After eating hands-down the most inventive rendition of carbonara I have ever had anywhere in the world (the bacon was replaced with beef hot dogs bits), I decided it was time for a bit of sight-seeing.

We didn’t have a long drive ahead of us to get to Demre, which had quite a few of those trusty brown signs (indicating a historically significant site).

The first place that we came upon was SO historically significant that we had to buy tickets from some government hacks and go through a turnstile. This was the real deal, with tour guides and hordes of Germans and the whole nine. I readied my notebook for copious note-taking.

We were at what is now referred to as Myra, an ancient city of Lycia (“Land of the Sun”). It was once one of the largest towns in the Lycian Alliance. It is most closely associated with Saint Paul, who changed ships in its harbor. It is also associated with another man with whom we are very familiar with, but I will save that tid bit for later.

This site features rock tombs cut into cliff faces, remains of Roman baths and an amphitheater. It is quite stunning, actually. I found it more captivating than the ruins we saw at Olympus, although I admit it could have been the sunny splendor of the day that improved my mood considerably.

A short drive from these ruins, one enters the dismal town of Demre and immediately notices a strange sight all around: images of jolly ol’ St. Nick. Yes, images of Santa Claus are on billboards, storefronts. Some of you may actually know that Saint Nicholas hails from Turkey, but when I was first told this, I thought the person telling me was acting a bit fascist. “Yeah, yeah, yeah”, I said. “Santa Claus is from Turkey, we are ALL from Turkey. Turkey is the center of the universe. Whatever, dude!” Imagine how silly I felt to find that it was true!

Saint Nicholas was the bishop of Myra back in the fourth century. He was nicknamed Nicholas the Wonderworker because of miracles that occurred during his time. He had a habit of secretly slipping coins into shoes that were left out, which led to our modern day version of a gift-giving Santa Claus, and the name comes from the German Sankt Niklaus.

There was a St. Nicholas Museum, but I wasn’t really in the mood for that. I mean, I am more interested in knowing how a skinny benevolent bishop from Turkey turned into a fat guy living at the North Pole with work shopping elves and flying reindeer and all of that. Somehow, I doubt this was discussed in the museum, so I just took a picture of the statue out front and that sufficed for me.

After a lovely day of learning, we headed back to our sleepy seaside village for a nap and some dinner.

The dinner would have been not worth mentioning at all were it not for an amusing anecdote. While we looked at the menu, the owner stopped by to see if we had decided. We were the only patrons, possibly even for that week and the man seemed more annoyed by our business rather than pleased by it.

Anyway, Barış asked how the pizza was and the man said, “Brother, I don’t make it well, so I don’t recommend it.” You just have to appreciate that kind of honesty! Say something like that to a customer in a restaurant in States and get your ass shown to the door. But it’s one of the things you just have to admire about Turks, in my opinion. His pride was too strong to present us with a sub standard pizza, so he politely steered us in another direction.

After dinner, we decided to just go back to the room where we planned to get a fire going in our en suite fireplace. Given that it was a Monday night in an off season virtual ghost town, we figured we weren’t missing any nightlife.

The next morning, we wandered ill-advisedly into an innocent enough looking tea garden. What we could not know (although we could have suspected it once we were inundated on one side by a table of honking British women and their dogs) was that this was a tourist trap. We paid too much for a breakfast that was not worth much at all, and while it was a bit of a bummer, we just shook it off and aimed to be wiser in the future.

I was too excited about where we were going for sight-seeing that day to care about having gotten the shaft for bad tea.

Tune in next time to find out where in the world we went;)