La Turquie!

Hi everyone!  As you probably know I spent a week in Turkey, you might even have already seen the pictures.  It was a really good trip and everything went pretty much smoothly.  I say 'pretty much', because the first day we had two flights, one directly to Turkey and the other one to the city of Izmir, and after the first flight custom's took so long that we missed the second one!  There happened to be 40 extra seats on the next plane an hour later, so it worked out okay.  We stayed three nights in the first hotel, one night in the second and two in the third (at Istanbul).  The hotels were nice and they all had nice buffet restaurants filled with awesome Turkish food!  Actually most of the meals we ate were at buffet-style restaurants.  One of them had little flags that they put on each table to show where the tourist groups were from.  Our table had a French flag on it of course, but all the flags were sitting on top of the buffet and the Mexican exchange student helped himself to a Mexican flag for the table.  Then we got one for us two Americans, and then the Brazilian for himself.  It was sweet! 

We spent most of the first four days visiting historical (as in ancient history) sites.  They were really beautiful and pretty interesting.  We also went to a store that sells Turkish spices, teas, and candy things.  They had samples of everything and it was so good!  My favorites were the apple tea and the sesame something or other (pâte de sesame in French, Halva in Turkish)  We had a tour guide who explained everything to us and was with us all five days.  Pictures speak louder than words, so here's some examples:

A library

We saw tons of theaters!

The site of some of my favorite ruins, built right into the mountain rock..

..and not far from this calcium formation thing, called the 'Cotton Castle'.

The St. Sophia, a 1500 year old church that got turned into a mosque.

The Grand Bazaar

Then Thursday night we arrived in Istanbul!  We had some free time in the immediate area of our hotel, but it wasn't very 'touristy'-there were lots of clothes shops but they were wholesale, and to buy anything you had to buy at least 3 of the same exact thing.  Mostly we just walked around.  Friday morning it was rainy and cold, but we visited a palace, the Blue Mosque, the St. Sophia church, and a few little places anyways.  Then, Friday afternoon, we were free in the Grand Bazaar, a big covered marketplace with more than 5000 little stalls!  There were lots of counterfeit stuff (sunglasses and tee-shirts/sweatshirts mostly).  I didn't even know that there were counterfeit Aeropostale sweatshirts, but you can buy them in Turkey!  Lots of the French bought them because there's no Aeropostale, Hollister, etc. here.  They also had lots of more Turkish looking things, like necklaces with the Turkish eye (blue and white circles), scarves, and things like that. 

Throughout the week we spent lots of time in the charter bus-most places we went were at one or two hours from our hotel.  Between hotels 2 and 3, we had about 6 hours total of driving that day!  It was okay though because we played cards, talked, played the Question Game and Who's Who (everyone tries to guess what person they're supposed to be using yes or no questions).  It was fun and the games lead to lots of laughs!

Every night at the hotel, we had a quiz game to review some of the things we had seen during the day. Each time the game was organized by a different class.  Certain nights, we played a game afterwards (the people who didn't want to go right to bed), and one night, I taught a cheer to everybody!  That was cool.  It was one of the quarter cheers, the one where usually we do a flip at the end. 

So in general, Turkey was amazing!  I got to see lots of new things and also meet some cool people who go to my school.  Going in I only knew two French people and the 3 other exchange students, and now I know.. lots and lots of the people who went!