snow on halloween

we successfully made it to country number 19, turkey.

we spent a day in sighnaghi Georgia, east of tbilisi. it's located in wine country, perched up on a hill with the old city wall still intact. very beautiful. managed to get in a little hike the first day to a monestary and holy spring before the weather turned bad.

headed back to tbisili and took an overnight bus to trabzon, turkey on friday night. managed to spend most of my birthday on some sort of transportation. first was that overnight bus with the Georgia-turkey border crossing at 2 am. luckily our bus had 7 people including us so the border crossing was quick. from Trabzon waited a couple hours in the bus station and took a 5 hour bus to erzurum. we didn't realize Erzurum was so high and cold so the actually had a decent sized snowstorm going on and a few inches on the ground. a snowy halloween.

we lucked out and ended up getting train tickets on an overnight train out of ezurum to Kayseri. ended up being the nicest train compartment we've been in, only 2 people, chairs, sink, refrigerator. after 15 hours on the train we got to Kayseri this morning at 6 am and found a bus to urgup (cappadocia) where we'll spend one night before heading to goreme to meet erick's roommate matt. maybe have a belated bday dinner since all we ate yesterday was bread, cheese, clif bars, and bananas.

it's surprisingly cold here in turkey, we were looking forward to warmer weather, and at least in eastern turkey, no one speaks english or german and there are very few ATM machines.