Denizli/Pamukkale

I'm on a writing kick right now, which is odd considering it's 3am Sunday morning. So I'm going to catch you up on some of the trips we've been doing. So about 5 weeks ago, our group traveled to the Denizli area and we saw some pretty cool stuff. First, we traveled to a town called Aphrodisias which has a lot of really amazing old ruins. The whole area was green and just beautiful. The only downside was it was raining a lot of the time. There was an old stadium where they held races so it's long like the chariot stadium in Ben-Hur. Naturally, we all had to race as well. Torvald won. The next day we went to Hierapolis which is an ancient city where people who had incurable diseases were sent to pass their last days. See there were healing waters where people went to be cured, but people who had diseases that couldn't be cured by the waters were sent away because the people who ran the waters didn't want the people getting healed to lose faith if some were dying. So they sent those incurable people to Hierapolis, and so there are a lot of graves there.
Then, we went to Pamukkale where they have the hot springs. They have a pool that you can swim in, and so we did. The hills of springs is really beautiful! The last place we visited was the ancient city of Laodicea. This city is famous as one of the seven churches mentioned in Revelation. They are in the process of digging it up and preserving it, but they say it will be bigger than Ephesus when completed. The trip made me realize that Turkey is packed full of artifacts and old cities just waiting to be discovered and dug up. It is amazing to think that there is all of this history here and yet a lot of people don't know about it. Hopefully more people will get the chance to see all of this history.
Catching up,
Monica

The gang at Aphrodisias

Hieropolis (complete with graves in the background)

Swimming in the hot springs

On the terrace

Laodicea

Faces in Aphrodisias

The stadium I mentioned.

 I would also like to mention that this is HUGE. Simply enormous 

Statues from Aphrodisias

Oh right, we saw snow. It decided to snow on us on the way to our hotel and so we all had to get out and be in it. It was Felipe's first time seeing snow, but all of us were pretty much screaming with excitement :)