About a week ago, a friend on my hockey team invited me to come along with her on a work retreat trip. Since i have been in the city now for a month, I jumped at the chance to get out of town. So yesterday morning I got up at 7am , by far the earliest since I've been here, and met my teammate Nazli to go to the bus that will take us to Abant. While waiting for everyone to gather around I was introduced to many people, and as I've commented before, Turkish people are all very nice and welcoming, so I felt totally comfortable. When the bus pulled out around 8:15 (everthing in Turkey happens late), we were all given a cup of tea and a snack. The ride was about three hours, on the road toward Istanbul. I slept for most of the way, though i did try to keep my eyes open to see the scenery, which reminded me of the small, scrubby hills of Wyoming. We passed many small towns, each of which had a mosque with tall minarets jutting up into the sky.
As we neared the town of Bolu, the landscape changed. The hills got bigger and were now covered with conifers. 32km past Bolu, we arrived at a hotel on Lake Abant. It was extremely windy and cold outside, but we all piled out and headed toward the dock on the lake to take some photos, then went inside to drink warm tea and wait for lunch. Lunch was inside the hotel, and it was an incredible buffet with many different salads, about six main courses to choose from, and 15 or more different deserts!
After lunch, we went for a long walk around the lake, maybe about 6km. It was very nice to get outside and be surrounded by hills and trees instead of concrete and cars! At many places around the lake, we came across groups of men with horses, trying to sell horseback or carriage rides. It was nice to see the local people, as they all looked different from the Ankara city people. They all looked kind of short and very weathered, but thus more interesting. Nazli opted for a short horseback ride, which they said would be 5 Lira. They led the horse around for two small circles, and then asked for 10 Lira, since they did two circles. Oh well.
When we finally returned to the hotel we were exhausted, so what else would we do, but drink tea! I have never had as much tea in my life as i have had so far in Turkey! But since it was cold out, we also drank salep, which is a warm thick sweet drink made from Orchid roots. I thought it was like sweet, thick milk, which was very good when just coming in from a long, cold walk. So we sat around, had salep, tea, and more food, and waited for our bus to depart, which it did at 5pm.
On the way back I slept again, but had to listen to guy up front playing guitar and singing Turkish songs into a microphone for the whole bus to hear. The first three songs were okay, and it was fun and interesting to hear a whole bus singing along, but after an hour, it got old. But he didn't stop until we were all the way back to Ankara! Oh, how i love the Turkish experience!
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