Leda Beach
After gorging one last time at the breakfast buffet (it’s amazing how good hot dogs cut into chunks and called sausages can taste when you realize it might be your last real meal for a while), we check out of our hotel and head off to the bus to take us into Side (see-day). The general idea is that by staying in town, there will be more for us to do during the day than just roast on the beach, and in the evenings, we’ll be able to pick from a plethora of fine dining options.
Through Tripadvisor (which is batting .500 this trip), we find a place called the Leda Beach Hotel for the princely sum of $38. In addition to being on a beach, it is right next to the old section of town, which is the part we figure we most want to see. Given all that, what could possibly go wrong?
First though, a little more about Side. The city has been in this location since before the Romans (although it has had many different names throughout the years), and unlike the ruins at Pergamon and Ephesus, which are fenced off and controlled, here, the city has just grown right around them. Some of the bigger buildings like the theater and Temple of Apollo still stand on their own, but smaller structures and parts of the city walls have just been absorbed into a fairly bustling, mid-sized city. For the locals its clearly no big thing, big for me, it takes a bit of getting used to that 2,000 year old column being used as a birdbath stand or the arch of that ancient aqueduct being the perfect spot for a table for two.
The majority of the old town is packed with restaurants, small hotels, and souvenir shops. We decide to spend the afternoon wandering through the maze of streets, looking for gifts to bring back for the kids, but quickly find that unlike any other country we’ve been to, there isn’t really a lot of stuff geared towards to tourists (or, I suppose, the kinds of tourists that come here don’t take home the kinds of things we do). Sure, there are all kinds off knock-off clothes and handbags, but nowhere in the hundreds of shops do we see a basic Turkey t-shirt for a seven year old.
We come away from old town empty handed, but do find a nice restaurant that is built into a restored Roman building overlooking the water. We go for the Anatolian Special, which arrives at our table in a clay pot on a bed a of burning salt. A bit kitschy, yes, but fitting given the location, and one of the tastiest meals we have had here. The timing also works out well, as while we are eating, the skies open up and it pours down rain.
Back at the hotel, we settle in for the night. For $38, the accommodations are a little basic (it reminds us of the Sugar Shack at the lake), but comfortable, and with my favorite feature of all – separate beds (for reasons unknown, is most hotels here they only have one scrappy blanket to use to keep warm and somehow I always end up on the short of that deal). All is good until about 2:00 in the morning, when the rooster next door decides its time to wake up. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, this rooster is the Grandma Katie of roosters, talking to pretty much anything, at anytime.
By the time morning finally rolls around, and with Katie rooster still talking away, we just want to get cleaned up, repack and move down the beach to another hotel we looked at. Forgetting that most places here use solar to provide hot water and that the sun is barely up, the cleaning up part go surprisingly quickly and provides a nice little pick-me-up to offset the lack of sleep. It looks like it is going to be a nice day, but I predict very little activity on our part.