Eastern Turkey: They'll basically give you their bed to fuck on

It's insane how nice these people are. Today we became honorary members of a local soccer team, were on centre stage at an impromptu dance party on a boat in the rain, were invited to sleep over at some random family's house after eating at their restaurant (unfortunately after we had already paid for a hotel), and are now being dragged off to a concert which apparently involves a guitar... that's all we know so far. As I write this Karin is reading me an e-mail she just received from a random dude we met a couple of towns ago who says that he hopes to meet her again sometime because he really really likes her.

So basically Eastern Turkey has been the best part of the trip so far because to add to the hospitality the history is mind boggling: we visited the cave in which apparently Abraham (that's right, the one the only... well maybe not only, patriarch of western religion) was born, we hiked around this incredible abandoned 4000 year old town perched on top of 100 m high cliffs above the river Tigris, we drank tea in a "bee-hive house" next to the ruins of the oldest mosque in turkey (from the mid-700s), today we boated out to see this old and elaborately relief-bedecked Armenian cathedral from the mid-800s etc... etc... And still more, the landscape is something out of a Peter Jackson movie (if said Peter Jackson movie is one of the LoTR trilogy because beyond that I can't really comment).

Some basic facts: Pretty much everyone around here is either Kurdish or Arab. The Kurds don't really like Turks. The Arabs (that we've met) don't speak a lot of English and so we don't know that much about them.

We're currently in a city named Van famous for its cats which apparently are all white and have one blue and one golden eye. We haven't seen any though because apparently they're so valuable that no one lets them outside.

Tomorrow we go to Ararat... the very one from Genesis on which Noah's ark landed. From there we're headed to Erzerum to catch a flight back to Istanbul just in time to catch my flight to St. P's.

I need to go but I do so while sending all my love to you my loyal readers.