Turkey: Day 1

So this is long overdue but I feel I have my excuses. After we got back from Turkey I was sick and then super tired all week. This week was midterms and I just finished my last midterm so I promise to get back to blogging more often.

Our first day in Turkey was rather short but still super exciting! We left the center around 11 and drove to Tel Aviv to get to the airport. It is such a hassle to get 80 students plus 12 faculty on the same exact airplane in a timely manner. It didn't help that they had scared the bejeezies out of us telling us they were going to interrogate each of us. It actually wasn't that bad, besides the super long wait times. Once in the gate we played games like farkle and scum. I promise we try really hard to be quiet but we are a pretty rowdy crowd. Luckily they split us up a little on the plane. I sat next to our program director and his wife, the Huntingtons and my roommate Jess. We had a really good conversation and the flight was a total breeze all the way to touch down in Istanbul.

Once in Turkey we headed for our hotel which was, let me tell you, a real hoot. It was called the Cartoon Hotel. The whole thing was decked out in these awful Disney statues and Roman busts. Not to mention the pictures which were prints of the classics with Martin the Martian stickers stuck to them. The pinnacle of it all was the giant smiling Daffy Duck picture that had a front row seat to our boudoir. But for what the hotel lacked in room quality it made up for completely with dinner.

Dinner was on the top floor of the hotel just outside the Turkish equivalent of Times Square. We were served a full 5 course meal with a 360 degree glass window view that was to die for. We could see everything; the thing that struck me most were the minarets and domes that pop up everywhere. The place is literally covered in Mosques, which isn't surprising considering 97% of the population is Muslim. Dinner was amazing but so long and by the end I couldn't believe I had been at dinner for 2 hours! It was the first of many nights that I conked out way too quickly.