4/6/98: The bus ride was terrible. We boarded the bus at 9:00pm last night in Istanbul, and arrived 11am this morning in Göreme. 14 hours to travel 720km! We are exhausted and I am crabby. We planned to stay at Köse Pensione, but it was full. Dawn, the proprietor, recommended we try L’Elysee Pension, run by her friends Anna and Chengis. We looked, liked, and stayed. Turned out to be a great choice.
4/6/23: All these years later, the memories of Göreme are only good ones. But recalling that bus ride as I read my diary made my body tense up as I remembered the cramped space, the bumpy and noisy and sleepless drive to central Turkey. Ruth had had back surgery three months before we left on our trip, and was still on high doses of Ibuprofen to manage the residual pain. But she was in surprisingly good shape after the trip. It was my attitude that had turned sour, not hers.
So, we took a nap, which always results in a fresh perspective for me. Then we wandered about the town a bit. Met a man named Dogan (silent “g” again) who had studied in US (still working on his dissertation for a Ph.D. in Comparative Linguistics). We also checked out a carpet shop, since we had set aside some of our funds for purchases along the way. Turkish carpets sold in America are exorbitantly expensive due to all of the in-between, export/import expenses, as well as being categorized as a high-end luxury item. We hoped to purchase one here and ship it back. While the prices were a small fraction of the cost of purchasing one in Chicago, we decided the prices were still higher than our budget had room for. It was fun to learn about the various types of carpets from the shop owner. Like a medieval tapestry, the patterns, the weave type, the pile and texture, all combine to tell a sort of story about the makers’ history and the villages where they were made. The carpets that we were most drawn to turned out to be in the $1,000 range, so we had to pass, as we were only prepared to spend up to $400. Though, in hind-site, those carpets would have sold for upwards of $15,000 back in the US.
We haven’t really missed out by not having a Turkish carpet though. The adventure of the trip shaped us in ways not unlike those villagers weaving their carpets. The tapestry of our lives since then has been threaded by the warp and whoof of God’s goodness to us, and decorated with patterns of His grace and love. So, in a way, He has made our lives a carpet of hospitality to those we meet every day. That’s a treasure impossible to calculate.
Back at the pensione, Anna and Chengis turned out to be extraordinary chefs, and dinner was delicious. We sat with another travelling couple, Veronika and Bernhardt, from Klagenfurt am Wörthersee in Austria. They were concluding their time in Turkey, while we were just getting started on our trip. So our conversation was delicious too.
