April 9, 2010 (Friday)

Tarsus. Up at 6:00 am and downstairs for breakfast at the Hilton Adana where we finally crashed after yesterday’s hard travel with so many miscues. Very large, good breakfast buffet. Now, we’re off to Tarsus. We get directions from the desk to get to the main highway D400 out of Adana, and off we go north to Tarsus, birthplace of the apostle Paul, to find the Tarsus Museum. Getting to the highway is pretty easy, and, lo and behold, the Garmin is working! Maybe things are looking up. But when we get to Tarsus, the Garmin becomes useless again. So frustrating . . . the streets are unmarked, small, and confusing, but we finally find our sabbatical target: the Tarsus archeological museum, rarely visited by any tour groups to Turkey.

Tarsus Museum. The museum is small, no admission fee, and the hours are Monday–Friday 8:30–12:00 and 1:00–5:00 pm. Holdings are few, but some are first century AD, including some pottery, vases, jewelry, statuary, and coins. The coins are not marked well, and the cabinets are dark. The museum clearly has little budget. We have an almost comical routine with the museum’s motion lights. Since the exhibits are lighted by motion lights, we have to keep moving around in constant motion like the sharks in the Gulf of Mexico tank at the Aquarium of the Americas so the lights will stay on for Jerry to take pics. After we finish, the young lady at the desk has observed our keen interest in their little museum and is very nice and gives us lots of brochures about various places in Turkey and a poster of the 1000-year anniversary the celebration of Paul.

Antakya. We plan to come back though Tarsus to do more touring, but we staged ourselves in Adana to be within striking distance of a day trip down to ancient Antioch of Syria (today part of Turkey, but the modern Syrian border is only 12 miles away). OK, the Garmin is as worthless as a brick, interminably unable to get a satellite fix, and the streets are unmarked, so now how do we get back to the highway so we can get on our way for the long push down to Antioch? After many wrong turns, we finally see a sign back to Adana and find our main D400 highway. Out on the main highway, the Garmin finally awakens out of its comatose state, gets its bearings, and becomes functional again. The Garmin provides us directions down to Antakya, the modern name for ancient Antioch of Syria.

After about a 2 ½ hour drive, we get to Antakya about 12:30 pm and have similar issues with finding our sabbatical target: the archeological museum. The Garmin is useless in the city, not because the unit does not have a satellite fix, but because Turkey has yet to discover labeling their street names with signs big enough actually to read sitting in a car. So, round and round we go. Very frustrating. We have the sinking feeling we have traveled for hours only to have wasted our time having reached our destination but completely clueless where we are or how to get to a specific location in this bustling, crowded, very Muslim and very foreign city. We finally see a policeman, stop, and ask directions. The English exchange is quite labored, but we find out we think we are close. We finally see the museum down the way, but now, where do we put this car? No on street parking, and no parking lots are apparent. We go round and round looking for a solution, but being careful not to stray too far from the museum to get lost on these twisting, turning streets up and down hills. Finally we do find a car park (a little gravel area behind a rock wall—that’s city parking in Antakya!).

Hatay Archeological Museum. The museum is wonderful. Filled with mosaics, one of world’s best and most extensive collection, and a major surprise, a beautiful sarcophagus with the contents still in tact (very, very rare; almost always they are disturbed over the centuries, or robbed). The bones and jewelry found inside are on display. The occupants were an adult male and female and a young female of Alpine nationality. We spent two hours in the museum (2:04 pm to 4:07 pm). Took a few pictures outside of the museum entrance and the city round-about traffic circle in front to give others trying to find the place visual “location” information.

We spent a little time trying to decide if we should try do anything else in Antioch before hitting the road again for the long ride back to Adana. The day is late, and very few ancient remains are left from first-century Antioch, one of the earliest ancient centers of the Christian movement. We have a sense of such stark contrast between then and now, a completely Muslim city with minarets rising on every other corner. Having no good guides, maps, or schematics to how to get to anything of interest left, we felt we just would be wasting our time and decide to head back to Adana.

Adana. We are able to navigate back out to the main highway out of Antakya. The Garmin is working and leading us home to the Adana Hilton hotel. We did have one heart-stopping moment on the drive back. Tooling down the highway on cruise control at highway speeds, an 18 wheeler in front of us blew a tire! Jerry reacted with the reflexes of a cat, safely steering us away and around all the flying rubber at high speed! Whew! What a feat of driving skill. After several hours, we are back at the Adana Hilton and have a wonderful dinner in the hotel restaurant. I had salmon, and Jerry had mixed grill. So delicious!

Back in our room, we review tomorrow’s schedule and try to figure out how we will find our hardest target of the day, the ancient tel (mound) of Derbe, the termination point of Paul’s first missionary journey. We decide we’ll try the GPS in the morning to see if she gets a satellite fix. As a backup plan, before we leave the hotel, we will go to the hotel’s business center and print additional Google map information. (Jerry already had located what he was pretty sure was the tel through research before the trip and studying Google maps.) In addition, we will go to Tarsus again, but this time to take in a few sights around town. We then plan to make our way through the Cilician Gates, the ancient pass through the Taurus Mountains, and on to Derbe. We then will finish the day’s adventure on to our hotel in Karaman, the modern city near the tel of Derbe. We have quite the ambitious itinerary for tomorrow! I hope we can make our destination. Finally, to bed.

For a video of the Tarsus and Antakya action today:

April 8, 2010 (Thursday)

Airport taxi. This day was supposed to be an easy day of travel, but instead will be a day of seven major miscues. When you first get up, you do not have a clue what is in store. We get ready in our Berlin hotel and repack suitcases for flights to Turkey. Have a nice breakfast in the very pretty dining room. Pictures of various famous people are on the walls. The hotel originally was a private home (need to get history from brochure). Paid the bill and headed downstairs to get taxi—well, there are two taxis waiting (1^st miscue of the day) because the lady at the front desk mistakenly called one when we already had one ordered the night before. So the two taxi drivers, a woman and a man, get into a heated discussion, and the lady from the hotel comes down and talks to them and motions for us to get into the first taxi with the woman driver. We comply but feel badly for two taxis showing up and one not getting the fare.

Tegel Airport. Our taxi driver speaks no English (we are getting used to that now) but gets us to Tegel airport in good time. The flight board at the airport shows our flight at Gate A05. We wait for a little while at Gate A05, but then are told we’re at the wrong gate! (2^nd miscue of the day) There’s been a change, and we need to go to Gate B25-28, in other words, right back to the area where we came into the airport! So, off we go rolling our bags. “See them bag rollers rolling they bags . . . “ By this time, a huge line has built up at check in, when we could have been at the beginning if we had gotten in line when we first arrived! Ugh. Since we already have boarding passes that I printed out back at the hotel, I go ask at the passport window if we can proceed, and am told we can go on through, so we do. Security this time, however, is very interested in Jerry’s backpack crammed with electronics, and looks it over carefully, opening up all the zipper pockets, etc. This is the first place Jerry’s backpack has caused any concern to security at all. The backpack gets sent through x-ray several times, wan checked, etc. Finally, they release the bag back to Jerry.

We are glad to clear the intense scrutiny of security, only to learn as we inspect the flight boards that our flight now shows a 45-minute delay! Ugh. We have to fly from Berlin to Istanbul, then clear security and visas with hundreds of other passengers at Istanbul’s International terminal, then find our connecting Turkish flight on down to Adana (near the southern coast) somewhere in the huge complex of the Istanbul International Airport. We are beginning to sense that our Istanbul connection to Adana is becoming iffy. As we are waiting, we discover on the flight boards that, instead of the connecting flight our itinerary scheduled us for in Istanbul, a direct flight from Berlin to Adana at the same gate actually was available—and, just to spite us, the direct flight to Adana takes off on time!! We already could have been in the air directly on the way to our final destination, but we had no knowledge of the flight from existing schedules on the Internet (3^rd miscue of the day). So, while we wait, we try to be productive with the dead time in the Berlin terminal by logging picture numbers with their corresponding descriptions into the database I will be typing up for Jerry when we get home. [This database will become a MAJOR project for Jean, as the number of pictures eventually will swell to almost 4000. Wow. She is absolutely incredible.—Jerry]

Finally, we board our Berlin flight to Istanbul! Hooray! However, I am trapped sitting next to the most malodorous woman! (I say again, What is wrong with these Europeans?!!) The odor was truly terrible and nauseating. (I really thought I was going to throw up.) If only she would not have kept moving her arms around, the stench perhaps would have been tolerable. On the flight, we catch a cute 2009 Sandra Bullock movie, “All About Steve” (“convinced that a CCN cameraman is her true love, an eccentric crossword puzzler trails him as he travels all over the country, hoping to convince him that they belong together”), and the laughs are a good diversion.

Istanbul. We finally land in Istanbul, get the shuttle to the gate, and get in the visa line, which is very long. The passport control line is even longer. We now are clear that we definitely are not making the connecting flight to Adana (4^th miscue of the day). Our hearts sink. What to do? What a surge of anxiety when you are with no one who speaks your language and you are missing your flight in a foreign country. A little bit of desperation creeps in. Standing in a line of hundreds of people in the Istanbul airport, we have to figure out our options and get something going to get us to Adana. I turn on my iPhone. [Thank God for AT&T 3G good anywhere in the world!—Jerry] and call Regina, our travel agent  at Travel Leaders, for help with our situation. She calls me back and says we have been put on a 10:30 pm flight to Adana, and that the Avis car rental place will wait on us (hopefully). Regina alerts Hilton and Avis about our late arrival. We have to go to the ticket window to get our tickets reissued for the new flight. We get that done and find our gate, then decide we’ll get something to eat.

We find a pub, and while waiting to get served, I was checking over our new tickets and suddenly noticed the departure time on our boarding pass is 6:35 pm, not 10:30 pm—and it’s 6:34 NOW!! (5^th miscue of the day). What had happened was, Regina had booked us on the 10:30 pm flight, but when we went to the ticket window to get our new tickets, the lady had bumped us up to an earlier flight, which was nice, but had failed to tell us she had bumped us to an earlier flight since they had open seats on that earlier flight! We rush to the gate, and there is absolutely no activity. OMG, have we missed the plane? I ask an attendant at another desk and am told it’s okay. The plane has not boarded yet. So, we sit and wait and wait and wait and wait—seems Turkish flights are perpetually late. Finally, an attendant shows up, and we all load up on shuttle busses and get taken out onto the tarmac to get on the plane. On the shuttle we talked with a nice Turkish man who used to live in Los Angeles, very fluent in English. Also, about 6 guys from the U. S. military are on the shuttle. Suddenly, we feel a lot safer J. We finally load the plane, and, thankfully, the stinky lady sits by someone else. Yikes! I feel sorry for the poor person sitting by her.

Adana. The flight from Istanbul to Adana is several hours. (Turkey is a huge country.) We finally arrive in Adana about 11:00 pm and load another shuttle from the plane to get to the gate. Unfortunately, our Los Angeles friend told us to get off at the wrong stop, and we had to walk a long way to transfer from the international to the domestic terminal (6^th miscue of the day). At the door, we show an attendant our baggage claim ticket and he personally walks us to the domestic gate and to the Avis counter. He’s very nice. We are beginning to experience the Turkish hospitality. The Turkish people really are very helpful. We get all the paperwork done and get the rental car, a grey/silver Renault that runs on diesel. The attendant turns on the car and shows us the switches for the lights and other elements of operation.

Adana Hilton. We head off to the hotel and get there just fine, but then realize we don’t know how to turn this car off and then restart it (7^th miscue of the day). So I call the Avis guy back at the airport, and he explains that the key is a black credit card looking thing—not a regular key, and a “stop” button shuts the car off. So we start experimenting with the key/entry card and make sure we can start/stop the car and lock/unlock it. That done, we go inside the Adana Hilton Hotel and check in around midnight. Our trip from the Askanischer Hof hotel in Berlin to the Adana Hilton in Turkey, which was supposed to be about 5–6 hours, has taken us 15 hours. We reviewed the day’s events and realized we had gone through a whole series of about seven major miscues. Well, in any case, we’re fine now. With determination we have pushed our way on through to our final goal of getting to Adana, Turkey and are back on track. The Adana Hilton is very nice—after all, it is a Hilton! We find out they have laundry service, so I get our dirty duds together, and housekeeping picks up the bundle to be returned to our room tomorrow. We shower, bathe, and clean up—feels so good! We record some more pictures, review plans for tomorrow, and off to bed about 1:00 am in a king size bed in a large room—yea!

April 7, 2010 (Wednesday)

Germany. We wake up in our train’s “deluxe” cabin, and we’re in Germany! We figured out how to change my bunk bed into a sofa, and the porter brought our breakfast of cold cuts and bread.

Berlin. We pull into Berlin, and an announcement is made that the train will make three stops, and the second stop is the main station. So, the train stops once, and, at the second stop, we (along with a nice couple from Australia who heard and understood the intercom announcement like we did) get off—but it’s not the main station! The train attendant sees us having exited the train and gets very strident about us getting off at the wrong stop. We do not know what we heard wrong, but two couples seemed to have heard the same thing. We get back on, and while waiting for the next stop, chat with the couple from Australia. They also are traveling on a grant, because the lady is an art professor and is in Germany for one week to view certain pieces of art. They appear to be about our age, and we laugh about how you finally get grants toward the end of your teaching career. Finally, we’re off at the “main station,” which was the third stop, not the second, and soon are in a taxi to our hotel.

Askanischer Hof. The Askanischer Hof is a small boutique hotel, but our room (#16) is huge. We are on the second floor with a great view of the avenue outside. Guess this huge room makes up for the itty bitty rooms in London, Paris, and the train! The hotel is along the main downtown avenue that is a premier business and marketing district. We learn later the next morning that the hotel used to be the home of a prominent Berlin family that had significant history in Berlin leading into WWII.

Pergamon Museum. We get directions to take bus 100 to Museum Island. We finally find it and get to the museum area. The bus ride takes us through some pretty parks. The stop “near” the museum isn’t really that near at all, and we walk a good ways on to the museum island. Finding the Pergamon Museum was confusing. We get in a ticket line of some kind, but I just don’t think it’s right, so I go up to the front to ask, and learn that there’s a different line for the Pergamon Museum. So off we go to the next long line. This line is really long, and that does not make my “boy scout” happy. When we finally get to the ticket counter, we see why the line was moving so slowly. Only one person is selling tickets for hundreds of people!! These Europeans!! And, aren’t Germans supposed to be the epitomy of “efficiency”? We finally get in, and I have to put my backpack in a locker.

The wait was worth it. The museum is stunning! Besides the reconstructed great Altar of Zeus (taken from Pergamum, Turkey) and the Ishtar Gate (great processional gate entrance of Babylon), the museum also has items from Miletus (the Miletus market gate) and other wonders. This museum, literally packed with famous archeological artifacts, has so much to see. We even have an extra temporary exhibit to view called “Return of the Gods,” which is an exhibit about the Greek gods. Also, a magnificent coin collection, about which we had no idea, has one of the most comprehensive and magnificently preserved coin exhibits in the world. Jerry is just floored at all the illustrations for his classes, especially his Exploring the New Testament class. We spent five hours in the museum and 1 hour in line for a total of 6 hours! [That will become the record for time spent in any museum of our entire trip.—Jerry]

A beautiful old church at the front of Museum Island catches my photographer’s attention, and Jerry takes some pictures. I need to research the church to find out the name and how old it is. We think possibly the church survived the bombing of Berlin in WWII. [Jean later found out the following history: The church is called the “Berliner Dom,” or Berlin Cathedral. This Evangelical Church was built between 1895 and 1905. At the time the church was built, the edifice was considered a Protestant counterweight to St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Bombed heavily in WWII, reconstruction of the church structure did not begin until 1975. Restoration of the interior began in 1984, and in 1993 the church finally was reopened.—Jerry]

Mondial Hotel Café. We walk down the boulevard until we finally can catch a taxi back to the hotel. We freshen up in our huge room and are off to find supper. We end up at the Mondial Hotel Café just up the street. What a find. Wish we had stayed here, because the staff falls over themselves helping us, even though we are not even staying there. For example, I asked about WiFi, and they gave us their code to use FREE. We called Jerry’s sister, Cindy, to check on the Stevens/Hyde clan, our house-sitter, Angela, and my Mother. Checking in with everyone was nice. We asked if a computer was available, and, wouldn’t you know, the hotel manager brought a laptop to the table, hooked it up, and let us use it for FREE. We checked email, etc. So, the folks at the Mondial Hotel, where we were not even staying, were very helpful, and, to top off everything, the food was delicious!

We went the short distance back down the street to our hotel, where I use the front desk computer to print our boarding passes for tomorrow’s flight from Berlin to Turkey. Also, I arrange for a taxi at 9 am tomorrow. Overall, a great day. Off to bed.

For a video of the Berlin action today: