Saturday, June 13

Lacey and Maren and I went to Beypazari with Joan today for some living museum and shopping fun, just us girls.

We met Joan at the metro station near Ankamall and she showed us the right dolmus to get onto for the 1 1/2 hour ride to Beypazari. Lacey fell asleep, Joan and I chatted, and Maren kept Joan guessing with a few rounds of 20 Questions. And then we were there! Pretty easy, especially with Joan along to lead the way.

We wandered through the market area looking at all the jewelry and fabrics and dodging the sun, on the way uphill to the museum. The museum is in an old upscale Ottoman house and has stations set up where you can try your hand at different Turkish arts: Ebru painting, stamping on fabric, shadow puppet plays. It was wonderful. Maren was excited to add birds to her Ebru painting, Lacey was beside herself that she was able to make an Ataturk print bandana, and they both giggled so hard while they put on their puppet show that I'm surprised we didn't have any accidents. It was a great time and so much more appreciated this late in the visit since they had already seen Ebru paintings demonstrated and heard about "Turkish Shadow Puppets". Fun stuff.

We stopped at a little gozleme cafe for lunch, complete with little stools for seating and tree trunk tables for eating.

Then it was time to do some buying of souvenirs. We had scanned things on the way in, so now we were ready to buy. We did our shopping, dodged the sunshine some more, and then it was already 3 PM and time to get moving toward a bus home.

The women in Beypazari wear headscarves that are long and flowing--they're actually two square scarves joined together to make a large rectangular sheet. Coupled with the "MC Hammer" pants (shalwar), they make for quite a flowing mass of floral fabric when they walk by you. It is interesting how each little area/village seems to have their own little tweak on "traditional" Turkish clothing--an extra large headscarf here, white headscarves there, inside the collar or out, wrapped over the face or not, hair peeking out or not. In each area there are all of the above, but the dominance of one version changes from one town to the next. In Beypazari there were also men wearing the Hammer pants, but not in other areas we've been.