Welcome back
I've taken then longest ever break, but I will persevere, fret not. I'm going to keep writing about Turkey in the present tense, but that's mostly because I'm copying straight from my journal. Stay with me.

The bug
Normal processing in the gastro-intestinal region resumed within one week, just short of my personal deadline to either name my new travelling companion (and preferably get it its own room) or alternatively commit hara-kiri through self-immolation. All for the best, I think.

Roman ruins
I've already become quite the expert on Roman ruins in my week-and-a-half here.There are three major sites along the Aegean coast: Troy, Pergamon and Ephesus.

Troy was first and had the oldest stuff. My tour guide for the day was the excitable Boris, a tutor of whatever the field of looking at old Greek stuff is called at the local university. He bounded around from the site, speaking at breakneck speed making him frequently unintelligable, giving us precisely five seconds for each photo break ("Ready? Good!"). But I couldn't dislike him, not even for a second -- he had the charisma of a kid who is showing a new playmate his favourite ever Lego kit. But instead of Lego castles, Boris was rabbiting on about an exciting new theory on urn-usage, or something similar.

Anyway, back to the old stone stuff. I was surprised to learn that there were actually nine Troys (or, thrillingly, possibly even 10) built one on top of the other, always reusing the existing materials. This makes the ruins themselves pretty low-scale: just some reconstructed walls and cross sections of hills showing the remainders of various Troys. The phrase "nothing to write home about" springs to mind, but, well, here I am doing it. The astute people of Turkish tourism had constructed a great big wooden horse near the car park, though. That was cool -- right up there with the Big Banana.

Next was Pergamon, about five hours south of Troy, outside the little town of Bergama. The ruins were restored in the late 1800s, and if you could put it out of your head that they were restored, then it was truly amazing. The scale of the ruins was truly intimidating: the columns were ten metres tall, the amphitheatre could sit 2000 people, even the statues of eagles seemed to be bigger than me. This place was built to intimidate people, and thousands of years later, it still was.

But like the even-better resoted ruins of Ephesus, you can only get a taste of their former glory. With hundreds of other tourists competing with you for a decent glimpse of whatever it is. But that taste is enough for you to imagine how imposing and dramatic these theatres and cities were. Whether its at first being disappointed at your attention being directed towards a once-great statue of a king to see that now all that remains is his foot, then realising that if that was his foot, then the rest of him must have been enormous. Or finding a shady seat in a ruined amphitheatre and imagining it full of people staring not only at the stage but also at the Aegean sea behind it, who stay there for days watching epics unfold. Just close your eyes and you're there.