Friday – Sinop, Turkey

Today, we arrived in Sinop, Turkey.

The First of May is Labour Day in Turkey; the first day of holidays for school children and a day where peaceful protests take place in city centres across the country. Peaceful on account of the massive amount of policeman assigned to making sure they’re peaceful. Or that’s how our guide explained Labour Day as we embarked on a three-hour walking tour of Sinop, a small city of only 35,000 inhabitants, and the most Northerly place in Turkey.

To be honest; three hours was almost certainly too long. It’s a nice enough place, but there really wasn’t a great deal to look at, and the guide was struggling to make it all interesting. We visited a Turkish house billed as a Ethnylogical Museum, which was reasonably interesting; giving a glimpse into how a Turkish family from the last century might have lived. By the time we arrived at the Archaeological Museum, however, our group of 26 had dwindled to 22, as folks started to lose interest and patience. Unfortunately, The Archaeological Museum was closed for refurbishment, and the forty minutes spent killing time around its gardens didn’t provide much in the way of compensation. It did sport a statue of Diogenes the philosopher who lived in a barrel with his dog, though, who was born in Sinop.

After the museum gardens, our guide took us to the Alaadin Mosque; an understated, but restful place of worship, before finishing up at a small market where he told us we had 25 minutes of free time before we would be returning to the ship. During this 25 minutes, however, a strange thing happened; the guide told me that some of the group wished to leave for the ship early and that he would show them which way to go. That was the last I saw of him; at the end of the 25 minutes, our party was down to 6, including Tracey, and myself, the escort. The guide, it seemed, had abandoned us. As we tried to find out what had happened to him, Amy, who was escorting one of the other groups, also became separated from her own group, and so the seven of us, realising we were alone, had to try and find our way back to the ship by ourselves.

This wasn’t such a massive problem as it turned out; Sinop is not a huge place, and it didn’t take long top navigate our way back towards the portside. However; the fact remains that having a group diminish from 26 to 5 and the guide abandon it the way he did, is a bit of a first for me.

In this afternoon’s class, I had them painting a tonal study, which went down well… and it was all far less chaotic.