Taşucu/Alanya


Sometimes, trips don't unfold the way you had pictured them. The original blueprint for this week's vacation centered around the island of Cyprus. We were going to take a ferry from the small coastal town of Taşucu to Girne, approximately two hours away on Cyprus. About 10pm on Saturday, almost mid-way between Antalya and Taşucu, my knowledgeable classicist travelling companion and I discovered we were short one passport. Unsure whether this would be an insurmountable obstacle to completing our travels- Turks can travel between the two countries with only an ID card- we completed the journey to Taşucu. A tanned, 30-year-old tourist boat captain and silver jewellery salesman from Manavga named Mehmet sitting next to me on the bus predicted that we could make the trip with just a residence permit, then offered me a job on the basis of my being able to speak English. 500 euros a month plus hosuing working on a tour boat, hmmm.... Finally we stepped off the bus at 4am. Luckily, it was just about the easiest place to navigate around I have been in since FunTown USA theme park. The only restaurant open on the main street was Dilek Lokantasa, a tiny diner occupied by a fisherman-looking guy with a vest and a baseball cap and the university-aged fellow filling the roles of maitre'd, sommelier, waiter, cook and busboy. While sipping tea and eating bread dipped in lentil soup, I found the Jazz-Rockets playoff game on TV. A tiny village sustained by fishing and domestic tourism, on the fringe of the Turkey, in the middle of the night, had an NBA game on its satellite feed- ah, the joys of globalization.

Once the ferry terminal office opened up, the ticket seller managed to explain to us that it was impossible for foreigners to get to Cyprus without passports, but hey, since we only lived in Ankara if we caught the next bus out of town and travelled contantly for additional entire day, we might make it back in time for the ferry the next day. He wasn't even kidding. At any rate, Plan B was NOT to go spend another $100 and 20 hours travelling, but rather to explore the charms of Taşucu. And I'm very glad we did. After napping for several hours, I discovered that not only was the harbor clean and adorned by the little tea garden-park I had watched the sunrise from, but there was a beach beyond it. The beach was several hundred meters long (do you have the metric system yet back home?) and set against a promenade tiled in white and red concrete. The height of the waves rolling in never deviated more than about 6 inches over the course of a day, and the harbor was perpetually ruffled only by a wind between 5-10 knots. In the evening, families in various decades of togetherness speed-walked, tottered, waddled or strolled with the comfort of the tiles and the relaxation of the waves, occasionally interruped by motor-scooter riders of a more predictable age and gender weaving amongst them. It may have been one of the few settings from the last eight months where my wearing of shorts was not unique, but I managed to distinguish myself as the only person giving someone a piggy-back ride.

Sevgi Lokantasa was a family-run restaurant whose seating capacity quintupled (and whose kitchen capacity doubled) when the weather was suitable for outdoors dining. It was as charming as a place can be where Nasim the unshaven cook who weighs twice as much as you do takes your order himself. He had an excellent way with otherwise simple and common foods; his chicken döner was to normal street döner what a homemade cheeseburger with sauteed toppings is to McDonald's, and one of the salads had a sweet pomegranate dressing. Basically, after having eaten rest-stop cuisine for a whole day, this felt like we had ended up at the Moosewood Restaurant. The waitress was one of the most Mediterranean-looking women I have met, her skin being a very few microshades away from the color of good olive oil. She flirted with the four other young men in the restaurant good-naturedly, but wasn't strikingly beautiful to the point where I was tempted to read anything into it when she asked me later where my girlfriend was when I came back for tea in the afternoon.


Randomly, the fisherman guy who was in Dilek Lokantasi that morning was also in Sevgi Lokantasi when we went in for lunch- I think by that point he thought we were stalking him. I even ran into him a third time coming back from the beach to take the aforementioned tea, and that time he actually had a fishing pole and tackle box with him.


There were definitely elements of small-town, middle to eastern Turkey in the way the family at the restaurant operated and interacted. The women ran the kitchen for the most part, aside from Nasim grilling the meat, and the men relayed orders to them every time a customer needed something. Similarly, the surrounding cafes had only men loitering in and around them, the women being almost completely out of sight on the main street. The beach and harbor were a different story, however. There were a few bikini sightings along the sand as well as girls in shorts and t-shirts chasing and wrestling with male companions. In the tea garden, couples held hands and snuggled (although I have to say, it was very modest compared to some of the PDA we get on the green here at Bilkent, I've had to start bringing a squirt gun to ultimate games in case people get too distracted). Overall, it was a fitting metaphor for Turkey- the traditional groups and families on the inland side of things with the younger, more modern demographic facing the outside world along the coast, interspersed with ATM's instead of apron pockets, motor scooters instead of prayer beads. Don't worry Phillip Morris, cigarettes are still integral to life on both sides here.

When we went back to Sevgi Lokantasi for dinner, Nasim's cousin, Nihat, was there. Nihat gets his own section. He was 38 years old, but seemed to have no problem being friendly and energetic with those of us a decade and a half his juniors. He was a computer teacher and airline steward, and spoke Farsi, Hindi, Arabic, Kurdish, English and Turkish. He'd been working out of Saudi Arabia for an airline for a few years and had come home to teach for a while, but his next goal was to go to American and train to be an airline pilot. We didn't go into the potential problems for someone from the Middle East studying flight in the US, I couldn't bear to dampen his enthusiasm. Eventually we talked about non-verbal communication and after I gave him the finger as an example, he took his middle finger and pulled down his lower eyelid. Ah, the glories of internationalism. Nihat offered to take us out for beers, so we borrowed his cousin's car and went down to the water (it took about as much time as it would have to drive, but now I can say I've ridden in a Toros, which is very different from a Taurus). 4/20, the first full day of Passover, and a full moon all at once- what more could you ask for drinking Efes and watching the waves roll in off a brightly glinting harbor. Nihat's wife even added some comedy by calling and yelling at him for leaving her with the three kids while he was out carousing with foreigners. I tried to help by talking to her on speaker phone, but she didn't believe an American would be speaking Turkish and thought I was just one of his friends pretending to be bad at Turkish. Poor Nihat.


The next morning, I officially nominated the day as Best Monday of the Year. After a traditional breakfast whose deliciousness was amplified by TWO helpings of butter and honey (that was pretty much enough to seal the award right there), I slung my hotel towel over my shoulder and headed down the promenade. The birds were flirting noisily and flitting from one palm tree to the next- they didn't know it was Monday; they never know it's Monday. The bushes lining the walkway had the color and fragrance of a natural candy store (I don't use this metaphor lightly, a candy store or a UU Church are the only things I would be OK with them tearing down Fenway Park for at this point), with a teasingly light scent on the orange and yellow ones and a deep, satisfying sweetness lying on the pink and purple set. A little girl, accompanied in the playground by her grandfather watched admiringly as I did pull-ups on the swingset WITH MY BACKPACK ON! (Eat your heart out, Dan Hartmann.)

Even on the best Mondays, something has to go wrong (but this was NOT a case of the Mondays). I haven't really been sunburned in at least five years; that's why it seemed like maybe I could lie on a Mediterranean beach from 11-2 and not bother with suscreen. And there was a breeze, I never really felt that hot. Nothing like days and days of subsequent soreness and fragility to remind you that, David Ortiz aside, some people do burn up in April.


Leaving for Alanya, we took a dolmuş down the coast a little farther to Silifke, where there was a bigger otogar, as had been suggested by our hostess at breakfast. Ironically, once we made it on an inter-city bus coming back west, the bus made a pick-up in Taşucu- right across from the hotel we had left that morning. D'OH! On the trip to Alanya though there were an amazing amount of imagination-esque little fishing villages. Harbor after harbor of green Mediterranean water rolling over pebbly or stony beaches went by below us. These views were interrupted only by occasional inland excursions to take on passengers from farming communities, or get stopped for ID inspection by the police.

Alanya overall was not as cool as Taşucu, having about 100 times the population and being much more of a resort town. It was hard to argue with having more beach and promenade time though, and my knowledgeable classicist travelling companion noted that there was something very relaxing about being in a city full of tourists so that we didn't stick out as obviously as in most Turkish cities. I also ran into a university student from Ankara named Serkan (not a Bilkenter) while I was swimming, and we had a chance to talk about all the normal topics: how I liked Turkey, where I had been, if I sufficiently disliked Bush, etc.


Other highlights:

-Antalya had a beautiful, modern bus terminal, by far the nicest I have seen in Turkey. One of the stands inside sold freshly squeezed orange juice, and when I tried to buy two whole oranges to eat on the bus, they got confused about why someone would try to buy an entire orange instead of orange juice and just gave them to me for free. They were good oranges, too, firm and juicy.

-While we were watching basketball at 5am in Dilek Lokantasi three young men came in laughing and stumbling, obviously having been out drinking for the night. And I thought this only happened at Louis.

-The bathroom at Dilek Lokantasi was broken, so when I went out back to, um, inspect their recycling system, I could smell bread baking. Nothing says dawn in Turkey like rising bread on the first day of Passover.

Update and Political/Religious Ponderances

-First off- you can make Bucky proctor a four-hour exam, but you can't stop him from using his water bottle as a musical instrument during important parts of the listening section.

-Frank Rich wrote this weekend about the utter dissolution of support for the Iraq war and its impending, long-overdue conclusion. Of the Petraeus-Crocker hearing, he writes: "...it accomplished little beyond certifying President Bush’s intention to kick the can to January 2009 so that the helicopters will vacate the Green Zone on the next president’s watch." But while the President is trying to ensure he doesn't have to be the one to withdraw the troops and end the occupation of Iraq, there is a lot that we can do to ensure he does. Defunding the occupation has been on the table for well over a year now, since the Democrats rolled into power, but so far with little success. But just because it didn't happen immediately doesn't mean it can't happen before Bush leaves office. He will have to ask for at least one more budget supplemental for the war this year, and if anti-occupation groups across the country keep the pressure on their senators and representatives in Washington, defunding the war and forcing Bush to withdraw the troops before he leaves office is possible. As the Petraeus-Crocker hearings showed, even Republican officials are getting fed up with the occupation and the circular logic of the administration's surge tactics. The anti-war movement has, through the sustained work of local groups like Waterville Area Bridges for Peace and Justice and national ones like Military Families Speak Out, convinced a majority of Americans that the war was and occupation is a bad idea. Now is the time to convert that public sentiment into effective action. There will be Tax-Day demonstrations and call-ins all over the country this week, raising awareness about the connection between people's federal tax dollars and the on-going atrocities that we are collectively responsible for. (If you do make a call about defunding the war, put in a plug for HR 1078, introduced by Minnesota's Keith Ellison, that would help implement the Global Marshall Plan). Very few officials are banging the defunding drum right now, but given the continuing shift in public opinion against the occupation, they should be, and are more likely to be successful at achieving redeployment with every passing month. If groups around the country maintain connections with their senators and representatives and keep them informed and pressured about the latest legislative possibilities for achieving that goal, it is much more likely to happen. The South-East New England Declaration of Peace group has done that with Senator Reed and Senator Whitehouse, men whose chief's of staff are now referred to by their first names in group emails on a regular basis. Rhode Island has it easier than most states when it comes to finding a sympathetic legislative ear for antioccupation sentiments, but groups nation-wide must be ready to jump on any opportunity for defunding by maintaining contact with and pressure on their elected officials.

-I accepted an offer of admission to Harvard Divinity School's Master of Divinity program this week. This, along with reading The Left Hand of God by Michael Lerner, has inspired me to think once again about envisioning ministry in more concrete terms. Harvard focuses on developing the "ministerial arts" in six areas: preaching, pastoral care, religious education, public leadership, denominational polity, and administration and program development. The three that I am most interested in right now are preaching, pastoral care and leadership, but really, it's like trying to choose between coarse and fine bulgar- they all look fulfilling and sustaining. I am most excited about public leadership as a category (full name "Public Leadership, Community Organizing, and Planning"), with courses like "Religion and American Public Life", "Public Narrative", "Religion, Development and Conflict", "Education for Liberation" AND "Ethical and Religious Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr." When I have difficulty envisioning how my broader work for social justice will manifest itself, it has been helpful to remind myself that MLKJ at age 22 hadn't heard of the Southern Christian Leadership Council yet. Granted, he was a minister at age 24 and co-counded the SCLC by age 26, but different life paths, different life paths. I CAN envision many of the methods of social justice work that will be part of my efforts with whatever congregation I have the privilege of leading, and those include teach-ins, political involvement, and civil disobedience to promote labor solidarity, civil rights, and local empowerment, among many other causes. Within the next month, I also plan to write about my broader goals for promoting a liberal spiritual awareness in America both socially and politically and my personal political goals in that context, as well as how my time in Turkey has shaped the above.

And finally...this week's moment that made me proud to be a Friends Camp counsellor: On Sunday morning, our Bilkent group visiting the orphanage tried to organize a series of relay races with the children in six groups. Even with a ratio of one Bilkenter for each child, it took them over five minutes to quiet the whole group, and even then the games never went quite right. I've seen counsellors outnumbered 12:1 make better stands in South China, and for that, I salute you fellow FC workers.

More Political/Historical Thoughts

-One of the books I read last month for my on-going discussions with an American History prof here was on America in WWI called "America's Great War" by Robert Zieger. It covered political, military, and social history as comprehensively as any non-textbook I have read, so I would recommend it. Naturally, one of the themes was Woodrow Wilson's involvement and leadership. After reading it, I decided that if I had been Wilson, I would have made a stronger bid for both economic and naval neturality.

Despite its avowed neutrality in the beginning of the war, American banks basically financed the Allied war effort for the first several years. Greater pressure on Wall Street to adhere to a genuine policy of neutrality would have helped the US stay out of the conflict in 1918 by eliminating much of the economic incentive to try and see that the Allies didn't default on their loans. So much of the rhetoric of democracy and moral righteousness that Wilson used in justifying the war to Congress and the American people was just rationalization for his administration's failures to maintain that originally sacred neurtrality. By continuing to allow Americans on ships going inside the "war zone" that Germany had defined around Great Britain and that they enforced regularly, Wilson ignored the significant changes in what it meant to be navally neutral that were occuring.

Would taking a harder line on economic and naval neutrality have cost him the 1916 election? Good chance. The Wall Street elite that funded so much of the Democratic party's activity might have even prevented him from being re-nominated. But for him to place political success over such dearly held and widely-supported values as non-intervention in European military conflicts and the role of America as arbiter and peace-seeker is a heinous example of goal displacement. William Jennings Bryan recognized this and resigned as Secetary of State as soon as he saw that the adopted position towards Germany's naval policies would lead to conflict (more on him in a moment). And in a historical sense, look at how much was at stake for America in its decision about entering the war: the military industrial complex can trace its roots to the factories and housing units that were hastily erected and funded in 1917 and 1918 and the aforementioned role of America as the city-on-a-hill neutral was sacrificed as well. Ultimately, Wilson was probably fighting a losing battle anyways, but if he had fought it with the humility, diplomacy and sagacity of Abraham Lincoln, he would have given himself a much better opportunity to succeed. Lincoln was only narrowly renominated to run for his second term, in large part because he stood up for unpopular practices that he believed in and bravely continued to make the case for his point of view. When the time came for Wilson to do so, he allowed himself to be led down a path towards military intervention, and eventually was forced to rationalize the country's involvement because he had left himself no other choice.

-Bryan surfaced again in a much less favorable light in Edward Larson's "Summer for the Gods" about the Scopes Trial in 1925. By that time, his status as a populist leader had led him to the majoritarian cause of supporting fundamentalist evangelicals in their quest to pass laws against the teaching of evolution in public schools. In accounts of the trial and its lead-up, both Bryan and Clarence Darrow come off as aggressive ideologues. One of the most damning points levelled at both of them is the fact they allowed their social views to affect their ideas about scientific matters. Bryan was so strongly anti-authoritarian that he convinced himself populists had a duty to oppose the teachings of the cadre of scientific elites they saw as controlling public discourse on evolution. Darrow was no less biased in his view of the populists, and believed in evolution based more on that social alignment than informed study of the biological sciences. These tendencies came back to hurt both of them at different points in the legal process; though Darrow succeeded in humiliating Bryan on the stand when he called him as an expert witness, that treatment of a man who was a national hero to many people won him few followers (especially since Bryan died a few days later). Bryan actually tried to precent the prosecutions situation from the first by encouraging authors of Tennessee's antievoltuion law to not include a punishment, knowing it would be more effective for his cause to have teachers operating in public defiance of the law without a concrete mechanism for challenging it in court. However, the law was written with a fine as the penalty, and the rest is history. The lesson, as always: don't humiliate a hero because he might die on you, and don't be a jerk if you want people to agree with your point of view.

--I didn't know there was such a thing as fundamentalist secularism, but that's what we are seeing in Turkey. Instead of taking the literal words of a religious text as the basis for a conservative movement, it is the legacy of Ataturk that is being invoked. Legal proceedings began this month which would ban the AKP (Justice and Development Party), head of the current ruling coalition due to its having garnered 47% of the vote in last year's parliamentary elections. Unfortunately, banned parties are not uncommon in Turkey, with 26 of them having gone before the AKP. Of course, this is a large set-back for any remaining aspirations the country may have of joining the EU. The attempt to ban the AKP is largely due to the party's efforts to legalize the wearing of headscarves in universities. Many Turks see that as a violation of the legacy of secularism associated with President Ataturk. However, Ataturk was primarily a modernist, and his was from this point of view that his secularism sprung, not vice-versa. Therefore, the reactionary response of banning an entire political party with pluralistic support over the headscarf issue may be supported by some of Ataturk's words, but not by their overall spirit.

BAŞKA Martın en iyisi! (MORE Best of March)

-Apparently, once you turn, like, 22, or something, it's not cool to brag about your mom. So I tried to leave her out of the Olympos account as much as possible. But I'm not gonna, lie it was awesome having her there, if for no other reason than that it made me feel smart for knowing the word for "soup" again (çorba). The Tuesday after that trip I had off from work, so after listening to the opening pitch for the Red Sox 2008 season in Tokyo at noon, Turkey time, we went downtown to shop for fabric and do some additional sightseeing.

My Mama may not have raised no fool (well, the jury's still out on Mike, ZING!), but she did raise at least one dope, as I evidenced by forgetting to look up the word for "fabric" (kumaş) before we left. Luckily, Mom had the presence of mind to draw some pants and a shirt in the process of being sewn together in a rather nifty version of real-life Pictionary, and a friend of the pharmacist whose store we stopped in led us to a fabric store. Score one for McKay. Unfortunately, one of the areas in which Turkey has failed to modernize rapidly enough is putting its fabric bolts out for people to feel like we do in the States, so no go on that one.

From there I tried to find the "Hal" market which went to back in September with Marion and Meredith and Laura. After only an hour of confused wandering around Ulus and one unfortunate side-trip down an alley full of pirated porn-vendors, we made it there. Even on a weekday afternoon, the market still radiated with a bustling sensuousness. The produce stalls had changed a few shades of green since the fall and the "HAMSI, IKI MILYON" ("ANCHOVIES, TWO MILLION" as in two million old Turkish Lira, the denomination in which a lot of people still give prices since they only switched a few years ago- one million old Turkish Lira equal one New Turkish Lira, the change having been made because of inflation; did I mention this is a currency that has out-performed the dollar most of the year until a recent political crisis involving the potential banning of Turkey's current plurality-holding party? I will now convert my life savings to soya beans) guy wasn't really hitting his stride yet at 2pm, but the density of human energy was still there. We bought a half kilo of strawberries and I borrowed a hose from one of the fish vendors to wash them off with so we could eat them while we walked around.

Navigating with only my street smarts, experience, the sun and a streetmap of Ankara, I next managed to successfully navigate us to a natural spices and herbs store in Kızılay. Between making our way there and then to Kocatepe Caddesi for the Kocatepe Mosque, I managed to turn a journey of a couple hundred yards into about forty minutes walking. If I had actually mapped the route on paper it would resemble a Family Circus cartoon of Billy's route home from his after-school job as a Wal-Mart greeter (I know, I already made a joke about those cartoons in the fall, but if Bill Keane can run them out every other month I say I get two per year, minimum). The spice store was like a cross between an herbal remedies place and a dried goods market, with a space heater and darkly varnished wood for all the shelves to give it an authentic aura. I think all we picked up was some coffee beans for Dad. By the way, how are the coffee beans, Dad?

The Kocatepe Mosque was the third-most amazing one that I have been in (out of maybe a dozen). It's very new and modern, as is the shopping center that it sits atop. Really, it's hard not to be in awe of the geometric splendor in a place like that. What Muslims lack in idolatry they certainly make up for in symmetry. The expansive beauty of the inside made me feel very reverential, but as always made me wonder how such aesthetic expressions could manifest themselves in a place that simultaneously represents a fearful and repressive gender inequality.

Afterwards, we went to an incredible iskender restaurant near the American embassy. Iskender is a veal kebap over sliced pita bread with a tomato sauce on top of yogurt covering it. At this particular place, they come out with the food and pour on sizzling butter during the presentation as well, with some fresh sauce. I made the sound Homer Simpson makes when he is thinking about donuts as this was happening. The other specialty is kunefe, a dessert shredded grain soaked in honey, with cheese in the middle, soaked with honey, served hot and soaked with honey. Again for this presentation they came out with the dish fresh and poured sizzling honey on it before we ate. More Homer Simpson noises, this time including squeals of delight.

Martın en iyisi (The best of March)

As Will pointed out recently, March was a pretty dry month here in Buckville, the online home of my musings and narrations. Do I have anything to show for the time I could have spent posting here? Well, yes and no. The biggest internet time-wasters for me over the last month have been choosing my March Madness college basketball bracket and participating in three fantasy baseball drafts and managing my teams. So far, I'm in the 99% percentile nation-wide for the March Madness picks and in first place for two fantasy baseball leagues, so I've got that going for me. But if my memoirist calls someday to chat about my glory days, let's all agree to focus more on the following:

-My trip to Olympos was superb, in all aspects from weather to company (although the return could have been timed a little better; usually I like to try and turn in before 4:30am on worknights). I'll admit, even my Andy Dufresne going to Mexico-esque hope and anticipation for the voyage was waning a little bit as we waited in the smoky BK Lounge (our friendly local Burger King at the bottom of the hill) from ten to eleven on Friday night. It was raining harder than it did for everyone's favorite Shawshank escape during pretty much the exact interval it took us to walk down to the rendez-vous point. Once we got on the bus, there were two stops in the first half hour, one to buy cigarettes (I can only assume that's the reason we were at the gas station for twenty minutes without filling up) and one to smoke them. An anomaly? No, we pretty much stopped at least once an hour all the way to the coast for cigarettes. The driver was badly in need of a Skip Gates-style coffee thermos. Employing the help of some ear plugs, I made it there fairly well-rested but with a neck that made bubblewrap sounds every time I stretched it.

The coolest parts were definitely the ancient city, the beach, the chimera fire, the beach, and the boat tour, a.k.a. everything we did. Setting out from the tree-house hostel (we actually stayed in bungalows, but it was still really cool) in the late morning, we took a walking tour of the ancient Lycian city of Olympos that lay between us and the beach. We passed a group of mountain-climbers practicing on a rocky, over-hanging part of one of the hills, but they didn't return our waves, even with their dangling feet that obviously weren't being used for anything else. The necropoli in the hills were again one of the highlights of the site, and I gotta say, seeing so many of them surviving from the ancient world is making me think twice about the Donny Karamazov method for my interrment. As you can see in the one on the right, trees, grass and shrubs were coming up on a lot of these suckers, and most were covered by some form of plant growth not recently planted by loved ones.

After passing through the Roman theater (capacity about 1,000, no-smoking sign still intact), where I pretened to be playing a hard-core AC/DC solo (you're not hard-core unless you live hard-core) for a bunch of robed ancients in the stadium seating, we made it out to the beach. As you can see from the picture on the left, the scenery is even nicer than the Bilkent reservoir that my room looks out on. My only complaints were that it was more rocky than sandy and there were no bbq grills built-in, ala Winlslow Park, so Freeport is still safe in getting my vote for future family gatherings. The beach was also fed by a beautiful but frigid stream of fresh water that wound through the rocks and created a nice pond-sized pool just behind the water.

In the evening, we wound out way up through the hills to the Chimera fires, a place where natural gas seeping out through the rocks has created a permanent natural fire for thousands of years. It was a very picturesque spot at twilight, and was frequented by locals as well as us yabancılar, so I guess its appeal doesn't wear out too quick. We had to walk a kilometer up the hill when we got out of the bus (haha, take THAT smokers), so seeing the fires poke through the trees as we came up was a very revelatory way to encounter them. Walking up beyond where you see the fire in the background in the picture on the right, I was able to get a view of the whole area below, stretching a few kilometers out to the Mediterranean, with just a few lights from various houses and hostels along the roads.

Sunday we took a glass-bottomed boat tour of the ruins of another Lycean city whose remains are now ninety percent below water. Unfortunately, the water was a little too turbulent for getting a good look at the ruins, so the best part of that trip ended up being swimming off the boat for about twenty minutes during a break. Mark it as the first time I ever went swimming in the Mediterranean on Easter. Hey, Martin Luther King Jr. had the Penn Center, I've got Olympos.

Four of our coleagues here, Ananda, Colleen, Alex and Lauren are leaving after this course, so I'm off to say goodbye to them this evening. However, I'll write again soon about the highlights of March, including my trip around Ankara with Mom and some books I've been reading on history and the theology of MLK.