Şanlıurfa, Gaziantep & Istanbul

After rediscovering posts from my old ivodr.com blog, I decided to bring my travel stories back to life—making them accessible again and preserving the memories of an incredible journey I returned from just over two years ago.

This is Post #8. More stories to come!

📍 Find all my travel posts here.

The question about where to sleep was resolved by my couchsurfing host Alghanhan, who accepted my request right when I was arriving in Şanlıurfa.

To my surprise, his home turned out to be an open space with around 20 travelers, most of them young people traveling through the Turkey after having attended a large rainbow gathering.

I really enjoyed my stay in Şanlıurfa, visiting historical places such as Karahantepe and Göbeklitepe and the places where the prophet Abraham was born and where we was thrown into a fire (according to the legend, god turned the fire into water and the coals into fish). I also went to a music shop for the xth time during this trip (one after the the other, all but one of the plastic parts of my over 60 year old guitar broke, giving me plenty of opportunities to visit music stores and being amazed by how easy it is to fix this instrument) and the owner, Mustafa, invited me to his home to talk English with his children. I agreed and got my guitar fixed for free :-)

After around one week, right when I was planning to leave, I realized that I could do my meditation retreat in this location. Since a while I had had the strong desire to dedicate myself more to meditation practice, and it felt right to just do it, instead of continuing to wait for it. I spent 5.5 days, mainly meditating, interspersed with studying meditation/spiritual topics and helping in the house. It was a really fruitful time and I learned a lot.

A few days after ending my retreat and after an incredibly heartwarming goodbye from the people in the house I hitchhiked to Gaziantep, the “food capital” of Turkey. The three days in this city were packed with delicious food, mixed with a little bit of sightseeing. On my last day I woke up with strong stomachache and diarrhea. Most likely this was due to digestion already weakened by a few days of bad stomach in Şanlıurfa and an indigestible mix of Gaziantep delicacies.

I recovered and in the evening I embarked on a 17 hour bus ride to Istanbul. I had decided to take the bus and not to hitchhike, because the feeling of wanting to get home soon got stronger and stronger. It looks like I’ll be home very soon :)