We pass by a truck that just fell off the road on that same day and turned over. When we take a break on a newly built, not yet fully functioning gas station I enjoy the crisp clear mountain air, chilly and dry for a change. The break, however, turns into a repair stop about five men take turns looking under the buses hood, but it doesn't seem to work. I have a fight with my phone which is erratically disconnecting and reconnecting, finally I manage to message my host in Erzurum. After about an hour we continue the trip. At some minor stop in the middle of this massive nowhere the conductor makes me change the bus and some hours late I arrive at Erzurum's modern bus station.
My hosts show me a bit of the town by car and invite me for traditional Turkish lunch to a restaurant. Although only one of them speaks English we easily find a lot to talk about and are soon deep in conversation about German politics, Turkish food, soccer, the landscape and many other things. I am truly grateful for the kind and generous hospitality, especially after the long bus ride and not understanding where I was going.
The guys I'm staying with are really sweet and show me around the town which is an important army base and university in this part of the country and they always worry if everything is fine - it sure is! They even help me get my camera fixed, so here are some pictures of the central square and one of the old mosques, quite different from those in Istanbul.
The days are still hot and we just take a brief look at the busy life downtown before sitting in the shade outside the university eating sunflower seeds and talking about politics, patriotism, culture and modernity, religion and family values. Such a lot of world to see!
The nights are pleasantly mild, so me mostly walk after dark, have delicious ice cream and visit the Taşhan, an old trading house that contains loads of tiny shops selling jewelry made from the black stone (black kind of amber), the Oltu Taş.
I wonder why there are ski jumpers decorating most of the street lamps on the bigger streets. They seem a bit out of place at these temperatures, but I can well imagine that it gets very cold round here in winter. And yes, there are ski jumps here, I can see them in the distance behind the university compounds. In 2011 the XXVth Winter Universiade were held here, something like Olympic Games for university athletes, I never heard of it before, the city is still proud of this event. There is something going on in this far Eastern corner of the country after all. I do see it is a very different part and a very distant place from most other parts of Turkey. My host points out that he definitely views himself as an Asian. People in Western Turkey might identify with Europe to some extent, for him that wouldn't make any sense whatsoever. He has seen four other cities in Turkey and never left the country, so he uses Couchsurfing to improve his English (and German and Russian to some extent) and learn as much about other places as possible by talking to his guests and reading on the internet. It humbles me to be welcomed with such hospitality and openness by someone to whom I cannot offer the same in return as he cannot afford travelling - for now, hopefully that will change in the future...
On the third day it's once more time to leave. I wake up early and walk around in the garden taking pictures of the huge landscape all around:
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen