Sponges we stumble upon

I will remember Antalya as the town where we looked for a good place to eat, the town where a hurricane was expected to pass through but eventually he must have had the wrong address told us Hakan, the archeologystudent who showed us the non-touristic part of the town and a good good restaurant. The town where we found the good nightrest to be able to carry on to the east. A town where we passed through.

The next day Nihad the gentle medicineseller gave us a lift all the way to Konya, in the middle of Turkey. It's the first place where we're real strangers. In Istanbul,with some imagination, we could've been one of them. Not in Konya we can. We see only women with hijabs on the street. I discover a certain feeling of unease sitting on the bus, holding my house, wearing a headscarve just for the beauty of it. On that bus I wish we could be hosted once by a Muslim family. To get rid of my unease and ignorance. To understand. A woman with the kindest eyes ever steps on. Even without smiling or looking at me I could feel the friendliness of that woman. It made me feel more comfortable on the bus in the conservative muslimtown.

From Konya we take the bus to Cappadocia, to Göreme, a town where you don't want to be in the season seeing all the guided tours,rafting,horseriding,hotels,the quads,bikes,cars to rent. Now the town looks empty and the people unhappy. We have a walk in the spectacular spongey landscape, spongey due to the eruptions of the volcano's surrounding the area. While walking I realise that this is not something we planned to see, we just happened to stumble upon it, like all the other things and people we meet. I realise I didn't know anything about Turkey,Atatürk,the Ottoman empire,the so many different nationalitybackgrounds of the Turks. I realise this is why we're making this journey. To meet and greet whatever comes and to learn from it. I decide to write about this, about the why and the how of this journey, something to grab on to if we would ever forget, a little support that could be useful some time, maybe. You can read the result on this blog under the title why and how.

We're skipping the hitchhiking for a while and decide to go on by bus and train or only with people we've known for a while. One not so kind, very sad and lonely man showed us that not everybody has the right intensions. But for the record, we're ok and we're very happy that we are where we are now. In Erzurum. The East. It's cold and the sun is under at 4:30pm but we couldn't have been in a better place than we are. We're staying with Semra and Zekeriya and their two chidren Betül and Lokman. A muslimfamily. It's what I had wished for on that Konyabus. The generosity that is so normal to them surprises us so. We were one of the family from the second we entered the house. We can wash our clothes, eat the incredible food of Semra and in the evening we're all together in the sofa for reading hour. We decide not to rush and stay here for a few days. In fact we decide not to rush at all anymore on this journey. Like this, things can come in their own pace and we're greatfully following that rythm and slowly forgetting about the Belgian one.