Satellite
  • Day 83

    Konya and a more traditional Turkey

    October 22, 2019 in Turkey ⋅ ⛅ 14 °C

    We'd been told not to go to Konya. Sometimes people said that we would be robbed, that people there have an obsession with money; that Konya is full of Syrian refugees (many Turkish people don't see with good eyes that their country is asylum for around 3M Syrians). Others said that there is nothing to see.

    To make our own experience we ignored all kinds of 'stupid' recommendations and discovered a very traditional city full of people wearing less modern and more modest clothes. Their traditional dishes were all cooked with meat, so we kept it also traditional with our favourite vegetarian combination: lentils soup + rice + white beans. Konya isn't used to see the amount of foreign tourists that other cities receive, so the locals were very interested on us and treated us like their guests meaning also that they didn't try to rip us off.
    Besides discovering who was Mevlana and the dervish tradition, we also discovered that Konya university has many students from abroad. We got to enjoy an entire evening with two of them, Ahmad (Jordan) and Emi (Algeria), and shared some different points of view about life, politics and religion. Thank you for your kindness guys! Shukran!
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