The old town of Epheseus is spectacular: the amphitheater, the administrative areas, remnants of houses, and of course the public toilet. But, so many people!! A cruise ship docked in Kusadasi yesterday and they must have had at least a thousand people from the cruise ship - maybe more. The only advantage to having all these people, is it gives you a feel for what the town might have been like when it was home to 300,000 people.

Celsus was a collector of writings, in the olden days, it was scrolls on papyrus. After his death, son built this library and the collection gained such reknown that it rivaled the library at Alexandria. They banned the sale of papyrus to Pergamon (an ancient name for this area). No matter. In Pergamon they discovered how to make parchment and create pages / books. It was Cleopatra who demanded of Marc Anthony all of the holdings in the Library of Celsus -which he promptly gave her. And all the holding were moved to Alexandria, only to be lost in the fire that destroyed the Library there. This isn't the movies, it really happened!

Susan's new friend, after purchase of turkish wrap-around pants.

We lunched in Sirince, a mountain village. Once home to ethnic Greeks until the invasion of Turkey by Greece in 1919. Ataturk amassed an army and pushed the Greeks back to the sea, and in 1923 the new Republic of Turkey was formed. The ethnic Greeks in Turkey were forced to Greece, and from Greece ethnic Turks were sent to Turkey - they came to this village to live in the homes left by the ethnic Greeks. Got that? Anyway, lunch was great, and so was the shopping.