It’s been a very lazy Sunday. Plus an aside on my Side trip, etc…

Watching the passing boats.

My big actions of the day: a walk through the historic harbor areas and a long afternoon nap.

Yup, that was my big day. I’d originally planned on finding the beach, but it was rainy in the morning, and after the sun came out, it didn’t really stay out and I ended up wandering around the city and its ancient harbor for awhile and looking at crap for sale.

Here’s the thing: I’m not keen on shopping—there’s nothing I really need—and I detest debating prices over stuff I don’t want in the first place.

However it was amusing that the people selling stuff assumed that I was German. I presume it’s my Jack Wolfskin backpack, but given that I wasn’t wearing socks with my sandals, a German couldn’t have mistaken me for being German.

Under the bath floors.

Meanwhile I didn’t say much about my tour yesterday, but it was a tour hitting three archeological highlights, plus a waterfall. We started with the Temple to Apollo—well, it’s ruins. It was impressive. From there we saw the theater at Aspendos, the waterfall at Kurşunlu, and closed out with time at Perge.

Overall the tour was interesting—I was starting at a pretty low knowledge base so I was easily impressed. (Well, not that low, but it has been years since I took the relevant history and architectural history courses.)

I do have to say that my tour group was very small: five people plus the guide.

An older Palestinian couple that insisted they will move back home. They were kicked out by Israel several decades ago and have since lived in the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon awaiting their return.

What does "strink" mean?

I decided to be non-committal in my response and said something like, “I hope so.”

In response I found out that Jews betrayed Hitler so he decided kill all of them – in other words those stupid Jews brought it upon themselves. And now the Palestinians are paying the price for the Jews betraying Hitler with the creation of Israel.

I didn’t ask for the details, I merely pointed out that I live in the shadow of Buchenwald and it is profoundly creepy. I also pointed out that Turkey killed a lot of Armenians and that genocide is pretty nasty. He tried to minimize the number of people killed and our conversation trailed off after that.

One could imagine what fireworks could have gone off had somebody wanted to engage in this discussion. I was left to talk about how wonderful everything was.

The other couple appeared to be a young newlywed couple from Saudi Arabia. There was some deference shown by the young woman toward her husband, but they both seemed happy and neither expressed an opinion about the holocaust—although the Saudis did not speak as fluent English as the Palestinians.