Beautiful blue skies, lots of green trees, light breezes, and ume blossoms. No, it doesn't qualify as Sakura blossoms but plum blossoms are pretty close. The streets were filled with lots of beautiful trees...
We headed off in the morning towards the coastal city of Cesme. From here we would be taking a ferry out to the Greek island of Chios. While there's a long history of fighting and atrocities between the Greeks and Turks, for the most part they get along these days - for the most part. Depends, of course, who is telling the story. For our part, we found all of them to be totally wonderful and helpful.
Getting out to our ferry was a trip in itself. You know, I waxed eloquently about the bus system here but, to be fair, the city is large and buses aren't fast....and fortunately we left an hour earlier than we thought we needed to....and it turns out that was a very good idea. The bus ride from Patrick's place to the Cesme bus took almost an hour, followed by another hour from there to Cesme (sounds like a long time but then again, it took an hour to drive the 40 minute bus route back home - and I technically wasn't stopping on every street corner - just lost a lot). We finally did succeed in getting our tickets, and making it to the ferry terminal. Then the question came up...which ferry??? Thanks again to Patrick's skills, we discovered that we had to weave through about 30 trucks to get to the far side where our ferry lay waiting for us. Ah well...old but dependable.
As we left we had a good view of Cesme Castle, an Ottoman castle built in the 1500's.
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