TURKEY December 29, 2009: Americans in Turkey – Day 12

Day 13 –Mike succumbs to very clever salesman and buys a carpet!

Drove from Urgup to Konya – pretty uneventful; most of the drive two lanes in each direction; light rain on and off. (Glad we didn’t have this weather when we were based in Kapodokya).

Arrived in Konya (city of one million) and tried to follow Google map directions … which worked fine until the very end.. and then we were suddenly in some kind of rush hour, lots of traffic circles; streets coming from every direction — and then we just  went with the traffic flow and were totally lost. After about 10 minutes meandering around without any sense of where we were and where we needed to be (we were trying to find the Hotel Rumi), we thought we’d just look for a high-rise building and find some other hotel. The only thing we knew was the the Hotel Rumi was near the Mevlana (the center of Sufidom)… Well no luck finding any other hotel, as nothing stood out.

So we decided to search for the Rumi, eventually stopping at a gas station and showing the address (on our Blackberry).. The guy explained in Turkish how to get there.. but he knew one English word – “lamp” which we figured meant traffic light… we followed what we thought we understood to be the directions and wound up on a very narrow, residential street blocked with traffic cones.. when along came a guy walking down the street who appeared to understand our plight and without any prompting, just moved the traffic cones and in we went to what was clearly a one way street going in the opposite direction.. By now we also realized this clearly was not a street with a hotel… so again we decided that we’d stop to ask for the Dedeman (a hotel chain in Turkey that we noticed in other cities and assumed was here in Konya as well.)  We made a few turns and then there lo and behold was the Rumi!..

The Rumi is small (about 40 rooms) and I think we may be the only guests.  We checked into the hotel and then checked out the city of Konya… a grungy, second world town, surrounding this shrine to Rumi and Sufiism. We’re told it’s one of the most conservative parts of Turkey. As such, 95% of the restaurants do not serve any wine or alcohol (yet we read that it has the highest percent of alcoholism in all of Turkey). About a week ago the annual Whirling Dervish Convention took place… really glad we missed that one.

We did stroll into the Mevlana Museum where I think Rumi is buried.