Turkey - Road trip day 6 (Efes and Cesme)

The next morning we got up to the crisp coolness of Sirince. We headed for breakfast which consisted of many types of cheeses, olives, jams, tomatoes, cucumbers, fried eggs, and tea. We polished breakfast with a cup of Turkish coffee.

I forgot to mention that we were able to find a nice hat for my husband the night before. He had it on every day for the rest of the trip...

This was my pretty pink cup and delish coffee...

From Sirince, we headed to Ephesus (Efes) which is an ancient Greek (then Roman) city. It is only 20 minutes from Sirince which makes Sirince a great spot to spend the night instead of big hotels in Kusadasi or Izmir.

It was remarkable to see Efes which had 25,000 occupants at one point of time. The weather was hot and we made it easy on ourselves by taking the trip up the hill with a carriage instead of walking. Then the only thing left for us was to walk down to the parking lot.

This is my new hat. I felt like Indiana Jones for the rest of the trip...

From there we headed to House of Virgin Mary. Pilgrims visit the house based on the belief that Virgin Mary was taken to this house by Saint John and lived there until her death. The house is actually a chapel now.

After lunch at Efes we drove to town of Cesme. This is a reasonable size beach town which is famous with it's windy beaches and wind surfing. Every year thousands of people come to this town to enjoy the beaches and do wind surfing.

After a long day of walking and heat, we directly headed to the pool.

Someone was really tired...

We stayed in a nice hotel/beach club. The rooms were "OK", compared to the price and the other places that we stayed not great.

For dinner, we headed to one of the cafes by the sea. This town is famous with a sandwich called "kumru". Kumru means dove and we did not know what kind of food "kumru" was for a while. At the end, we found out that it was a sandwich made with cheese, Turkish sausage, salami, and tomatoes. It is like a grilled cheese sandwich but the cheese does not get pressed and melted within the sandwich. They melt the cheese and put all the ingredients on top of the cheese on the grill, then they place the blob of goodness in a sliced bread. And the bread is not mushy sandwich bread but a mini bread made only for this sandwich and in result only for me. As you can imagine I had one...

And I had a dessert too. They are simply fried dough dipped in heavy, sweet, and yummy syrup.

Kids had ice cream and for some reason wanted to be the Statue of Liberty of Cesme...

Well done...