The pace we established today was, as I was to find out later, the pace at which Ahmet operates and which prevailed for most of the rest of our tour. As intimated yesterday, we were up early to get to the airport, missing breakfast in the process. The Sales Manager and his wife mentioned yesterday, it turned out, were already in Kayseri having caught an earlier flight due to some mix-up in communications and ticketing as arranged by Ahmet - quite funny really as they had arrived in Kayseri expecting to find us there and then had to wait some hours for our arrival. Our Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 was piloted by a female Captain and I'm sad to say she bounced the aircraft upon landing - literally. This is not meant to be a reflection on female pilots but it of course drew some comment from the passengers, not all of it complimentary. Our day in Kayseri started by being driven in our Mercedes minibus, which was to be our mode of transport throughout the rest of the tour, to our hotel, the Hilton in Kayseri. After checking in to our spacious rooms we headed out for a day of sightseeing which included a visit to a former mental hospital, a mosque, a museum of sorts with a series of displays relating to life in Kayseri, the local bazaar where we tasted pastirma and sucuk for the first time and lastly on account of, I suppose anyway, our senior cop we had a visit to Police Headquarters to meet with the Acting Chief Commissioner of Police for the Kayseri region. This was somewhat interesting and set the stage for what was to become common on this tour - the exchange of gifts. We had come prepared having been forewarned at an information evening, and had a backpack full of stuffed koalas, kangaroos and assorted bits of Australiana sourced from Victoria Market in Melbourne. These gifts were to prove strange when compared to what we received in return throughout our journey and was the source of much laughter as we drove from city to city. We lunched at a restaurant that specialised in kofte and also enjoyed the local lentil soup. Lentil soup was to become a regular on our lunch menus throughout Turkey and the local variations all proved interesting and tasty. As part of the tour we were invited to have dinner with a great many "local families" along the way - all part of this intercultural dialogue. What I didn't realise until we set out was just how wealthy most, if not all, of these individuals are. Ahmet had us booked in with local businessmen and high ranking folk who all had in common that they were active supporters of the Gulen movement. This evening we experienced a fantastic dinner at the "summer house" of a gentleman and his family who own a number of chains of furniture stores throughout Turkey - on our journey I swear we saw at least one of each of his two major chains represented in each city we visited. The summer house would have put most house in Australia to shame. Despite such obvious wealth we were astonished at just how humble these people were and their genuine philanthropy that led to their establishing schools to promote Fethullah Gulen's ideas that education is the key to establishing harmonious relations between peoples and by providing such opportunities to those who can least afford it. It was a wonderful evening with plenty of interesting conversation and delicious food and drink. When it came time to leave the exchange of gifts took place and for our strange assortment of furry animals we each received a complete bedroom linen and doona set from one of their stores and valued at several hundred dollars - such an imbalance but then the joy of giving is not about the value. After what had been a very busy day we returned to the Hilton for a well earned rest.
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