B

The modern city of Bergama is a sleepy little town with two ancient Graeco-Roman sites that bring many a foreign visitor, ourselves included.  As usual we had picked a likely guesthouse from Lonely Planet and were hoping the bus would drop us off nearby as we knew we would pass within a few blocks.  This simple maneuver proved impossible, however, as the conductor simply ignored our frantic waving and shouting, hoping perhaps do divert us from our choice to someone who would pay him a commission.  It was not to be.  

We had chosen the place for two reasons.  First, the name of the place brought back very good memories.  It was called Boeblingen Guesthouse and named after a town very close to Tuebingen where Jan lived for two years. Jan was sent out to check out our choice because the owner was said to speak German.  The second reason had to do with location.  It appeared to be located midway between the two main sites in town and would thus make them both reachable on foot.

The Boeblingen proved to be all that LP promised and the owner happily remedied the bus conductor's lack of cooperation by driving Jan back to the bus station to pick up Gerry and the bags. Our first outing, the next day, was to the Asklepion, the world's first teaching hospital.  Perhaps it would be better to say a center of medicine and teaching. The remains are extensive and grouped around a couple of low hills that are visible from the acropolis of Pergamon, three or so miles away.

Apart from seeing the ancient ruins, we also explored the modern town of Bergama and visited the museum that contains a collection of relics from the sites.  We visited the museum a second time, but for a rather unusual reason. 

While in Izmir we had purchased a rug that we wanted to ship to England. At the post office there had been some problem to do with insurance that we had not understood and not been able to solve satisfactorily and so we had decided instead to mail it from Bergama, figuring that a smaller town would be more friendly.  That proved to be the case, but we still had some mysteries to unravel.  It turns out that all rugs exported from Turkey have to be inspected and tagged for export.  When we showed up at the post office they sent us to the museum to get the rug "valued".  We were a little nervous thinking perhaps they would want to charge us some high export tax or something.  As it was the operation took about 20 minutes, cost us a couple of dollars, and simply verified the quality of the rug we had purchased and added a tag specifying that.  Most rug shops have all of their rugs pre-valued, but we had bought from a wholesale shop and he had warned us that there might be some export proceedings that he wasn't aware of because he sold almost exclusively to shopkeepers.

The rug was subsequently mailed and arrived safely at its destination, albeit a little quicker than we had anticipated.  We had tried to have it sent surface mail, but in spite of our attempts the rug went airmail and arrived in a matter of days.