You’ll have to excuse me if I haven’t posted for a while. Recently two things happened: 1) I gave up on Irfan and his emotional but less than stirring portrait of a Turkish family and decided to take a look at the books on my Kindle and 2) I realized that the hotel garden is PARADISE ON EARTH. So basically, aside from the hours that I was absolutely required to be working, for the past week or so I have been all but dead to the world, tucked into a wicker sofa under the olive trees, sipping Turkish coffee and working my way through three consecutive novels. (Actually, they’re not olive trees—they’re “sweet olive” or “false olive” trees. The fruit is olive shaped, but in order to eat it you have to first peel away the flaky, papery top layer of skin, revealing what is essentially powder inside. Powder that tastes like soap. There are buckets of these for sale everywhere, though why you would bother with them when there are also bins and bins of freshly hulled hazelnuts, candied chickpeas and roasted apricot pits to be had I can’t imagine.)

I have roused myself from my torpor, though! I am reentering society! (This despite the fact that I have two more books already downloaded and instant access to thousands more should be considered very, very impressive.) So…what have I actually done recently? Let’s see…this morning, after my very Turkish breakfast of cucumbers, olives, boiled eggs and yellow melon I donned my sun hat (really) and embarked for Uçhisar, via Pigeon Valley. I posted a picture of Uçhisar earlier; it’s only 2km from Goreme, and I can see the castle from the hotel, but until this morning I’d never actually been there. Like all of the crazy rock formations here the castle it is entirely unencumbered by guard rails, fences or any sort of signage; I’d been told that last year a German photographer fell to his death when he took a step backward to get that perfect shot, so I made sure to take all of my pictures from a forward-facing position. Speaking of pictures, I took about a thousand…here’s a selection.
In Pigeon Valley














House in a fairy chimney...the fairy chimney has two chimneys!












The town of Uçhisar, a mix of old and older.













Uçhisar street...so picturesque.
















Vendors next to Uçhisar castle. Haha.






















View from the top of the castle.














Growing grapes and lavender.
















Actually, there’s really not much to say about the castle, though I did have a bit of an adventure (i.e. I nearly FELL TO MY DEATH) on the way home. I got a little lost in Uchisar (meaning that of the two roads in town, I took the wrong one) and ended up walking back to Goreme through a very pretty but completely unfamiliar valley. In general valley travel is great—as long as you stick to the floor and don’t do any 180 degree turns you’re basically guaranteed to make it to your destination. That is, as long as the path you are on does not suddenly end at the lip of a scary, gravelly, steep CLIFF. So one of the great things about the Kindle (which after some initial reservations I have come to love at least as much as I’ve loved most of my pets) is the built-in dictionary—looking up the definitions to thorny words is a snap, so I’ve been doing a lot of vocabulary building lately. Since one of my new words is “escarpment” (a long, precipitous, clifflike ridge of land, rock, or the like, commonly formed by faulting or fracturing of the earth's crust), when I got to this particular point in my walk I knew exactly what I was facing. And while the samurai in the book were able to nimbly leap down to the bottom, in my case navigating this little bit of terrain meant sliding on the seat of my shorts very, very, gingerly downward, constantly aware of the jagged rocks below and the fact that the “ground” beneath me was really just a pile of sand and dust that could send me rocketing down at any moment. (Also, because I had just left the company of a French family at the dead end of a different path, the only thought running through my mind was, “Je suis seule! Je suis seule!” I really thought I might die alone at the bottom of the unknown valley. Actually, that’s a lie. I was also thinking about how much I was probably damaging my nice J. Crew shorts…but then again, don’t they have a special “old, worn out and crappy” wash? I’ll just pretend I paid extra for the cool look.) Anyway, I don’t think I’m doing a good job of describing how incredibly frightening this was, but let’s just say that when I (finally, after an eternity) made it to the bottom, I felt lucky to be alive—the birds songs were sweeter, the sun shone a little brighter, all of that.