On the bus en route to somewhere or other.

Dinner last night involved a great quantity of courses, of course. A tasty salad, a green bean and yogurt dish that... took some effort, some meat and rice, some more things I don't remember, a tasty apple.

Woke up this morning, spent some time online and packing, had breakfast of cereal and bread with meat and cheese. I have to thank Brenna for yesterday morning when she suggested I pour the milk into my glass so I could acceptably drink the milk from my cereal. Sat around a bit more and onto the bus. We went to Bergama, ancient Pergamon, and picked up a tour guide who started almost every sentence with “my dear guests.” It was amusing, and certainly better than “my friend, my friend.” We saw an ancient temple that had become a church that had become a mosque, the acropolis here which had a nice theatre, many temples, and chambers (now underground) that were used as dormitories, animal storage, prison and general storage, a famous altar of Zeus which is now in Berlin, all pretty cool stuff. There was a great story about an emperor wanting to see a bear fight a gorilla, the arenamaster forced an actor to wear a gorilla suit and fight a bear. In the arena the actor whispered “please don't attack me, I'm not a gorilla, I'm just an actor,” and heard the bear say back “don't attack me, I'm an actor in a bearskin.” From there we had a buffet lunch which was pretty good, and then on to the Asklepion, one of the first hospitals of the world.

Apparently they had psychological treatment, including music and drama therapy, and physical therapy all the way back then? It was interesting. Granted, one of the psych treatments, walking down a tunnel while psychotherapists pretended to the be the gods above you and whispered down through windows, sounded like it would make me go crazy before it cured me, but hey. The hospital had a theatre, as I mentioned, they apparently used that as part of treatment too. We also heard a funny story here, of an emperor who was questioned by a madman, and upon telling the madman who he was, got the response “how sad, I got here because I said that too.”

By the by, our tour guide also sang in Turkish for us twice on the bus. That was pretty cool. Driving through miles of olives again, having just munched on a handful of hazelnuts, and uploading my pictures.

Wednesday, March 10th, roughly 4:20-4:30 PM local time