The plan was to use this as a random walk day, but it was a
really drizzly gray morning, so we stayed in extra long
before finally deciding to check out another town - so we
walked to the town square, where we found that the next bus
was to Nevsehir. Whatever; the round trip was only 2 or 3
lira, so no great loss any way. It's about a 20 min ride,
and we alit in a bustling and very foreign-feeling town.
I believe that none of those we encountered here spoke any
English at all, and why would they? Tourists are few and
far between as there's little to distinguish the place,
despite having been claimed to be the site of the Roman
city Nyssa. On the hilltop overlooking the city is the now
mostly unmaintained castle, which shows signs of having had
some tourist-oriented sprucing up several decades ago, but
in order to get there (which we wanted to do ever since
espying it in the distance from near the bus stop, which is
just a collecting and distribution point on a shop-jammed
street downtown) we had to negotiate disused, rocky, and
steep tracks that at one point may have been actual paths.

The castle so-called is actually a Byzantine fortification
built to lord it over one of the branches of the Silk Road;
I suppose there was nothing for it to do after a while, so
it fell into disuse. There wasn't a whole lot for us to see,
so we went back down via a set of steps that petered out a
few tantalizing and overgrown yards from an actual street,
found a several-hundred-year-old Orthodox shrine that is now
just a target of graffiti, saw a rather nifty Monument to
Peace in one of the main squares, toured a nondescript
residential section of town, and rode the bus back. The main
reason for our not having lunch here (doner kebap at 3 TL
and looking pretty good - quite a bargain) was that there
was no beer available anywhere we saw in town. Our first
order of business on returning to Goreme was hitting the
grocery store for Efes Xtra (sort of the Turkish equivalent
of Bud Ice) and Efes dark (ditto Amber Bock) and a bottle
of local Turasan wine, which had a picture of the rock
formations on it.

The restaurant Dibek, in the former stables of a 475-year-
old building, had caught my eye, so we went inside. A small
child greeted us and apparently said that it would go
upstairs and fetch its parents; presently some guy came
down and seated us in a very ornate and darkly atmospheric
room that appeared empty but turned out to also be housing
a young Japanese couple smooching in the corner.

lili ordered manti - these came as little coarse dumplings
stuffed with who knows what, swimming in an extremely sour
yogurt flavored copiously with dried mint. It was probably
pretty authentic, but neither of us much liked it. Guvec
here was an essentially meatless eggplant stew, but not bad.

I'd take the atmosphere here and the food at Silk Road
any day, but we don't have that pick and choose luxury.

We went home to consume our beer acquisitions and lounged
about a while - it was still not nice enough to do much
more exploring. As Fat Boys is just down at the bottom of
the hill, on this side of town, that's where we had what
passed for dinner: she ordered a burger, which turned out
to be a weird kofte thing; I just had beer.

Pleasant stroll up the hill home, where my bed felt really
good despite some of the cave ceiling having crumbled
onto the covers (a hazard, one supposes, of living in a cave).