Sanliurfa trip

On Friday (11 April), Emily and I loaded up the kids (and half the house) into The Tank and headed off to Sanliurfa and Harran for a two-day, one-night trip along with our friends, Karl and Julianna and their two-year-old daughter. A whole 20 minutes into the drive, Blythe started whimpering, "This is taking long!" She said that same phrase approximately 3,000 times during the next four hours. After winding through the mountains, crossing the Euphrates River, having Rowan scream bloody murder for a solid hour or so, and taking several potty breaks at Turkish gas stations -- where they offer you complimentary tea but not toilet paper -- we finally made it to Sanliurfa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanliurfa).

It's a beautiful city located in eastern Turkey, about 40 miles from the Syrian border. But it's proximity to Syria isn't it's only draw: Sanliurfa (also known simply as Urfa) is mentioned in the Koran as the birthplace of both Job and Abraham. The Koran says Urfa is where Job and his boils hung out, and where Abraham lived before heading off to everyone's favorite get-away destination, Soddom and Gommorah. While Abraham lived in Urfa, he destroyed some of King Nimrod's favorite idols and Nimrod responded by catapulting Abraham into a lake of fire -- only the fire miraculously turned into goldfish while Abraham was in mid-flight. As I always say, it's much better to land in a lake of goldfish than a lake of fire. Anyway, a massive mosque complex and garden has been built around this fish pond -- and the fish are still there. Well, not the original fish. And instead of goldfish, they're now carp. Holy carp. Which means no one is allowed to touch or catch them. You can, however, feed them. There are vendors lined along the pond and the streams that wind through the gardens, and they sell fish food. The kids got a big kick out of creating feeding frenzies -- particularly Rowan, who had to be restrained several times from jumping in.

After we fed the holy carp, we wandered over to the mosque built over the cave where Abraham was born. We went inside, which required us to take off our shoes and go in separate entrances/rooms -- segregated by gender. Emily and Blythe had to cover their heads. The boys and I went into a room that overlooks the cave and watched as the Muslim men lined up to drink from a spring that comes from the cave. We decided to not have a drink.

From the cave mosque, we hiked up to the castle that overlooks the city. It was built a long time ago. By some very strong dudes, apparently. Over the years, the castle has been captured by everyone from Alexander the Great and the Crusaders to the Arabs and the old Turkish men who charge you $2 for the privilege to climb a billion steps to the top. And Rowan demanded he climb all billion steps all by himself, thank you very much. Like most castles and historical sites in Turkey, the castle is in ruins and features many, many different ways in which you can die -- to include but not limited to (1) plunging hundreds of feet to your death thanks to the lack of guardrails along the walls and (2) falling into unmarked cisterns. Emily is a big, big fan of Turkish castles and spent most of our time there steering the kids from various death traps. We climbed back down and ate dinner in a restaurant built into the castle walls. Halfway through dinner, we noticed that thousands of pigeons were roosting in the rocks perched over the place where they were cooking our food. That observation was made in between Rowan throwing his food across the table and having a butter-knife fight with our friends' daughter, so yeah, dinner was lovely.

The kids went to bed early in our very nice hotel.

The next day, we drove to Harran, which is about 30 miles south of Urfa and so close to Syria you can almost smell the mustard gas. Harran is mentioned in the Old Testament as the place where Abraham, Sarah, Abraham's father and Lot lived before they took off for greener pastures in Canaan. It also is where Abraham had the famous vision of the Lord telling him that his posterity would cover the Earth and from which Christ would be born. By some accounts, Harran is where Jacob worked for 20 years before he could marry Rachael -- and judging from the heat even in April, that was probably a long 20 years. More recently, it was visited and surveyed by Lawrence of Arabia. Anyway, Harran is one of the oldest continously lived-in settlements in the world (first mentioned in a writing dated from 1100 BC, and even then it was a big and important enough city to warrant mentioning) and it doesn't seem to have changed much over the years. It's a dusty little town with ruins of Islam's first university (although their college football team was never very good), a castle (of course), and walls and foundations from the ancient city. The town is full of these weird beehive-shaped dwellings that are built out of mud and straw. We went inside a few of them and got to look at scarves and crap. Harran was pretty neat, although I almost punched our "tour guide" in the neck when he demanded $25 for letting us park next to his complex of beehive houses. I ended up paying him $7 after engaging in the Arab national sport of arguing over stupid #$&@. While our "tour guide" helped ensure Harran wasn't the awe-inspiring experience we were hoping for, it still was incredible to be re-tracing the prophets' steps.

All in all, it was a great trip. Urfa and Harran definitely had a Middle Eastern feel, and Urfa was (surprisingly) the cleanest city we've visited so far. It was worth the eight or so hours of screaming in the car and the insane price of gas here, and we plan to go back.