Wild Wild East!

Diyarbakir

Our train rolled in to Diyarbakir's station around 7:15 this morning, giving us some extra time to slowly wake up and watch the sun rise over the plains. The headcold I started feeling our final night in Ankara turned into a mild fever on the train, but I think I'm lucky because the best time to be sick is when you are trapped on a 27 hour train with no where to go but the bed. So, I slept the entire way, dozing in and out of consciousness with Wait Wait... blaring through my ear buds.


Hamdi is a trooper! Accompanied us to the station at 4 am


This bed sure is comfy

The bikes were in the front vagon, buried under other people's stuff. We waited and watched several Kurdish families scrambling to unload sack after sack stuffed with wool, onions, kitchenware, blankets, and who knows what else -- quickly!!-- before we grabbed our bikes off the train. Then they stopped and watched us load up our bikes, equally as curious about us.

What kind of cargo is this?

Still early, so Chris and I biked straight to the Old City, a comparatively more run down area still encapsulated within the tall, foreboding black walls.

We came across another caravanserai, the Haşan Paşa Hani, also restored into a fancy hotel. The interior courtyard is equally as grand, decorated with the iconic black and white sandstone Diyarbakir is known for, and with emblems praising Allah on the walls. They look semi geometric, but are actully Kufic script, dating to the 8th century.


Two Kufic emblems

Restored sitting area in the han

Then we cycled out the south west gate, 3 km out to an old roman bridge. From there the old city is visable, minarets and apartment blocks peaking out above the walls. We pinicked on the bridge for breakfast; I ate my egg, cheese, and tomatoe sandwich that I was too sick to stomach on the train, Chris downed a bag of peanuts and a pear. We were distracted from the picturesque view by a nearby construction crew, a group of men building new walls along the bridge. The stone doesn't match and looks very tacky, but we're hoping that if it lasts a few hundred years it will someday be impressive.


Make room for the camels!

Heading back in to town, we encountered our first group of evil children, some boys up on the hill who began lugging huge stones down at us. First time kids have done that! Normally I have dogs to worry about, now it's children.


Eeh, its a bridge

Ok so once back in the old city, which was stirring to life by now, we stopped at a cheese market. They sell a very salty, hard cheese of various shapes- sometime strings, balls, or sticks. I got one of each. But as we tried to lock our bikes on the side of a shop the owner came out and said no, shooing us away. Immediately we were surrounded by a group a young men, forbidding us to leave the bikes anywhere nearby, insisting we go down the street to the paid carpark. Really? All I want is to buy some cheese. So Chris stood with them for the 4 minutes I needed to xhiro through and select the nicest looking old man to buy from.


Highly guarded cheese market

A little peeved, we skirted out of the old city, into the more modern center, and to a coffee shop to meet our CS host. He wasn't in yet, but we stayed awhile talking with the one guy working, listening to acoustic Turkish music, and enjoying the very bohemian ambiance.


Granola City, Turkey


Diyarbakir's famous striped architecture


(Turley's dumb blonde joke) How many men does it take to sell a döner...?


Chris' food saga continues!!!

Hours later we were again in the old city, this time following the park along the interior castle walls. There are stairs up to the rim, so we locked the bikes to a pole and scaled up to the top, nervously keeping an eye on the bikes and feeling disappointingly paranoid that someone would cause problems. We decided to head back, just in time to catch a group of kids sprinting to the bikes, shaking and tearing at them in hopes of breaking them free. Not much we could do from above, but when they saw us coming back they got more wild and began tearing at the bags ties to the back.


Strolling along the old walls

Just my umbrella bag full of market food and chris' sketchpad, which they ripped out, sending food flying. Finally, after all this a guy nearby turned and yelled at them, a little too late. When we got down to the bottom the kids were long gone, with the food but without Chris' art (or my Klean Kanteen)-- maşallah!


Çocuklar fenah!! (bad kids!)

And nobody around did anything but wag their heads. Even the kids' older sisters (or maybe neighbors) came out from the walls, knowing full well what the mongrels just did, and provoking us further. What's with this place?? I'm supposed to come here and learn that the rumors about people in the east aren't true! I really want to smugly decide that all the warnings of caution we've gotten are dismissable. Darnnit.

Ok so we move on, following the castle walls to the backside, where there is an old prison-turned-cafe below ground topped by a large open air cafe on top.
The road along the walls then diverted into a neighborhood, full of wildly excited children just out from school. We were like fresh meat in a piranha tank. Done for. Finished.


I always said this prison would make a great date spot...

The little monsters ran screaming down the street alongside us (Hello! Hey baby!), grabbing onto our racks and touching everything they could reach. Ack! Scat vermin! My already dislike for children plummeted to an alltime detest.

Other than a stopover at a mosque (Sanctuary! Sanctuary!) where Chris won over a small group of boys through karikature sketches, we hightailed it the heck out of there. The power cut out just a few blocks before we got to the main gates... One final stage of the nightmare.


Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer...

We ended up hanging out the entire evening with some friends of our CS host, Güner. They took us to their party apartment- literally a scummy, virtually empty apartment they rent for their drinking nights. One of the guys spoke English pretty well; well enough to go on a rant about fuck America and why America is stupid, after the vodka bottle was empty.

I would have loved to engage in a (sober) discussion with him about America's political agenda and what I, too, am against, but unfortunately his beer goggles also served as ear plugs. As an American abroad I really want to represent myself as different from the actions of my government, and to show that not all Americans are wealthy, obese idiots as stereotyped. It's terrible that America fights wars and makes deals with other countries to secure (i.e. rape them of) natural resources and cheap labor in order to support the 'American lifestyle', full of gas guzzling cars and central heating. At the same time developing countries are brainwashed with this hegemony, sloughing off their traditions and replacing them with the modern western life. So while this guy drives his car, wearing very fashionable western clothing and expensive watches, drinking bottled water (and vodka) from the nearby Carrefour supermarket, and playing music from one of his two cell phones, he complains that America is evil. Friend, please look at the system you are embracing!

Eventually we were rescued by Güner, who is a veternarian and was working an emergency shift. We went to his apartment but didn't get to hang out long before sleep hit.