Eskisehir

Here are some pictures from the train ride here:







At first glance this picture is meaningless, but if you look carefully on the right, about halfway down, you'll see something pretty special to me. Maybe the quality is bad so I'll tell you what it is - a rower! Somewhere along the way to Eskisehir we went past a very flat lake and there were lots of rowers - mostly doubles but also some singles and some 4s. Pretty cool!



Here's the river going through the city with the pedestrian streets alongside it. The first couple of days here were quite nice - sunny and not too cool at all. But then...



Snow! There's an older part of Eskisehir - Odunpazari - where there are old Ottoman houses and I love how they are painted - so bright and colorful! There is a lot of history that predates these houses, which I'm guessing were built no more than a couple of hundred years ago (??). The little brochure that I have describes the technique in which they were built. From what I can understand, wooden catwalks (scaffolding??) are filled with bricks or adobes and that is covered with plaster and lath. This picture kind of shows it:







The Turks really reuse things a lot, maybe we should take a lesson from them. The most popular things they use are olive oil cans, yogurt containers, and tomato paste containers (that really reflects their cuisine!), mostly for flower pots, and also they fill them with cement and a tall stick and use it to reserve parking spaces in front of their houses.





There is also a big complex in Odunpazari where there is a mosque and school and fountain and kitchen and other such things. It was built in the mid 16th century. It was hard to get an overall picture - sorry!



The place to perform ablutions - to wash your feet, arms, face etc before entering the mosque. I certainly didn't see anyone there this morning! Brrr