The Best Part of Ankara

Hello all,
So we left Cappadocia on our tour bus about 8 on Saturday. It's a four hour drive, so we settled down for a short sleep before getting off in Ankara. I dozed off, despite the horribly uncomfortable seats. I was awoken by the sound of the driver yelling in Turkish, and the tour leader yelling back in English; my fears were confirmed when the clock read 12:30 and there was no sign of a city around. It gradually came out that we had missed the city, and the driver was not turning around. After an extremely tense 20 minutes (lots of yelling and cell phone calls) he did, but he was not happy about it. We got off as soon as possible in Ankara, and took taxis to Bilkent University, where we were staying in dorms. As you might imagine, we resolved to make that our last contact with the Fez Travel agency.
Our first activity in the morning was to visit the site of Gordion, currently being excavated by UNC's own Ken Sams. Gordion was the capital of the Phrygian Kingdom (c. 8th century BC), whose most famous ruler was the legendary King Midas. The site is about 2 hours outside the city, and we were given a complete tour by Prof. Sams. Only about half of the old city has been excavated, the most impressive site being the main gate, which once would've stood 20 meters over the surrounding plane:
Our next stop was Midas' tomb itself, discovered in 1957. It lies under a man-made mound known as a tumulus around 50 meters tall, making it the second largest such grave in Anatolia. Most of which was in the grave (mostly bronze bowls and sculptures) has been removed to museums, but it's still pretty cool to see where King Midas was buried.
By the time we got back to Ankara, it was about 6, so we took the metro downtown to grab dinner and watch the Euro Cup final between Germany and Spain. After dinner, we still had a good 2 hours until the game, so we decided to go try to find Ankara's largest mosque, Kocatepe Camii. It's one of the largest mosques on earth, with a capacity of 100,000:

Finished in 1987, we were a little skeptical about how nice it would be; we've been a bit spoiled with all the beautiful Sinans of Istanbul. But the mosque is as beautiful as it is large, a larger-than-the original replication of the Blue Mosque with a huge circular chandelier in the center:
We found a bar around kick-off and watched the game. As the game progressed, Kristina felt worse and worse, becoming obviously quite sick by the end of the game. We rushed back to the metro, but when we got to the deck, Kristina had to run back up to use the bathroom. We thought the next train would be the last, so we decided to get on the train and meet Edward and Kristina at the train stop (the last stop on the metro line). Somehow, there was another train after ours, which they managed to get on, saving themselves a costly cab ride. Equally inexplicably, I arranged a dolmus from the train station to our dorms for 30 lira (about half what we were expecting), and, an hour and a half after leaving the bar, all of us were back safe (though Kristina still had some intestinal issues to work out).
When the Turkish poet Yahya Kemal was asked what his favorite thing about Ankara was, he responded, "Going back to Istanbul." By the end of our first night, we were beginning to understand why. After our two weeks on the road, we were ready to get back and with only one day left, our excitement was palpable. We still had one day though and who knew what adventures/digestive problems it would bring. Day 2 of Ankara coming later today.