Samos Island, Greece

We arrived on Samos Island via a ferry from Kuşadası around eleven in the morning. The boat brought us to Vathi port, the main port located in the northeastern part of the island, in the largest town on the island known as Samos Town. Samos Island is home to about 33,000 people and is 447 square kilometers in size. Tourists from Turkey often come to this island for a quick visit due to its proximity to Kuşadası. Hoping to explore more than just the island’s main port with its many visitors and crowded streets we decided to stay in the town of Karlovasi, located in the northwestern part of Samos Island. After getting directions at the port we made our way down the main road to the bus station to see about taking a bus to Karlovasi. It took us about one-and-a-half hours to reach Karlovasi by bus, which was a spectacular ride along a coastal road winding up and down hills overlooking the bright blue water of the Aegean Sea.


One of the many adorable churches in Karlovasi


Samos is known for it's lovely mansions

Once we arrived in Karlovasi we dropped of our bags at our hotel (that’s right we got to stay in an actual hotel instead of hostel because there are no hostels on the island) and went out for a lunch (I enjoyed a pork gyro pita and a coffee frappe). Following lunch we walked around the town a bit enjoying its narrow cobblestone streets and quaint red-tiled buildings. Apparently mid-afternoon on a Greek island is siesta time because most of the stores were closed and the streets were deserted. Worn out from the hills and the heat we walked back to our hotel and I spent the afternoon by the pool. Later that day we decided to go for another stroll around town and we ended up making it to the waterfront road just in time to watch the end of the sunset over the water. After a stop for some ice cream we headed back to the hotel for the evening.


Downtown Karlovasi



The next day we went our separate ways because Robby is not a fan of water or the beach so Robby head off on the bus to visit Pythagorio, home town of Pythagoras (as in the Pythagorean Theorem), in the southeastern part of the island. Meanwhile I decided to hit the nearest beach. Potami Beach is located about one mile from the center of Karlovasi and the walk there is all along the waterfront. I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing in a lounge chair and swimming in the Aegean Sea. The water was the perfect temperature with a nice tide. Robby and I met up at the hotel after our adventures and went out for a dinner of traditional Greek food – delicious Karlovasi, Samos, Greece


At the beach

On our last day on Samos Island we walked to the port and purchased our ferry tickets to Athens and then I went back to the beach and Robby explored the hills surrounding the town. We met back up for dinner and when we returned to our hotel there was large party going on outside on the patio near the pool. We never figured out exactly what the party was for, but we spent the evening being serenaded by a small band playing traditional Greek music.

Next Stop: Athens, Greece

On the Turkish Coast: Selçuk, Ephesus, and Kuşadası

Traveling on the overnight bus from Istanbul to Selçuk we arrived at our hostel around 8:30 in the morning. We stayed at Atilla’s Getaway, a hostel recommended to us by Armenia PCVs, a bit outside of the town. It was perfect – quite, great views, a swimming pool, hammocks, and great food – for two days of relaxing. Exhausted from the trip since even when I manage to sleep on an overnight bus I never feel rested I spend the day reading, napping, and lounging by the pool. The hostel had a package deal where for like five dollars more a night you got breakfast (choice of 6 meals including french toast) and dinner. It was nice eating dinner together at picnic tables outside with all the fellow guests. We met a lot of travelers from Australia, where it seems to be a requirement to take 6 months to a year to travel, and an English teacher from Paris. I wish I had photos of the hostel to share with you, but I was having such a great time that I did not take any pictures.



On our second day in Selçuk we visited the historic site of Ephesus in the morning. First we took the hostel’s free transport to the bus station in town and then took a short minibus ride to the site. Ephesus was an ancient Greek city and later a Roman city. It was the second largest city of the Roman Empire for many years ranking behind Rome. It was home to the famed Temple of Artemis (completed around 550 BC) and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The temple was destroyed in 410 AD by a mob led by St. John Chrysostom, an important figure in the early Christian church. The Emperor Constantine I rebuilt much of the city. Ephesus was one of the seven churches of Asia cited in the Book of Revelations.


The Theatre


The Roman Library of Celsus



It is believed that the Gospel of John may have been written in Ephesus and the city was home to several 5th century ecclesiastical councils. The Church of Mary, an early 5th century AD church, is located at Ephesus although all that is left is the remnants of walls.


Ruins of the Church of Mary

On our walk back see the Church of Mary we were treated to a little Roman bit of the Roman times in Ephesus.



After two days in Selçuk we traveled by minibus to Kuşadası for one night to closer to the port. After checking into our hostel we walked around the market and stopped for a lunch of kebab. Later we toured to waterfront and enjoyed some stuffed clams and fried calamari at a waterfront restaurant by the port. This day happened to be my grandmother and great aunt's 75th birthday and my whole family and their friends (104 people to be exact) were at a birthday party. Luckily I was able to call them on Skype from the hostel and wish them both all the best and let them know how much I loved them on such a monumental birthday.


Kuşadası's Waterfront

Walking around town we stumbled upon an old castle that is now like a little public park.



Next Stop: Karlovasi - Samos Island, Greece

Leaving Armenia Part Two: Istanbul

We arrived in Istanbul around 6 am local time and decided to take an airport shuttle to our hostel because we had flown into the airport on the Asian side of the city and our hostel was on the European side. The guide book said that the journey could take up to two hour, but I thought that had to be an overestimation. In the end it took a little over two hours before we got dropped off in the Sultanahmet section of the city. The views driving across the Bosporus Bridge, the main way across between the Asian and European sides of the city were amazing. We arrived at our hostel around 9:30am, but we couldn’t check into our room until 1:30pm so we walked around a bit and got some baklava and ice cream and then relaxed on the hostel’s rooftop patio. By the time we checked into our room I was so exhausted that I took a three hour nap. Later we went out for dinner at a nearby restaurant with an excellent view of the water.


The Bosporus Bridge





After dinner I enjoyed some drinks at the hostel bar with some of our roommates – a brother and sister from Toronto and a guy who is Foreign Service Officer. Around midnight while everyone was getting ready for bed a stray cat made it into our room and hid under the beds. We managed to get it out and next thing we know he is back inside. I had to take my scarf and use it to lure the cat out from under the bed and we shut the door and shut the front door to the hostel. All this time Robby is half asleep in bed wondering what is going on. Somehow the cat managed to sneak in a third time while people are milling in and out. As one of the guys is taking the cat out a third time the guy working at the hostel front desk says we are being too loud and we are like well if you would shut the door we would not be trying to get a stray cat out of our room at midnight!

The next morning after a Turkish breakfast on the hostel patio we went to the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya. The location of our hostel was perfect – really close to all the major sites in Sultanahmet. The Blue Mosque was built between 1609 and 1619. Aya Sofya (Church of Holy Wisdom) was built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and was completed in 537 AD. It was the grandest church in Christendom until the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453. It was converted into a mosque and the Byzantine mosaics were covers (because Islam prohibits images) and the mosaics were not revealed until the 1930s, when Atatürk declared the site a museum.


The Blue Mosque


Inside The Blue Mosque


Aya Sofya


Inside Aya Sofya

Next we explored the Grand Bazaar, which was not like what I was expecting. In my mind it would be this large outdoor market full of stalls and in reality it was inside and more like a mall made up of tiny little shops.

Hot and exhausted we decided to get some lunch. I enjoyed some pide (Turkish pizza – an oblong crust filled with tomato sauce, peppers, and diced bits of lamb) and a restaurant near our hostel with big couches full of pillows on which to enjoy the shade and easy breeze. We sat at the restaurant for about two hours relaxing with some apple tea and Turkish coffee.

Later in the day we went to the Basilica Cistern, which is an underground water storage area built by Constantine and enlarged by Justinian. There are fish that still live inside the cistern. Then we went on a walk along the waterfront and back to the hostel where we spent the evening enjoying the cool evening breeze off the water. During the day it was hot and sunny with a nice breeze and in the evening it was really cool.


Fish swimming inside the cistern


Medusa head to protect the cistern

The next day we toured Topkapi Palace, which was begun by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453 and where Ottoman sultans lived until the 19th century.


Part of Topkapi Palace


Tile inside one of the palace rooms



Next we walked to the Galata Bridge that connects Sultanahmet with the Golden Horn. There are restaurants on the bridge and we stopped there for lunch (yummy stuffed mussels!!) before our Bosporus cruise. The cruise up the Bosporus was amazing – sitting on the deck enjoying the breeze, watching the teal blue water. From the boat we saw Dolmabahçe Palace (built between 1843 and 1856 as home for some of the last Ottoman sultans and where Atatürk died in 1938) and Ortaköy Mosque (built between 1854 and 1856 by Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid). It took about an hour-and-a-half to get to the opening of the Bosporus to the Black Sea. Once there we had about an hour to walk around before the return boat left. We stopped for coffee and pastries at a little café. Once we returned from our cruise we had a relaxing dinner near our hostel and a quite night.


On the boat!


Dolmabahçe Palace


Ortaköy Mosque

We spent out last day in Istanbul doing a little window shopping, enjoying the views from the hostel’s terrace, and preparing for our night bus to Selçuk

Next Stop: Selçuk, Ephesus, and Kuşadasi

Leaving Armenia Part One: Tbilisi

Two years…I can’t believe that it has been two years since I left for Peace Corps. I think most of that is because it is ending. It is like when you graduate from college and when you look back on the years you can’t believe how quickly it went by even though during you know there we times when it felt so slow. Leaving Aygepat for the last time did not fell as final as I thought it would be because my exit was so hurried and rushed, just trying to get all my things together and to Yerevan. Once I got to Yerevan I still had paperwork to do, packing to finish up, and goodbyes to say. There was not really time for long, sentimental goodbyes and it is only now really hitting me that I’m done and don’t know the next time I’ll be in Armenia. I spent my last night in Armenia in Vardablur at my friend Robby’s host family’s house. It was nice to spend it with an amazing Armenian family and enjoy a going away feast. The next morning we headed to Stepanavan for the marshootni to go to Tbilisi, Georgia. Tbilisi is so different from Yerevan – it has a more European feel to it and is full of beautiful 19th century architecture. During Soviet times Tbilisi was the cultural capital of the Caucasus, while Yerevan was a dusty cowtown.



This was Robby’s fourth time in Tbilisi so I followed his lead and we spent to day walking around the city. On our way back towards our hostel after stopping for coffee at a bookstore and café we ran into Danny and Mike, two other Peace Corps volunteers leaving Armenia. We all went to dinner, for a walk around the city, and out to a pub with a Georgia friend of Danny.





The next day we took a day trip to the David Gareja monastery complex, about 70km southeast of Tbilisi. We took a marshootni to the town nearest the monastery and then the driver agreed to drive us to the monastery. We were traveling with a German traveler and luckily he spoke a little Russian and he was able to negotiate everything. It took us about an hour of off-roading to get to the complex. The monastery is a Georgian Orthodox monastery founded in the 6th century AD by St. David Gareja, an Assyrian monk. The complex is made up of hundreds of cells, chapels, churches, refectories, and living quarters all carved out of the mountain. The monastery was closed after the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia in 1921 and was restored after Georgia declared independence in 1991.





After we made it back to Tbilisi we went out for an Italian dinner and some Georgian Saperavi wine at one of the sidewalk cafes in Tbilisi’s area known as ‘Old Town.’ Then we walked to a huge new Georgian Orthodox church that was built in an attempt to revitalize the Georgian Orthodox church. Once we got back to the hostel I was all prepared for an evening of reading and relaxing and a quite day of packing the next day before our afternoon flight. Then Robby tells me he got an email from the airline saying confirming our flight at 4:45am, not pm! I do not what my brain was thinking when I booked the flight because I’ve been dealing with military times for two years and flight times are always in military time, but in the stress of preparing to leave I got the times mixed up in my head. Luckily Robby caught it and we were able to arrange for a taxi to the airport the next morning, get packed up, and get a few hours of sleep before we had to leave.



Next stop: Istanbul

My Kinda New House...(since November)

I am a bad blogger. I'm pretty sure one of the first rules of blogging is to update your blog often to keep your followers following and I haven't posted anything since Thanksgiving. So I'm going to use this post to catch everyone up on my life in Armenia (and a little bit in the U.S.) for the last four months. Everyone November we have a conference call the All-Volunteer conference in Yerevan. This conference is the only one where all the volunteers from both the old group and the new group get together at the same time. We have a Thanksgiving dinner with the Peace Corps staff, which is a great way to celebrate the holiday when we are all so far away from our friends and family in the U.S. A few days before the conference this year I received a phone call from Stepan, my program manager, letting me know that I was going to have to move out of my house because my landlady's little sister needed to move back to the village. I had about two weeks to find a new house and move, but this would all have to wait until after I returned from a week in Yerevan.

Because I live in a village there are a limited amount of empty houses available for rent. The first one I looked at was house that was previously unavailable the first time I moved last April. It was pretty nice - it even have an indoor shower with a hot water heater, but it turned out that the landlady, who lived in the village with her son used this house to escape to when she fought with her son and wanted to be able to have keys to the house once I moved. This is against Peace Corps policy and something I have to battle at my last house, where my landlady was overbearing and always just showing up at my house and calling me when I wasn't home saying she need to come over for some reason (to clean, to fix something, etc.) I loved my last house, but after dealing with that I wasn't excited about the prospect of another nosy landlady. Stepan called and tried to talk to the landlady, but it was a no go. At this point the only other house available was one that I looked at last April and had passed on. It's a nice house, but because no one has lived in it for many years it doesn't have a function hot water heater or wood stove or gas heater to heat the house. It was my only option so I moved in at the beginning of December, just time to get settled in before my trip to the U.S..

It has it's problems, one hour into being plugged in the refrigerator stopped working and while my landlord has tried multiple times to fix it - it is still broken. They have also been unable to fix the hot water heater. Peace Corps gives every volunteer money to fix up their house once they move out of their host family's house, but of course since I had moved out 8 months earlier that money was long gone. I making due though - I have become an expert bucket bather and since my kitchen is in a separate building from house during the winter the lack of a fridge wasn't a problem because it was the same temperature it was outside. Luckily I have an awesome site mate who lives in Artashat (the town nearest to my village) who has an amazing apartment with a hot shower and once a week we get together for what we call Dinner/Shower/Knitting/West Wing night. We get together and make tasty food, I get a hot shower, and then we relax and knit while watching the DVDs of The West Wing. Because Pat has a small agitator for washing clothes I know also bring my laundry over to wash every couple of weeks.

I was skyping with my parents last weekend and my dad mentioned that he had only seen the walls of my bedroom and wanted me to post pictures of my house. So without further ado here is my kinda new house...


Kitchen


Kitchen


Kitchen


Water Storage Bucket


Shower room with old, broken hot water heater


Outhouse


Kitchen is through the door on the left/Garage/The Door on the right is my house


Left Door is Shower Room/Right Door is Kitchen


Bookcase in my bedroom


Bed & Photos of home


Bedroom


Desk/Dining Room Table


Bedroom

Shnorhavor Thanksgiving

I'm behind on my posting so today is going to be my catch up day on all the events of the last couple of weeks, which have been very busy. One of the questions I get most when I talk to my family and friends in the U.S. is what I do to celebrate American holidays here in Armenia. Luckily Armenia is a small country and it is fairly easy to travel around and visit other volunteers and because of this I've been fortunate enough to be able to celebrate among fellow volunteers. This Thanksgiving I celebrated at the apartment of my site mate Pat, who was kind enough to host a small dinner in Artashat. She even went so far as to go to the turkey farm and select our dinner! Together with Pat and fellow volunteers Beckey, Katrina, Katie, and David, I enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner complete with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pecan pie. We even got to decorate a mini-Christmas tree after dinner!

Hello my name is Sarah and I am a knitting addict

Now I’m sure all my friends and family in America have this image in their minds of what exactly it is I’m doing here as a Peace Corps volunteer (saving the world one person at a time and all), but one thing I bet you don’t picture is the vast amount of free time the average PCV has in any given day. When Peace Corps is looking for our job placements the school/office must be able to provide 15-20 hours/week of meaningful work. I’m lucky and there is plenty for me to do at the mayor’s office, but coming from the U.S. where I was in class 12-15 hours/week, working 20 hours/week, and attempting to read about a 1,000 pages/week for grad school it is a huge difference. Many volunteers also find themselves with free time because of the differences in the work culture here compared with the hyper-efficient, always on the go nature of working in the U.S. Volunteers develop many interesting hobbies as a way of filling this new free time including reading, playing music, blogging, watching television and movies on our computers, hanging out with friends, and knitting.

A powerful cult of knitters has developed here in Peace Corps Armenia and volunteers are learning every day. Now I’m not sure if this happens in other Peace Corps countries in the Eastern Europe/Central Asia region, although I’m sure it does. I recently learned how to knit and I now must admit that “Hello my name is Sarah and I am a knitting addict.” I attempted to learn last year, but I only ever ended up with scarf fit for a mouse. My new site mate Pat is an avid knitter and when she moved to site she began teaching me again and I was hooked. This fall we would meet up at the outdoor cafe in Artashat (the town near my village, where Pat lives) and knit and drink a few beers. We were quite a scene! So far I have made six scarves, three pairs of arm warmers, and now I’m working on my first hat! Now in the evenings I sit in my house and either listen to music or watch a movie and knit. The contingent of knitters in Peace Corps is so strong that when we have our conferences and meetings you look down the conference table and there are probably ten people knitting while they listen.

So here are some pictures of my creations…