End of Day 2 in Kastamonu - Katy

10:30pm at the end of Thursday. We had another good day in Kastamonu. The theme (or rather key survival skill) for this city is ‘go with the flow’. Since our arrival, the details of our daily agenda have been very sketchy. We start everyday at 10ish (which means somewhere from 9am for Dave to 10:30-10:45 for the rest of us.

Today we headed off to tour the city, and more or less, we don’t know where we are going until we got there. We tried to ask for more specifics, but that doesn’t really get us very far. We did find out today that on Saturday, we are headed to a village/town on/near the black sea that is on the World Heritage (?) list for historical places. We’ll stay in a hotel near there on Sat. pm and then head back to Kastamonu on Sunday. Monday, we are off to our next city, which will be a 8-9 hour bus ride from here.

One thing that happens when you have to ‘go with the flow’ is that you completely lose track of what day or date it is. We spend about 5 minutes every day debating what day of the week it is.
On our ‘Mystery-at-Every-Turn’ tour of Kastamonu today we stopped at a Helva shop, visited a 600 year old mosque, hiked the hill to visit the Kastamonu castle that was built in the Byzantine era and is mostly now rubble following an earthquake in 1943, visited a center where women weave beautiful cloth and rugs, checked out a ancient gravesite that was built sometime in the BC’s (amazing and not really protected), stopped in a Turkish version of a Boys and Girls Club for some complete chaos with the kids, had our 20th cup of tea, and then separated off for the night to our respective host families.

Helva is a Turkish pastry of sorts. It is made with boiled sugar, flour and butter (how can you go wrong?!). It is kind of a cross between cotton candy and a Mexican wedding cake. We’ve had many different versions since arriving in Kastamonu: plain, covered in chocolate, mixed with coffee, nut-flavored, etc..

The stop in at the Turkish Boys and Girls Club was pretty wild. When we first got there the kids were off playing badminton, so we had a peaceful (but lonely) tour of the club. Then 25 sweaty kids appeared and chaos erupted. We were individually corned by groups of kids shouting ‘Hello!’, ‘What is your name?’, ‘How are you?’, and then they had no clue what we said when we responded. [Kind of like us when we try to speak Turkish.] They were very cute and so excited to meet us. We have to slowly extract ourselves from the masses and pull Dave away from the Foosball table; it was a great way to end the afternoon.