After breakfast the next morning, I said goodbye to Isadora and was off to my next destination: Antakya/Hatay/Antioch.
I napped on the bus, I woke up as someone was asking the bus driver to let them off the bus. I realized that we were already in Antakya and I saw that a campus of Mustafa Kemal University (the residence of my next couchsurfing host) was close by, so I jumped off the bus too. Unfortunately for me, I was at the wrong campus. My mistake.
It took a while, but with the help of a few friendly strangers, my couchsurfing host’s roommate and a local bus ride I made it to the right campus.
I met my hosts, Mileta and Federica, Erasmus students at Mustafa Kemal University (Erasmus is a European foreign exchange program) from Lithuania and Sicily, respectively. They were so great!
Mileta is super well traveled and has even been paid to travel through her writing. Both of them had just moved to Turkey for the start of the semester less than two weeks earlier and were still getting a feel for the place and the people. Mileta especially was learning Turkish super fast, I found that very impressive.
We chatted for a bit on their porch while drinking Turkish tea. Their porch faced a courtyard which had other apartments across it, and shortly one of their neighbors across the courtyard, yelled ‘Hi.’ We invited the neighbor, Sercan (Ser-jan), and his friend to join us. The 5 of us chilled first at Mileta and Federica’s place then at Sercan’s apartment. He and his friends were so overwhelmingly friendly, and he even cooked everyone in the apartment dinner!
Mileta and Federica had made plans with some other people to smoke nargile – hookah. We met up with those friends, a group of six other students with varying degrees of English and walked to their place. They fed us some more (food that one of the guy’s mother in Adana had made that was insanely good), set up the nargile –nane (mint) flavored, and made coffee and tea.
We chatted through the evening, until two of the Turkish girls said they were tired, and the boys walked us home (warning that it was dangerous to walk near but not on the campus late at night as women).
The next day after a leisurely enjoying breakfast and tea with Mileta, I left to wander the old city. It was so cool! Market places, narrow alleys, colorful houses, and künefe.
(colorful alleys)
(kunefe)
(full of cheese!)
(downtown Antakya)
I picked up some nuts from street vendors and after a few hours I headed back to the apartment.
Mileta and Federica invited me along to join them in having dinner with their neighbors across the hallway. They neighbors made delicious food that we all ate together and we enjoyed each others company, talking to the extent possible with limited English and Turkish abilities.
Afterwards, Mileta and Federica left to go to an Erasmus-student-only event and I hung out at their apartment.
I was there for only a bit when Sercan swung by with his neighbor Mustafa and invited me to join them in wandering around the neighborhood. We wandered and knocked on Sercan’s friend’s doors and said ‘hi’ to everyone on the street that he knew. Ultimately, we found a big chess set, and I challenged Sercan to a game (which he won).
The next day was a day of cards, Mileta didn’t have class, and after we woke up, she taught me a Lithuanian game, that was strikingly similar to a Russian game I’d learned earlier, (called stupid fool man according to my Russian friend’s translation, and idiot according to Mileta’s). I really think that this is my favorite card game now – it is a predominantly strategy based game, check out the rules and/or I’ll teach you them!
I’d purchased a ticket to Cappadocia for that evening so I decided to wander around campus and absorb a bit more of the place before leaving.
I got back to Mileta and Federica’s apartment to find Federica just returning from class. She invited me to join her and Mileta at a Kurdish wedding two evenings away (apparently the neighbors who’d invited them were three guys who wanted a more even gender ratio and had asked her if she knew another woman to invite). Well, that sounded awesome! I told Federica that I’d planned to go to Cappadocia though, but that I’d come back to Antakya after. Federica thought about it for a few minutes then said that her class the next day was canceled and that she’d love to come along with me to Cappadoicia and we’d both come back for the wedding.
We had a few hours to kill before the bus left. Federica taught me a Sicilian card game called scopa, very similar to a game my grandmother taught me (and I’d always thought of as being a Jewish game – casino – in fact, casino descends from scopa and thus is Italian – and is a super popular game the world over – Steph taught me a Greek varient called bastra, but the game also goes by the names pasur, escoba, mulle, and probably by many other names as well). For whatever it is worth, the Sicilian version is more fun.
Sercan and Mustafa came over, seeing us playing cards on the porch. We taught them the scopa and in exchange Sercan taught us Batak (a trick-based bidding card game not dissimilar from bridge).
Another neighbor, Mehmet, came over and when we told him we were going to Cappadocia, he said that he wanted in. That would have been awesome, but unfortunately, Federica had gotten the last seat! Soon it was time to go, and we caught the 9 pm bus out and were off to Göreme a town in the Cappadocian region.
(Federica, Mehmet and I take a selfie)
songtreetravels 