runlindsayrun

Day Seven

Okay, any day that starts with a 5.30 am wakeup call is either incredibly good or incredibly bad. I'm counting this one as good, even though I was muttering some pretty unpleasant words under my breath as I was making myself presentable and dragging myself into the breakfast area. Ugh.

We needed an early start because it's been an incredibly full day... By 7 am, we were off the boat and loaded into buses in Kusadasi, a port city in Turkey. From there, a 15 minute drive took us to the ruins of ancient Ephesus, and I'm still trying to find words to explain what I experienced this morning.

Ephesus was pretty cool. It was a city of 250,000 in its prime, but a disappearing harbour and disease eventually caused it to die out and become covered in eroded dirt and sediment. It was re-discovered almost 140 years ago, and teams of archeologists and historians have been working since then to unearth and reconstruct what they can of the city's remains.

First, it was HUGE. It's a pretty significant city, and I was not expecting it to be that big. We walked for a long time, just exploring all the different sites and buildings - the parliament buildings, the baths, the shops, the library, the brothel, the theatre, the town market square. It was incredible. Their technology and infrastructure (like running water and a sewer system) is almost unbelievable. And all the roads were still largely intact, which made it a really moving experience - just knowing that you were walking the same steps as John and Paul and so many famous people from history. They are working on uncovering the area where they believe Paul used to do most of his preaching, outside the synagoge at the end of the market square we saw. It just kind of blew my mind a little bit. I know my faith is real, but this experience made it real in a different way. And learning from seeing how the Ephesians lived and how their culture worked and what it valued makes Paul's letter to the church of Ephesians so significant to me. I'm still processing.

The bus returned us to Kusadasi, where we were given a tour of a store that sells authentic handmade Turkish rugs, and they showed us how they are made. Sounds a little bit lame, but it was actually really interesting. From there, we had free time to wander through the bazaar area. The bazaar was one of those life experiences that we just exactly like I'd imagined it would be like - big, crazy, pushy, total sensory overload. Does that make sense? It was the same thing when Erin and I spent time in the UK and travelled outside of London to see stone fences surrounding cottages with thatched roofs, and sheep wandering around the countryside - exactly how you imagined rural England would be like. It gives you this funny feeling that, no matter how foreign the experience might be, it's somehow familiar to you.

Then it was back on the boat for lunch with some more Americans, this time an older couple travelling as part of a biblical tour from the southern US, very vocally religious - and kind of amusingly racist. During lunch, we sailed through the Strait of Stamos, a point where you literally see Greece on one side of you and Turkey on the other side, a couple of hundred metres away.

And by 3 pm, we were docked on the island of Patmos. Here, we broke off from the organized groups and figured out for ourselves how to reach the top of the hill, where we toured two monasteries dedicated to the apostle John, who was exiled on Patmos. We also got to step inside the cave where he received the Revelation, which was pretty incredible.

These experiences are definitely making me think, and adding some context that I know few Christians are lucky enough to see and touch and experience first-hand. Today was a very big day.

Labels: Greece, My Life, The Boy, Travel

posted by Lindsay @ 9:42 AM