Ruins of Ephesus and too many antiquities

So our pansiyon had 3 people trying to fix the wifi but it was still broken this morning so we went to a cafe, where the Internet didn't work and then magically found a free signal while driving out of town-an explanation for the double posts today.
The ruins of the roman city of Ephesus are about a mile out of town and they were really spectacular. Turkey apparently only started preserving and digging Ephesus out in the last century and they will probably be digging for a few more centuries to uncover all the ruins. They've found so many broken columns and carved lintels and other pieces that they categorize by type and stick everything in a field together--this doesn't seem like the most efficient system for putting complicated things back together again but it does make interesting fields. And of course we couldn't resist posing Mina with the ruins. This is but a small, small sample of the series of Mina and the antiquities. Ephesus was completely overrun with bus tours from cruise ships--hundreds of people, it's interesting because they don't make it into Selcuk at all. We spent a few hours walking around, longer than we expected as there was so much to see and it was so lovely to wander around pastures full of big carved fragments and try to imagine what it must have looked like two thousand years ago. Kahraman narrated more documentary iPhone footage so if anyone wants the full tour...
We had an unfortunate lunch in Selcuk followed by some Turkish ice cream, called dondurma. Dondurma has some powdered root, I think it's salep, in it that makes it somewhat stretchy--yes, stretchy ice cream, strange but true.
After we went to the remains of the temple of Artemis, surprisingly it was in a field that we can see from our pansiyon window. What's left is one giant column, about 3 feet across and 50 feet high--but there were 127 columns like this. These pieces were even less guarded or organized than Ephesus. 3,500 year old carved pillar chunks sprinkled across a field populated by a flock of cranky geese--it was great.
Next we trekked up to see the house where the virgin Mary lived--actually it was a shrine built on the foundation of the house that Mary might have lived in. I found the description of the 'evidence' a bit dubious--an invalid nun in Germany dreamed or had visions about Marys house and explorers were sent out in 1891 and found it apparently exactly as she described. But then I've always been a bit on the cynical side. I'm posting photos in the next post of Mina playing on the table outside of Marys.
We came back and had a delicious meal at our pansiyon--the owners mother does the cooking, fabulous cauliflower. Mina is feeling much better and back to her cheerful self and is even eating food again--yay! She has also learned to pull out drawers and make a funny clicking noise with her tongue.