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Sille is a pretty small village just outside of Konya. The traditional village houses are mirrored by a rock-face full of cave dwellings and chapels.

If you have the chance to go to Sille, you should time your visit for a mealtime at the terraced Sille Konak. Sille Konak is a restored Greek house featuring a small museum, and providing excellent and reasonable priced home cooking.

Kastamonu is a really nice town and an ideal place for a stopover between Anatolia and the Black Sea. It features many old Ottoman houses, a castle, and several museums and mosques.

Atatürk launched his hat reforms in Kastamonu in 1925. Mustafa Kemal regarded the fez as a symbol of backwardness and banned it.

Göreme is set amid towering fairy chimneys, majestic honeycomb cliffs and cave dwellings. Altough Cappadocia is one of the most visited tourist attractions in Turkey, village life in Göreme manages to happily coexist with a thriving tourism industry.

The region around Göreme was used for shooting “Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam” (Turkish Star Wars). Besides showing the beautiful landscape of Cappadocia it also contains some really hilarious dialogues:

Murat: “Begin your famous whistle which no woman can resist.”
Ali: [Whistles]
Murat: “You whistle it wrong”
Ali: “Why?”
Murat: “Skeletons came instead of women”

And my personal favourite:

Ali: “Do you think you are the man who saves the world?”
Murat: “As much as you think you are a womanizer.”

If you are into bizarre movies, you definitely have to watch “Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam”.

Sinop is a popular destination for holidaymakers from İstanbul and Ankara. The city takes its name from the legend of Sinope, daughter of the river god Asopus and was the birthplace of Diogenes.

Sinop’s main attractions are the relatively well-preserved fortification and the Tarihi Cezaevi (Old Jail).

Anıtkabir is the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Mustafa Kemal is the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. The mausoleum is located in Ankara on top of Rasattepe (Observation Hill).

Antalya is one of my favourite cities in Turkey. I especially like Kaleiçi, the historical center of the city.

Alanya is a seaside resort in the south of Turkey. It has in the past couple of decades been discovered and subsequently conquered by European package tourism, especially from Russia, Germany and Scandinavia.

In my opinion, unfortunately Alanya was not able to keep its identity during this process and most parts of the city look like German or Russian colonies. But there are still some really nice places like Alanya Castla, an old Seljuk fortress, or Kızılkule (Red Tower).

The Mevlâna museum, located in Konya, Turkey, is the mausoleum of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a Sufi mystic also known as Mevlâna or Rumi. It was also the lodge of the whirling dervishes.

This year is the 800th anniversary of the birth of Mevlâna and the UNESCO year of birth of Mevlâna Rumi.

I saw this Linux-powered bathroom set at Kapalı Çarsi (Grand Bazaar) in Istanbul.

I wonder if it runs NetBSD too…

The licence plate code of Konya is 42:

Coincidence or not? :)

After almost 11 weeks in Turkey I’m back in Switzerland.

Doing the internship in Konya was a truly great experience. Besides having a challenging and interesting project to work on - web development with Ruby on Rails - I made a lot of new friends and had the chance to visit many different places in Turkey. I went to Istanbul, Ankara, Cappadocia, the Mediterranean and Black Sea region, and different cities near Konya.

I’ll be doing an internship at the Selçuk University in Konya, Turkey for the next 11 weeks.