Ankara and Hattusa (Giorgio's visit)

An italian friend has been here for two days. Yesterday we walked around Ankara, and while we were resting on the top of the old town hill some high school students came to speak to us. As usual, they were very friendly and wanted to know where we are from, what we do here and so on. At the end one of them gave me a little bracelet as a present: i was a bit moved. Now we are friends on facebook :) After it started raining and we were invited by a shop owner to take a tea in his shop to escape the rain.
Today we went to Hattusa ruins, the old capital of Hittites empire, four hour east of Ankara. The ruins, 3500 year old, are very ruined, but the place is in a delightful position on the top of some rocky hills where the view all around is really beautiful, on one side the arid plateaus on the other side the green mountains. As in Safranbolu, very few tourists and a marvellous quiet atmosphere. The most interesting parts of the ruins are the gates to the town, protected by some huge stone lions, and an artificial hill under which the Hittites built a long tunnel (it's unkown the utility of it: maybe they just want to build a tunnel and were lazy so instead of digging in the mountains they just build a new mountains already incorporating a tunnel:). Just outside the town, there are two caves with beautiful engravings from the same period.
We had some problems with the means of transportation there (we missed the dolmus and we had to pay a lot for the taxi, so the way back we tried to hitchhike but the very few cars passing always headed the wrong direction...), but it was worth spending that money because now i can tell everybody that i was in one of the most important place of mankind history. Returning to Ankara we met a very talkative and nice guy who told us that he visited Amasya, a town five hours from Ankara towards the east, and it's beautiful: he showed us the pictures he took in his computer and it's really nice. So now I have a new place where to go! :)