Cappadocia and the Surronding Environs

Last weekend all of the fields walkers and a few of the team leaders took a trip to Cappadocia, this is an area of Eastern Central Turkey famed for its landscape (if you have seen a postcard of Turkey and it does not have Istanbul on it, it probably shows Cappadocia). The area is a large plain surrounded by volcanoes which erupted some time ago and covered the entire area with a layer of volcanic rock called tufa, this rock is amazingly soft so when people began to inhabit the area rather than build houses above the ground they instead carved into the rock itself which had been eroded into spires and mouds and canyons by wind and water by this time. People still live in similar odings boring rooms and halls into the rock itself, they are even sold as normal homes (providing they are outside of a historical site) and you can even buy an uncarved spire and carve it yourself (something that is now added to my dream homes list). While there we visited dozens of ancient churchs carved into the rock and even an entire city beneath the surface. It went eight levels down (well eleven really but only eight were open to the public) and at some points I had to completely double over to fit myself into the sometimes small tunnels between rooms. They estimate some hundreds of people ould have lived there.
Cappadocia is also where we visited a carpet workshop and got to see how Turkish carpets are made and even to help a little (though i'm sure we were only slowing the workers down with our clumsy fingers) We were then brought into a carpet show room and given a number of drinks and then shown at least a hundred in carpets which layered the floor by the end of the session the salesman showed us everything from simple kalims to silk carpets worth around 10,000 USD. I then made the questionable decision of purchasing a carpet myself, perhaps it was the two turkish coffees I had had by then (I have taken quite a fondness to it).
On the last night in Cappadocia we went to a rather touristy dinner and a show with Whirling Dervishs performing a ceremony in the beginning and then folk-dancing followed by belly-dancing Feliz, Turkish member of our team had previously taught us a popular Turkish dance often done at weddings so when the dancers began grabbing people from the audience we fit right in. It was a fun night during which i tried both Raki, the traditional Turkish liquor which tastes something like black liquorice and Istanblue, a Turkish vodka which tastes something like Raki.