Looking Ahead: Fly Away Home

So I am writing this post from the couch in our condo in Gaziantep. We will post pictures and all soon, but first I wanted to write about the last two weeks and the trip out here.

After we left my family in Colorado we flew to Pennsylvania to spend sometime with Kylie's family. We were able to spend a lot of time with our two little nephews. They are so cute and so much fun to be around. We are really going to miss them. Then on Saturday Kylie's parents, her younger sister and a friend, and the two of us all loaded into the car and headed down to the Outer Banks for a week. It was such a good time with them. We were just a 5 minute walk to the beach on the ocean side and just about the same to the sound on the other side. We got to explore all over Cape Hatteras and went down to Ocracoke Island. For Kylie and I it was such a nice break from the preparations to move. We played a lot of games. We taught Kylie's family how to play farkle. Mostly we just spent tons of time relaxing and reading and hanging out together. We were there from Saturday to Saturday. On Sunday we celebrated Tom's birthday and had some of the family over to the house for lunch. Then Monday (and late Sunday night) was final packing (weighing and reweighing the suitcases), a few errands and then off to the airport. It was such a blessing that when we left Colorado we basically were ready to go. Then the time in Pennsylvania and NC was really relaxing and not nearly as hectic as it could have been.

Monday afternoon we got to the airport and after saying goodbye to Kylie's parents and sister went in to check-in for our flight. We got up to the counter and the lady asked how many bags we were checking and I said 4 and she just gave me this ghastly look of shock. Then she said, "you realize you only get 1 each right?" I had checked this before we left and was sure that we got two since we were flying outside of North America and Europe. But she was insistent that it was only one. She asked her manager who also said that it was only one on Lufthansa, but on Turkish Air it was two. So we were resigned to pay for the extra baggage, but the lady said, "let me see what I can do." We aren't really sure how she did it, but somehow she was able to check all four of our bags all the way through and did not charge us anything extra for having 4 (or for the extra .8 kilos that one weighed). That was another really nice blessing. After that our flight to Frankfurt went without incident. Because of weather (or so they said) our flight to Istanbul sat on the tarmac for quite a while and then when we got over the city we were put in a holding pattern. We were a little bit nervous because we had to purchase our visa and go through passport control and did not have a real long time for our connection to our final flight. When we finally landed we rushed through all of the clearances and as we were headed to the domestic terminal it was 10 minutes after our flight was to have begun boarding. So we started to get a little more nervous but as we were running-walking through the terminal we finally found a monitor with our flight on it and it was delayed for one hour. So that gave us plenty of time to find the gate and make it for our final flight in plenty of time.

We arrived in Gaziantep about 9:00. All of our luggage showed up without incident. We were met just outside the terminal by one of Kylie's fellow teachers and a driver. Then we loaded up and they took us to our condo. It was after dark when we landed so we did not get to see much of the city as we drove to our condo. But the few things we saw just down the street (the dondurma (ice cream) and iskender (really really good)) I'm sure will become places we frequent often.

Well, that is all for now. We will write more about our apartment and the university over the next few days!