Sirince

 Stuffed grape leaves, stuffed peppers, a salad

 This is Gozleme, a Turkish pancake, a crepe but its filled with a meat sauce. It can be filled with spinach and cheese or a host of other things and its absolutely delicious. I love Gozleme. It's not always available. I think its mostly available during lunch time and even so only at restaurants that advertise it. We went to a few restaurants but couldn't find it on their menu.

 Imagine lunching under a grape arbor among people from all over the world. Its incredible.

 This was the first time in my traveling life that I meet people from South Korea. We see a lot of Japanese and we are always mistaken to be Japanese. Here in Turkey we meet people from all over Asia including a bunch of them from Malaysia. I was originally from Malaysia and I can tell them apart a mile away.

We left Istanbul that morning on a Turkish airline flight and landed at the airport in Izmir. The airport is designated as Izmir but it is not really Izmir, it is halfway between Izmir and Selcuk. The ancient name for Izmir was Smyrna as in Smyrna in the bible (Acts of the apostles). Selcuk is the little town which is closest to the ancient city (now in ruins) of Ephesus. There is a train that runs between Izmir and Selcuk which picks up and drops off people in the airport. So we took the train and in 90 minutes arrived in Selcuk. We found our pension which was a dump. I was a little depressed at the sight of it. In fact Selcuk, in spite of being so close to Ephesus gets no respect. It is a backwater town and I think its people feel it and they lament all the time that the fancy tourists don't come to their town. They stay in 4 star hotels at the coast, mostly at Kusadasi and they get bussed into Ephesus in luxury air conditioned buses. Ephesus is one of the churches on the 'seven churches' of Revelation's circuit and sees millions of Christians a year. It is always crowded. We'll be visiting Ephesus next but in the meantime after checking in, we found a dolmus (mini bus) and headed for the hills. 90 minutes out of Selcuk, up in the hills, is a little village called Sirince. It is pretty, prosperous and interesting. We were hungry and upon arrival ordered up a bunch of food and had the most delicious lunch.