Selcuk 19.06.10

we spent a couple of hours wandering around Ephesus this morning. Ephesus is an ancient Greek city and back in the day it was the second largest city of the Roman Empire coming in behind Rome itself. Ephesus had a population of more than 250,000 in the 1st century BC, which also made it the second largest city in the world.
We got hats (there you go mum & pat hehe) before going in from a stall outside.
we got an audio guide to share and thank god we did because nothing was signed.all they had was numbers for which audio guide to listen to so the people walking around without audio guides or human guides wouldn't have known what they were looking at.
the most impressive building was the library which was probably the building in the best condition.

there was also a large theatre that was very impressive.

above two photos are of the theatre obviously.

i know this one was a bath and gymnasium because it was the first thing we learnt about when we got to Ephesus

i can't remember what this one was but don't those pillars look precarious

the amount of tourist groups walking around was crazy although still nothing compared to Angkor Wat.

some of the tourists

a mosaic on the ground, i didn't realise love hearts were so old school :-)

Ewen with the library in the background

Ewen was, as always, fascinated by the number of cats around. especially the one hanging out in the public toilet area.

Ewen attempting to entice a cat

"The latrina built in the first century A.D. are the public toilets of Ephesus. The toilets were ranged side by side with no partition between them. In the middle was a square pool. The floor was paved with mosaics"
we got the typical tourist photo of me sitting on one of the toilets, one guy who was there at the same time as us even pulled out a roll of toilet paper to pose for his photo!
the streets were very interesting, paved and lined with collumns and various statues. there was also a variety of baths and temples dotted around the place.

the above two photos are of roads in Ephesus

there was an indoor museum but it was an extra 15 lira each and we were a bit museumed out after yesterday so we skipped that section.

cannot remember what either of these buildings were, after a while it all started to blur together...

we took this sneaky photo (it took a few tries to get a good one) of the woman in the pink pants and pink top, she had taken her ticket and folded it over her nose like a beak... we assume to keep the sun off but who knows really... was very bizarre!!!

me standing out the front of the library
the theatre... freaking massive!!!

opposite the cafe we had lunch at was a shop giving away free donut like things and our waiter was nice enough to get some for us.

we went to a market this afternoon in Selcuk and got 6 plums for 50cents and a huge bag of cherries for $1.
we have spent the rest of the afternoon on the computer and playing backgammon (me-2 ewen-1) passing away the time until we get the bus to Canakkale tonight at 8pm.

tomorrow morning we will arrive in Canakkale at about 5am wait 3 and a half hours then join a tour group to go to Troy then that tour finishes at 12pm we have lunch then at 1pm we join another tour to go to Galipoli that tour ends at 6pm then at 6.30pm we get a bus to İstanbul arriving at 11pm what an exhausting 48 hours this will be! wish us luck everyone!