Turkishly Delightful: Visiting Kas

After Cappadocia, we took our Canadian friends to Kas for a couple of days. If you follow my blog, this should not come as I surprise as I've gone on and on about Kas' fabulousness in the past. (Our trip last summer starts here.)

Kas is a rare jewel on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, and I cannot say enough good things about it. There isn't a direct connection by road or air, so if you want to get there, you have to drive a few hours from either Antalya to the east or the town of Fethiye or the Dalaman airport to the west, which has kept Kas delightfully quiet and laid-back. At the same time, it's also a great base for exploring the area -- there are a number of restaurants and hotels in town, and it's close enough to popular places like the St. Nicholas Church in Demre, Saklikent Gorge, Patara beach, the Kekova sunken city ruins where you can go kayaking, and the above-water ruins at Xanthos, Letoon, Myra, Patara and Tlos. In Kas, you can also go scuba diving, hang gliding and take a day-trip to a Greek island. [I suppose I should also point out that Kas is actually Kaş -- I usually can't be bothered to add the Turkish accents on my American keyboard -- and pronounced Kah-shh.]

Anyway, so on this trip, we spent three lovely nights in Kas. Since we'd been multiple times before, we let our friends decide what we would do, and in the end, they didn't want to do anything but just enjoy the ambiance (and the gloriously warm weather, a marked change from both Cappadocia and Canada). Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in such a lovely town.

Not surprisingly, the locals agree...

Our first full day there was April 23, National Sovereignty and Children's Day in Turkey. Although the holiday actually commemorates the establishment of the Turkish parliament in 1920, it's become about children and most people have the day off from work. So, appropriately, there were little children playing in the square and dancing to music.

We spent a lot of time eating and drinking. The oranges were in abundance and we enjoyed many glasses of freshly squeezed juice. Cagatay and our friends also enjoyed Turkish coffee, and we had some fun playing fortune-teller with the leftover coffee grounds. This is a real thing -- to start, you place the saucer over the finished cup and make a wish, and then you flip the cup/saucer over and let it sit for awhile. Cagatay suggested that they put their wedding rings on top of the flipped cup because it helps the cup cool faster, though one source I found said that it also helps to dispel bad omens. After awhile, you flip open your coffee cup and begin interpreting the patterns left by the grounds, which have migrated up along the sides and probably onto the saucer. That's all I know about it, but go here for details on how to interpret the grounds patterns. With this cup, we felt like it had something to do with Cappadocia...don't those look like the rock formations at Pasabaglari?