Turkey Day 10

After breakfast we walked to the Goreme Open Air Museum just a little over a kilometer from the heart of the city. Goreme is a quaint village with lots of interesting little shops and restaurants, more about those later.  We walked for a good 2 hours through this old cave city that has many churches with some of the most well preserved Christian Frescoes in Turkey.  There were too many people so at times it was difficult to get into some of the rooms.  The best church was The Dark Church.  It was an extra 8 TL to get in but it was well worth it.  The most well preserved frescoes were here, and the extra charge kept the number of people down, so we were able to take our time. 

After we finished we headed back into town, Shin said he wanted a hamburger so we stopped in a little cafe just across from the bus station that had a sign outside saying they had a hamburger and FF lunch set.  Not sure exactly what kind of meat it was but I don't think it was beef, but it was doable.  Went back to the hotel rested and got a few pictures uploaded, but when I tried to do more I kept getting cut off in the middle, you could only log on the computer for 25 minutes at a time.  

Back into town for some shopping and supper.  There  is a store that is in the oldest Building in Goreme, it is one of the Caravanseri, or stations on the silk road, but you really cant see the building for all the carpets.

A guy who said we could call him Serge, and his helper, who he called Road Runner, followed us around.  Road Runner's job was to pull the carpets off the the piles for us to see, and then to put them back when we were done.  He was too funny, his boss would tell jokes about him and he seemed to understand the English but couldn't speak.  I think I would call him "macho shy", he would get embarrassed cover his mouth and laugh.  He seemed very interesting and very happy.

By the time we were ready to head out they brought out some food and insisted we eat something.  It was the kind of Turkish pizza we had eaten the night before but so much better. This store was nice and there were a couple of things that caught my interest but they were all old and I wasn't convinced yet that was what I wanted to buy.

Our next stop was the Sultan Carpet Shop, which is run by the same family that owns our hotel, they had a lot of really nice things, old and new, but even the old things were really nice.  I found 2 of the big seating cushions that I really liked, mostly because they were soft and not really scratchy.  Told them I would think about it and come back after dinner.

We ate at A'laturk.  Shin said he wanted fish, so we chose this place.  It was fancy and  probably over priced, we had soup a chef salad and sea bream.  Bill came to 78TL, way too much.

Anyway I decided I would buy one of the cushions, I ended up paying 120 euros, probably too much, but hey I may never get back here so why not.  Back to the hotel where I tried to upload more pics with no luck.

Here are 2 of the interesting restaurant names we ran across.