Autumn falling

I have recently made a dangerous discovery: If I take two night buses I can spend three solid days anywhere within a thousand kilometer radius and still make it back to school in time for my morning class on Tuesday.  This is a wonderful and terrible burden.  I have all of Western Anatolia and the Balkans at my fingertips.  Though lately I've been using those fingertips to try and claw my way out of the scholastic hole I'm settling in.  My classes average eight hundred pages of reading a week, which breaks down to (not counting papers) about six hours a day, if I'm lucky (Kant, Foucault, and Bloch tend to go at their own pace).  As you can guess, that ain't happenin'.  I'm caught in a tight place between how much I generally enjoy the classes and readings and the sad fact that every night I spend at home reading means some cool Istanbul something or another missed.  There's also the nagging knowledge that all I really need to manage in any of these courses is a 61% because however well I do its showing up on my transcript as pass/fail.   I came to learn.  I just need to find the right balance between "experiential learning" (a great euphemism for concerts and exploration, no?) and the old books.

But, back to travel.  I found out about my travel possibilities the fun way via a successful trip with three friends to lake Eğidir in South Central Turkey.  We didn't have much of a plan, other than find "autumn". By some sad evolutionary mishap the trees of Istanbul (there are full-blown forests within city limits) don't change colors.  Some spend a couple days looking sickly before shedding, others just fall off while still green.  As four fall-o-philes, we decided a road trip was in order.

Eğidir the town is pretty.  It juts into the eponymous pale lake on a long spit and doesn't dissapoint when it comes to a Southern Turkish town's prerequisites: derelict Byzantine castle, ludicrously steep mountains, endearing hostel, and a flotilla of old men in ragstopped row boats fighting among themselves for the right to lure us out to our watery doom.  The seldom mentioned flip side of traveling in the off season is that, like a fish separated from its school, there's nothing to insulate you from the sharks.  You become the sole target for the badgerers in front of every store and restaurant.  Making eye contact with these people invites the risk of someone following you down the street serenading, "Very good.  Very choice.  You see.  No problem.  Cheap.  No problem."

We hit it off with our hosteler, Ibrahim, who took us on an excursion to the village's Sunday market.  He had been born and raised there, so we strolled around windy dirt rolls waving at neighbors and old friends.  What would have been an hour's walk doubled as we wandered, picked, and gorged our way through orchards and vineyards and other even more exotic yards littered with exotic yellow, brown, and orange fruits that I'd never heard tell of before.  

The market's main attraction was the pens of goats for sale.  Once bought, their occupants could be carried by their hind legs over to a blood-spattered, open air abattoir and eviscerated before your eyes.  There were also dozens of colorful, cheap stalls selling everything for olives to women's stockings to pruning hooks.  I bought non-essential clothes that I had considered too bulky to bring to Istanbul... like a decent coat... and fawn-pants (they look like a prop used the BBC production of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe).  

The next day we biked thirty kilometers (most of it spent on one infernal hill) to a nearly kilometer deep cave that had been used for religious rights by the Greeks and Romans.  The entrance was nestled in a craggy ravine and only reachable by crossing an old Roman bridge.  It wasn't open.   But when in need of a fall fix, old holes in the ground are ancillary.  The long ride took us through a countryside that was all golden poplars and crisp high plateau.  We even encountered several red and yellow half acre heaps of apples sprawling on the side of the road.  We may or may not have dove into one like the inviting pulpy McDonald's ball pit it was.  Suffice to say we got what we came for.