Around Hasankeyf

Check out the bucket of sheep heads! Baaa!

After spending the day exploring the ruins, we made our way to the baklava shop in town. Anybody up at school can tell you how obsessed I am with the baklava that I get from the IV Deli-mart. Baklava is the best desert ever invented. The stuff sits in your stomach like a brick, but it is so worth it. During our visit in Turkey, I ate enough baklava to kill a small horse. They serve it five or six pieces at a time here, and I ate more than ten pieces each day I was in Turkey.

Next to the internet café there was a guy grilling chicken on the sidewalk. Apparently his propane tank was running low. He had started a fire on the sidewalk which he put his propane tank on top of. I guess he was trying to get more pressure in the tank by heating it up, but it had to be one of the most stupid things I have ever seen. We yelled at him to stomp his fire out, as we did not want to walk past and get blown up.

After checking our email in the internet café, the guy who ran the place talked with us. He spoke very good English. He had been married for three years, but he said he was on drugs when he got married. Since then he had slept with hundreds of women while working as a rafting guide in Antalya. He had met a woman on the internet from Laos who had flown out to see him that year. Currently she was in the United States and he didn’t trust that she was being faithful to him. He said he was getting grey hairs from worrying about it. We had our 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th glass of tea for the day while we helped him work out his women problems.

After a while, an army truck rolled up, and a Turkish military officer came in. He was a Captain. Everybody in the internet café stopped talking and our friend went to the back of the room. They were very accommodating to him, but they obviously did not want him to be there. The captain walked up to the main computer and started using it like he owned the place. He had a big gun on his hip. You could almost smell the tension in the air. Jeff broke the ice by telling the Captain that he looked like Kurt Russell. It was a stretch, but the Captain really loved it. I snapped a picture of them and then we took off.