Izmir!

The 6.5 hour layover in Munich wasn't bad. One of the girls in my group, Nikki, lived in Munich for more than a year, so she knew her way around and took us into the city for breakfast. It was the best breakfast i've had in a long time. Better than Helser's, better than Zell's better than Crush. I took a picture for good measure.

As we were eating we realized that we were eating on the corner of Turkenstrase (digression: why doesn't my computer have the double s in its special character thingy? you should pretend that the second s in that street name is the double s.) so we took a picture.

right to left, that's Elisha, Nikki, me and Alex

And now I'm here!
I can't even describe what it is like here. It's more beautiful than i imagined. The pictures in this post don't even come close to showing what it's really like. Everyone here at Izmir Ekonomi Universitesi are wonderful. They are so kind and helpful. Even the ones who don't speak much (if any) English. We met some of our peer helpers yesterday. These girls are about the cutest thing in the world. These 4 are interns for the Universitesi. They are getting some sort of certification in translation and interpretation, so they speak pretty good English. I guess we will be meeting a few more on monday and these ones will be students as opposed to employees. And then on top of all of that we will each have a Turkish roommate. No one else in the group is happy about it except me. I think i'll learn way more this way, and also i can get over any qualms i might have about sharing my bedroom with someone else. From what i understand the 9 of us will be the only kids studying Turkish here this summer, so we will be getting all kinds of love and attention.
We had a free day today, so we went down to the bazaar in the town square. Bazaar is an apt name for this place. yeesh! I think i will like it a lot more when i can speak some Turkish, but today it was SO overwhelming. There were people coming up to us asking if we needed a guide, trying to get us to eat at their restaurants, trying to get us to buy their crap... and there were people who were just yelling out what they were selling! as i expected, i was getting a lot of strange looks and one woman even tsk tsk tsked at me to signal her disapproval.
One thing i noticed here is there are an ENORMOUS amount of Fiats and Renaults. The police drive Renaults! It's like Fiat is the Honda of Turkey. Who knew?
ok, now it's time for pictures!
This is the view from my room:


This is my room in the morning,

and this is my room in the afternoon with the sun beaming through my window


Now picture me sitting in that chair, in that room, listening to the call to prayer.
yep.
it's all kinds of awesome being me.