serüvenler seviyorum!! i love adventures!

So . . . it is definitely time for me to write a post! There is so much to write, but I will try to not make this a novel. We are finished with our second week of classes! I love teaching. I must say though, that by the end of the week, I'm tired, and all of my students were tired. It is funny, because I gave the same lecture 3 times on Friday. I pointed to the building across from the English Prep building and said, "You see that building? That is university. If you do not start working in this class, you will never go there. If you work here, Level A, Level B, Level C, Level D, University. If you do not start working - Level A, Level A, Level A, Level A - four years!!" I think they got the point. We'll see if it helps!
But, despite an occasional (or somewhat usual) lack of motivation, our students have been doing well and we have really enjoyed getting to know them. They are a ton of fun. And they have been helping us learn Turkish!! We are hoping to be able to spend a lot of time with some of them and hopefully get to share more of our lives with them. So, please keep that in mind.
This week we did not do much other than school, but on Friday night we got together with our friend Erhan and his friend Hakan at SankoPark. That was very fun. I think we laughed for almost 3 hours straight.

Today was a grand adventure. :-) Early this afternoon we headed towards old çarşı, near the castle. We found the soccer stadium and then saw that directly across from the stadium was a muze (museum.)

So, we wandered in and were very excited. The museum was full of steles from the Hittite and Roman periods and also a ton of mosaics from Zeugma - a city on the Euphrates that has just been uncovered in the last few decades. The mosaics were awesome - all different mythological stories and such. (The pictures above are all mosaics from Zeugma. The top one is a very famous picture around here of a gypsy girl - then the middle one is Europa who was captured by Zeus because he fell in love with her, and she became so famous that they named a continent after her, and the bottom one is Poseidon.) Then there were coin collections, stamp collections, signet collections, hair pins, animal figurines, pottery . . . it was pretty awesome.

Next we went and walked over by the castle. There is a little coffeehouse there that has been restored to a traditional Turkish coffeehouse. It is really cute, and sits right underneath of the castle. So, we went in there and got çay. There was a family there with three little boys. They were so much fun to watch. There is a rope hammock-like swing under one of the trees, and the boys were having a blast in it. This provided a pretty funny false cognate story. One little boy was in the swing, and the other one pushed him pretty hard towards the tree. Then the boy in the swing shouted "Hayir, hayir!!" Which, to Jeremy and I in the context of swinging meant, "higher, higher, push me higher!" However, we then remembered that we are in Turkey, and "Hayir" actually means "No! No!" I guess the little boy was more nervous of hitting the tree than he was excited to swing. We laughed. Then we walked around for a little while. I bought a scarf and Jeremy got a cool hat.

We ate some dinner. Then tonight we went to one of Jeremy's students house. We should not have eaten dinner first! She gave us potato salad, a cake, baklava, cookies, and tea. Then, after we talked for a while she brought out a plate for each of us with grapes, an apple, a plum, half a pomegranate, and a mandalin! We are stuffed. But it was very good to get to know her and her husband a little better. Her husband speaks very good English and he is actually a professor at Zirve. So, we talked for a couple of hours. It was very good to get to know them a little better.


So, one last story from today . . . I promise. When we were finished dinner and ready to come home to wait for Fatma Tok to pick us up, we got on a bus as usual that said Karataş. This goes to the street near our home and almost always goes right by University. Well . . . that was the sign, but apparently the man was not on his usual bus route. So, we stayed on the bus for maybe 30 minutes before we realized he was not going to take us anywhere near our house, so we got off. Problem was, we had no idea where we were, or which way our house was. So . . . we kinda wandered, and finally saw a smaller bus that had Karataş on it, so we asked, and they said they were going that way, so we jumped on. And, yes they were going to Karataş but not to University. So, we were getting closer to Karataş and the man stopped, pointed over a hill and said "University." So, we jumped off . . . walked over the hill and realized we were still a few blocks away. But, finally we saw "our mosque" at the end of the road, and felt a breath of relief.

But you know what? I had a cool guy, in a cool hat . . . and I would follow him to the end of the world - even if it didn't end up at home. :-)