Arkadash'ed!!

This will be brief for the moment, I have to go back to the dorm and let my roommate in because we only have one key right now. and no internet. honk if you love liminal periods in your life.

Highlights of my trip to Safranbolu and Amasra:
(Marion took some pictures, which can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/marionpenning/sets)
The pensiyon we stayed at in Safranbolu was owned by a wonderfully hospitable family that had bought an Ottoman-era house and made a pensiyon out of it. They had a baby named Effe (I'm not sure if it's spelled the same as the popular beer), who was the cutest baby since the kitten on the street. On Thursday, one of the sons from the family took us on a tour of Yokuk, a preserved Ottoman village nearby. The houses and streets and gave a wonderful feeling of the place's history through their materials, layout, and decoration. We toured a house from back in the day when the grandfather would have lived on the top floor and his son on the third floor and that guy's son on the second and the animals on the bottom floor, which was cool because you could see how it was possible for them to cook, bathe and sleep in one room. After the tour we were offered grapes and conversation by an out-going woman named Felis. She asked if we could get married so that she could come to America with me and I said that sounded fine, so now we are arkadash's (companions/spouses). You should mostly be receiving invitations shortly. Meredith is still first in my heart though.

Going from Safranbolu to Bartin (our connection to Amasra), we finally began to leave the Anatolian Plateau. Our surroundings resembled Maine- coniferously covered hills gave onto deciduous stream valleys. The sun even disappeared as we began descending into Amasra. In Amasra we stayed with another great family, folks named Hava and Zohar, a retired teacher and engineer with daughters teaching in Istanbul. Their house had romantic dark wooden windows looking straight down onto the Black Sea in all her strength and tumult. They brought us gozleme (a nan-esque stapleof turkish diets) and figs fresh from their gardens and drove us to the bus stop when it was raining Sunday morning. Amasra was a beautiful little town, small enough to see most of it and then walk back to the pensiyon, with a great beach for dipping in the Black Sea. I tried to explain to Hava that I want to be a UU minister while we were watching the Turkish national basketball team lose to Slovenia, and couldn't quite do it, but I managed to learn the words for Jesus and Moses (Isa and Musa) in the process, and made her laugh at the fact that we only have call to worship once a week usually in the US, but they do it five times a day in Turkey.

The last tidbit I would like to include for now (I hope to update this in the next couple days with more details) involves the Turkish custom of only accepting an offer after it has been made three times, in case the person doesn't really mean it. Like when Zohar let me have the only couch cushion while we watched women's volleyball, i forgot about this when i was asking him if he wanted it instead and only asked once, so of course he said no. But when Mery and I boarded the bus to head back to Ankara, a woman with a baby was sitting behind us, and one of our seats was stuck in the tilted-back position. After we figured this out, I had to insist several times to get the woman to switch with us, and she did.

Please post or email me if you want to hear more about anything that I am talking about, hope you are all enjoying my attempts at writing about the adventures here!