe of Turkish dancers just outside of the ship.

The excursion for Kusadasi was for the ruins at the ancient city of Ephesus. It used to be a huge and bustling town back in the day, but now it’s a big set of ruins. It’s also the site of where Mary apparently died as well as the site of the Temple to Aphrodite (I think), one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. I think you can see one of the remaining pillars of it. We were unable to see either on this tour of Ephesus though. They were far from the main ruins. Other than that, however, the ruins were very cool. They were in very good condition for being ancient ruins. This civilization had a public bathroom with toilets with running water, a theater with very good acoustics, and a really pretty library that was one of the biggest in the world during its time.

It was a good thing that we did a tour so early, though. It was 9/10 at the time, but it was extremely hot outside. We found shade when we could, but it was still very hot. Anyway, at some point we had to watch some very silly historical reenactment while they passed out little frozen towel hats to cool us down (that was nice, actually). The historical reenactment was pretty silly, but my favorite person was the sculptor who kind of stood off on the sidelines making a sculpture. After the tour of the ruins, our tour guide gave us 20 minutes to use the restrooms and to shop for souvenirs, which we did. The shopkeepers who lined the exit of Ephesus were relentless, very much like the type of people who line the exit and entrance of Chitzen Itza.

We loaded back onto the bus and drove back into town. The next part of our shore excursion was an exhibition of Turkish rugs and how they are made. We got free food and drinks, which was kind of cool, and the way the laid out the rugs was pretty cool because they had some choreographed system going on, but all the rugs were extremely expensive and it was kind of silly in general. Andrew did try raku, which is the national drink of Turkey. I don’t think he realized that it was so alcoholic and strong though, because he seemed very miserable afterwards.

After the tour, we asked the tour guide where a good place to get kebabs would be. She pointed us in the direction of a restaurant that did kebabs. When Mia and I requested kebabs, we just wanted the cheap fast food, but this one ended up being more on the pricey side. Anyway, we were there for a while and ordered some family dish that ended up being very expensive. It was pretty good.

After eating, we go explore the Turkish bizarres, which are pretty intense. Everyone tries to draw you into their respective store and they are all very aggressive at doing this. At some point we find this toy store because Chabba wanted to buy a gift for Nicole. Mia and I found this absolutely racist toy. She took video of it. It was just…beyond racist.

We also went on this search for this Spiderman sweatshirt that we would see at every other store. The hood zipped up all the way so it covered your face and made you look like Spiderman. Mia wanted one, but they did not have one in her size. One shopkeeper yelled at her because he said that she was a girl and should not be into things like Spiderman. I don’t think I have to say that we were unsuccessful in finding this. Andrew bought a fez, though, which made him look like Abu from Aladdin. I wanted those clacker things, but we did not get them. Oppa went back to the ship with Chabba and Halmony, which left Umma with all of us kids. We were on a search for a hat that Gianni saw and wanted, so we had to backtrack the entire bazaar to find it. Our trek back to the ship took a long time, mostly because we continued to stop in almost every other shop that we saw. Umma did find a new charger for her camera battery, though, which was good because she had misplaced her other one or had left it behind somewhere.

We do make it back on the ship and went on some big search to find other people. We don’t, but ended up eating a lot of food at the Windjammer even though we were all very full from lunch. We hang out in the library for a while, doing our daily sudoku and the like. I find Oppa eventually and guilt him into walking a mile so I can get my Vitality points.

At 6, I wake Umma up so that I could go with Gianni and her to Name that Tune in the Schooner Bar. Since we were the only group that actually went for that, they ended up just changing it to general trivia and we lost to this hard core trivia family. This was slightly depressing, but whatever.

We go back to the room to get ready for dinner before the entertainment show for the night. We got there a little late, but the show was kind of silly. It was some British-themed entertainment show. We got there in time for the British movie montage, where they promptly slaughtered a Beatles song and sang songs from movies like Love Actually and Bridget Jones’ Diary. They then sang Spice Girls songs with horrendous costumes that Victoria Beckham would not have been caught dead in. They sang songs by Elton John and Queen and Kylie Minogue (isn’t she Australian?) and Robbie Williams. It was very silly.

We wanted to do the 8:15 British pub trivia but it was all British trivia, so we left for dinner instead. As we sat down for dinner, we watched the sunset from our tables, which was very pretty. Dinner was good, I had the pork tender loin, which was very good. Mia and I also spent dinner doing crazy silly dances for Nicole, who had started to warm up to us at this point.

After dinner, I went to the casino with Umma and Mia. I won $25 and have not been back since. I don’t want to lose it all, pretty much. We got back to the room and watched the tail end of Dan in Real Life (love that movie) and watched some Johnny Bravo on Cartoon Network before going to bed.