Getting to Paris from Glasgow was a fun experience. That is, compared to having my eye balls spooned out of my head with ice cream scoopers and then served to me chilled on a bed of lettuce. It was ridiculous. When I got to the airport in Glasgow, I wasn’t feeling well at all. I had come down with a bad cold the day before, and I was pretty weak and congested, not to mention sad to be leaving my family. I printed my boarding pass and checked my bag. I was seven kilos over my baggage allotment, but I am gone for eleven months, so I felt like it was a necessary indulgence that I gave myself. I went to pay for the excess baggage at another desk, and before the woman ran my credit card, I asked how much it would be. She told me that she was going to charge me 202 POUNDS! I was utterly shocked, especially because my actual plane ticket didn’t cost anywhere near that much. Apparently, I was charged twice for my excess baggage, because I had a connecting flight. What airline does that? The woman informed me that had I pre-booked an extra bag online, I would only have been charged 8.99 pounds, but since I didn’t, I had to pay the 202 pounds to get my things to Paris. I said that I absolutely could not do that, and she called to have my bag sent back so that I could try to get rid of some of the excess weight.

When my bag came back, I opened it right at the baggage reclaim and started throwing a huge portion of my stuff into the nearest garbage can. Everything from bug spray to underwear to pants to sunscreen had to go. I must have looked crazy (or like a poor student) as I put on layer after layer of clothes, trying to save as much as I could by wearing it on the plane. I eventually got the weight down to where it needed to be (20 kilos for my checked bag and 10 for my one carry-on—yes, they weighed that, too) through a combination of throwing stuff out and moving things around. I gave the one textbook that I had brought from Turkey to a man who worked in the airport, not liking the idea of throwing a book away. It might have looked a little sketchy to give away a book called Conflicts in the Middle East right before getting on a flight, but I couldn’t just toss it.

After I was felt up like nobody’s business at airport security (there’s no back of the hand rule in Scotland), and I had to deal with a delay after I got to my lay-over (The first plane didn’t work, so we didn’t get on it. The second plane, which we did situate ourselves on, didn’t work, either, so we took a bus on the runway to a third plane, which, thankfully, got us to Paris safely). After I landed I only had to deal with a night bus and a taxi trip to get to my hostel, which was decent.

It was a good thing that my hostel wasn’t bad, since I ended up spending a lot of time there. I remained sick for the entirety of the trip, and was forced to spend most of my first and fourth day in Paris in bed as a result (there’s nothing like getting sick in a Metro station to hit it home that you need to rest up so that you don’t get refused entry to an African country).

I did have a lot of fun in Paris, however. Most of the time, I was with an old friend from high school, Abby, and we went to the Louvre (where we met a nice girl named Jessica from our hostel) together as well as to Monmartre, Notre Dame, and the Musee d’Orsay. I even spent a day on my own at the Rodin museum which had a great Matisse exhibit. It snowed in the city a few times, giving everything a beautiful powdery-white cover.

Eventually it was time to hit the air again for my next great adventure…South Africa!

Getting to Glasgow wasn’t very fun, but it wasn’t extremely difficult, either, which I greatly appreciated. I woke up at about twenty past four in the morning, and I proceeded to shower and get my things together so that I could leave. I walked to one Tube station and was promptly directed to another one that was down the street by the man who was working there, because it was an easier route. He was right, and I got to the train station in time to catch the six twenty train to Stanstead Airport. The man who checked my bag didn’t charge me for the extra three kilos of stuff that I had packed, and I was able to pass through security, get a cup of tea, and make it to my gate with time to spare. Yay! A lot of the flights to Scotland had been cancelled due to some snow that had fallen in the area, and I was lucky that my plane wasn’t even delayed.

My time in Glasgow was wonderful. I had a beautiful Christmas with my family, rang in New Years with my grandparents, and bonded with my beautiful cousins over sneaking one of them in to a club. I spent the day in Edinburgh with my Uncle Gerry, who is absolutely fantastic and very funny, and I explored on my own as well, going to the Modern Art museum in Glasgow and making some unnecessary purchases.

I was terribly sad to leave my family and Scotland, but I was so happy that I had come. I can’t wait to go back!

I spent one day in London, and it was very nice.  I went to Covent Garden, where I watched the Christmas shoppers (it was the 22^nd, so the Christmas season was in full-swing).  I ate a jacket potato at my second-favorite jacket potato vender (Number one? The Tempting Tattie in Edinburgh), and I ventured to find a coat, which I didn’t have, as it was over 70 degrees when I left Turkey in the middle of the night.  I was able to wander around London, seeing Parliament and the London Eye, a Christmas market, carolers, and a play called The Misanthrope with Keira Knightly.

There are carnivals that go on around Christmas and New Years in the United Kingdom.  I saw one in London, and I’ve seen them in Glasgow and Edinburgh since then.  Why anyone would want to go on fast outdoor rides in the middle of winter is beyond me, but they seem to be successful.

All-in-all, my day in London was really pleasant.  It was cold, but it was also very festive.  It was nice to explore the city a little more (I had been there a few times before), and I was able to get to my flight to Glasgow the next morning with only a little bit of hassle, so I was pleased!

I have finally completed my great escape from Turkey!  Let me tell you, it’s not as easy as one might imagine to go from having no passport in Alanya to passing through customs at London Heathrow.  It required many different modes of transportation, a lot of sitting around, and some random encounters, but I did it!  My adventure started at 10:20 on Sunday night, when I left the lojman in Alanya in a cab for the bus station.  After I got there, I put my bag on the wrong bus, almost got on the wrong bus myself (who knew that there was more than one 11 o’clock bus from Alanya to Ankara?), and then was sorted out by a couple of (probably pretty annoyed) bus drivers.  The bus journey went through the mountain pass that gives the coastal regions access to the central Anatolian region, which is nice in the daytime, but not much but scary winding roads in the nighttime.  At ten past seven we arrived, with the rain, at the Ankara bus station.  I had a kind of gross Turkish breakfast at one of the cafes located inside of the terminal to kill some time, and then I grabbed a cab to the South African Embassy.  Once there, I proceeded to wait for about four hours with a large stuffed panther with green hair, the mascot for the World Cup 2010, for company.  The extended amount of time that I spent in the waiting room gave me ample opportunity to contemplate what a huge waste of money it was for the South African government to pay to have life-sized stuffed animals made for their embassies.  I hope that they serve some greater purpose that I am unaware of, like they come to life to spread the word of Nelson Mandela to all lof the non-believers in the major cities of the world.  That would be kind of cool.  Otherwise I can’t support the manufacture of these creatures.  They aren’t even suitable for children, because they are so heavy that an infant could be crushed to death if the stuffed animal fell on top of it.

After spending a considerable amount of time in the embassy, and being addressed as Veronica the entire time (I was more than a little nervous that that was the name that would be on my visa when I got it), I was given my passport back, with the visa safely stuck into it.  Woot woot!  I am totally going to South Africa!  The people at the embassy were really nice and set me up with their travel agent, who helped me to book the next flight from Ankara to London, so that I could take advantage of my new-found freedom.   I hopped in a (hugely expensive) cab, and off I went.  A few minutes after I left the embassy, the cab driver got a call and passed the phone to me.  Apparently, my credit card had been acting up again (it chooses when it wants to work and when it will go on strike based on how desperate I am—the more I need it the more likely it is to refuse to work in a foreign country) and it wouldn’t run to book the ticket.  I tried my debit card, but that too has refused to work in certain conditions (this time anywhere outside of an ATM), so I had to go to the airport, try (and fail) to reach my credit card company, find an ATM, take out enough money to buy a ticket to London, and go to the counter to pay in cash.  I felt like a spy.  That is totally something that a spy would do—pay for an international flight with cash.  Less traceable.  I am so cool.

Anyway, after checking my bag, grabbing something to eat, feeding some once-outdoor, now-indoor birds, and waiting for a while, I got on my flight to Istanbul…one step closer to leaving the country!  It was a little bit of a treat being in the Istanbul airport, since it was decorated for Christmas with lots of hanging white lights and a few Christmas trees, some more traditional than others.  I found Internet access and then promptly had my computer co-opted by some men from the Ivory Coast who needed to buy tickets.  How they got past security without a ticket is beyond me, but whatever.

I got to London at a little past ten that night, and then lugged by bag up and down the steps of the London underground in order to reach my hostel in Bayswater.  All together, it took me about 26 hours to complete my trip from Alanya to London, but I made it!

During my struggle to escape from Turkey, I had a lot of time to think about the past few months, and all that I have seen and done and experienced.  I complained about the inability to flush toilet paper and the resulting smell (which, I have realized, seems to be an American issue and not a Turkish one.  I have been in Turkish homes, and they are immaculate.  There is no bad smell.  We Americans are just gross and dirty sometimes.  By B.), the oil in the food and the inevitability of meat in most dishes with nutritional value, and my many hospital visits (five in all this semester), but none of that in any way challenges the fact that living and studying in Turkey has been an incredibly enriching experience that has allowed me to see a huge amount of things that I wouldn’t have gotten around to seeing for a long time, to meet some amazing people, whether Turkish, American, or other nationalities, and to toughen up a little bit.  I do not regret coming at all.  I am so happy that I was able to have this amazing experience in a beautiful part of the world, and to have the time to really enjoy it.

Vicki out.  Ayiyiyiyiyiyiyiyiyiyiyiy!

One thing that I’ve noticed while in Turkey is that safety regulations in and around this part of the world aren’t like those in the US.  One example of this is when some of us decided to go into the mountains to go white water rafting.  In the United States, when a group of novices wishes to raft on the rapids, they are given some training, a life vest, and a helmet, as there are rocks in the river.  Rocks can be, at times, both sharp and hard.  If one hits you on the head, or, as is more often the case with rafting, if you hit one with your head, there is a chance that the incident could result in injury, discomforture, or even a loss of consciousness.  This is never a good thing, but it is particularly unfortunate when you hit your head while rafting, since most of the rocks are located OUTSIDE of the raft, and if your head has ventured to one, it is likely that it and the rest of your body is also outside of your primary floatation device.  Under these circumstances, staying conscious would be advisable.  Anyway, this doesn’t seem to be the case in Turkey.

When one goes white water rafting in Turkey, one is handed a smelly life jacket and a paddle and is pointed in the direction of the river.  It is all very thrilling, but probably wouldn’t pass insurance regulations back home.  I’m cool with that, though.  Helmets aren’t very trendy.

The actual rafting trip was wonderful.  It was definitely one of my favorite things that we did in Turkey.  The mountains were absolutely beautiful, and the water was a cool blue that perfectly conveyed in color what the water felt like in temperature–freezing.  That didn’t stop most of us from jumping in a few times (also something that wasn’t necessarily very safe but was incredibly fun).  I think that everyone but us was confused when we sang the Georgetown Fight Song in the rain as we powered down the river, but that just made it better, especially since those who we were confusing (and I like to think intimidating) were annoying Russians who insisted on spraying us with icy mountain river water and hitting on us from their less-than-impressive raft of old men.

This lack of safety precautions extends to all of the castles and ruins that we have visited in Turkey, Syria, and Cyprus.  Basically, the attitude is, “If you’re stupid enough to fall off of the top of a fortress’s wall, you don’t deserve financial compensation.”  It’s an interesting take, but one that I don’t completely disagree with.

This past weekend I travelled to Konya to see the famous Whirling Dervishes.  Getting there required a four-hour bus ride through a mountain pass.  The scenery along the way was absolutely gorgeous, and the mountain tops were snow-capped, which was lovely.

Once we arrived in Konya, we went to eat a special dish from the area…meat.  Every “special dish” in Turkey consists of meat.  When I say meat, I’m not refering to chicken, ham, veal, or a variety of other meats.  Most of these things don’t exist in Turkey, or at least aren’t considered as falling into the category of “et” (“meat”).  Et is lamb, and sometimes beef…but mostly lamb.  Everywhere we go, we are given some form of this to eat.  Being a vegetarian, I have trouble telling the different methods of presentation apart.  It all smells the same–like “Grandma,” as one of us likes to say.  Sometimes, I think that the people who attempt to eat this food have difficultly differentiating between the different types, too.

It is sort of nice, being exempt from others’ expectations that I will eat this food.  It allows me to sit back and observe some of my peers squirm, thinking about whether it would be more effective to hide the food in a napkin or under a pile of un-eaten rice.  (The rice is always the better choice–they aren’t expecting it).  I’ve even hidden others’ pieces of et in the remnants of my vegetarian meals, in an attempt to both not appear rude and to pull one over on whoever it is that thought that only putting lamb on the menu was a good idea–it’s just cruel, as far as I can tell.

Konya is also famous for its sugar.  It is the sugar capital of Turkey, being the location of most of the factories that turn sugar beets into the kind of sugar that we all recognize.  There are sugar candies that are made primarily in Konya.  They don’t taste particularly good.  They are sort of like balls of powdered sugar that has been mixed with water and left to harden.  They are colored all different colors, however, which makes them look appealing.

Of course, the main reason why we went to Konya was to see the Whirling Dervishes.  The performance, which began after a very long speech by a professor in Turkish (from what I could understand, he was saying something about a person’s headlights being left on in the parking lot), was really wonderful.  The dervishes came onto the stage, and after some time of quiet prayer, they began to whirl, attempting to connect with the devine while at the same time channeling that divinity to the earth.  It was an amazing and beautiful thing to witness.

Mawlana Jalaleddin-i Rumi, the father of the founder of the Dervish order in Konya, said (or is reputed to have said):

“Come, come again whoever you are, come!  Wonderer, fire worshipper or idolatrous, come!  Come even if you broke your penitence a hundred times, Ours is the portal of hope, come as you are.”

Konya and the dervishes were all very welcoming, and I am glad that we had the opportunity gelmek.

Wow!  It’s really been a while since I updated this.  I guess I dropped the ball.  Well, there’s nothing to do but pick it back up again, right?

At the end of October, my arkadashlar and I went on a trip to Antalya and Cyprus.  We were only gone for a long weekend, but it was certainly packed with enough scrambling and picture-taking to last…maybe another few hours.  Let me break the fun down for you.

We left on Friday, October 30th, for Antalya.  Antalya is the closest major-ish city to Alanya.  It is about two hours by bus to the East, and it is also located on the beautiful shores of the Meditteranean.  Once there, we explored the old city, complete with lots of old houses, tourist shops and stalls, and hills that are so fun to go down but a pain in the ass to get back up.  After our exploration and lunch, we headed over to an archaeological museum that boasted that it was the best collection of Roman whatever in the WORLD.  Funny thing is, we’ve heard that a few times on our various adventures.  Apparently these places have some issues with superlatives.  This museum did have one really exciting and super-creepy piece, however: Santa’s jaw.  That’s right.  How Nightmare Before Christmas is that, seeing Santa’s jaw on Halloween Eve?  To be fair, it was actually only about half of a jaw, but there was a tooth left in it, so that’s cool.

After we left the museum, we toured a community organization that held after-school programs for children and classes for their parents as well.  It was really interesting to hear about the different approaches that the organization took to assisting the community members, most of whom were migrants living in poor conditions.

We stayed in Antalya over-night, leaving before five in the morning for our flight to Cyprus.  We flew into North Cyprus, which doesn’t really exist if you ask most of the world, what with Turkey sort of just taking claim to a piece of the island.  The country has a sad and violent history which is really too complicated to get into at the moment, but there is a DMZ cutting it into two unequal pieces that is maintained by United Nations Peacekeeping Forces.  From the capital city you can see through the fence to the bomb-blasted houses that are contained in the Green Line.

While in Cyprus we visited two castles.  One of them had really tacky murals within its rooms that were particularly good photo-ops, not to mention a lot of naked mannequins being tortured.  That was a treat…or a scarring experience that I’ll never be able to escape…sometimes the difference between the two is too slight to distinguish them from one another.

The other castle was much less disturbing, being the model for Disney’s Snow White’s castle.  It was built into the top of a mountain, and it was beautiful.  So what if a bunch of soldiers were pushed to their death off of a ledge located in the establishment?  At least all of the mannequins were fully clothed.

While in Cyprus, we also crossed the Green Line into Greek Cyprus (which is really all of Cyprus, but don’t tell Turkey).  We got to go to Starbuck’s, which was fantastic.  I also went exploring and found some great graffiti.

Our trip to Cyprus was wonderful.  It was so much better than Syria–not one person threw up!  It was a good way to start November.

So I’ve been showering with a lemon lately.  Or, more accurately, a lemon-shaped piece of soap.  This is yet another new experience that I have been lucky to have as a result of being in Turkey.

It is not an unpleasant thing, showering with my lemon-shaped soap, but it is, in my opinion, the secondmost tricky thing that I have had to do (the first being learning how to use a squat toilet without getting wet…eww).  The initial problem with showering with lemon-like soap is that it is yellow, like a lemon.  Now, one cannot forget that I am in Turkey, and I am not particularly convinced that Turkey has any sort of agency that completes work similar to that of the Food and Drug Administration in the US.  I’m not saying that I put a lot of faith in the FDA, but I do trust it enough to give me an idea of whether the yellow layering on my soap that seems to give my hands a neon-like shean is going to keep me from having children later in life or not.  Since I don’t have any assurances that the former will not happen, unlikely though it may seem, the first action that I must take before washing myself with the lemon soap is to wash the soap itself until the strange yellow leaves its surface.  Once this is done, the real problem begins.  The difficult part about showering with a piece of soap that is shaped like a lemon is that it doesn’t have many grooves.  Therefore, keeping a grasp on the lemon and moving it enough to bring about a lather is quite difficult.

The soap doesn’t smell like lemon.  That should be mentioned.

Anyway, the reason why I brought up the soap to begin with is that it is from a city called Edirne, which is located near Istanbul.  Edirne is famous for one of its mosques, which is okay–big, decorative, holy.  But it is the second thing that Edirne is known for that makes it a tourist hot-spot, and that is its fruit-shaped soaps.

No matter your preference–apple, orange…banana…you can find soap that will fool even the cleverest of the clever into taking a big bite out of one if you happen to leave it in a nice basket (which is often included) on the kitchen table.

So, basically, my recommendation is this: go to Turkey.  Find your way to out-of-the-way Edirne, and buy yourself some lira-and-a-half soap.  Then bring it home and fool your friends.  Just don’t be surprised if, later, there’s a lemon in the shower.

Okay, so Syria is dirty.  The streets are dusty, the beds have bugs, there was a mysterious booger in my shower.  That’s fine.  I can understand that.  Dirt is a part of life, bugs need beds, too, and sometimes you just can’t find a tissue…in the bathroom.  Whatever.  I can deal with that.  It is on the outside.  I, on the inside, am clean and at peace with the outside grossness.  The problem comes when the badness without becomes the wretchedness within.

I, along with many of my professors and fellow students, became infected with some sort (or variety of) bacteria while in Aleppo and Damascus.  When I saw the first girl throwing up, I felt very bad for her, but I also thanked my lucky stars that it wasn’t me.  Well, I guess those burning balls of gas in the sky didn’t get my thanks fast enough, because soon afterwards I came down with something similar.  It made trecking through Syria interesting, but the real fun came when I got back to Alanya.

I don’t know what made me think that after I got back to my apartment, I would magically feel better.  I think that just NOT BEING IN SYRIA was considered by all of us to be the first step towards recovery, but we were oh-so-wrong.  Some of our systems worsened, and after a particularly rough Sunday night, I decided to go with some of my peers to the hospital to be tested to see if I was the most recent victim of some mild form of biological warfare.  (You’ve got to admit, it would be sneeky.–Don’t infect people with something that kills them, infect them with something that causes mass vomiting, so that not only are they incapacitated, but also hospitals are flooded with smelly, stomach bile-dripping patients.  The clean-up alone could take hundreds, if not thousands, of man-hours if enough people are infected.)

When I was at the hospital, one of the first things that I noticed was the fly that was buzzing around.  This wasn’t just a normal fly.  It was like the fly from Hell.  A hell where the ground, the walls, and the ceilings are made of poo, and only poo.  It was absolutely disgusting.  And I swear that its red eyes were plotting and demonic.  Its sole purpose in life must have been to spread the diseases of the patients to one another, so that no one who ever set foot in that hospital could ever be well again.  I hate that fly.

Anyway, after some testing and unprofessional information sharing on the part of the doctor and the staff, we were all informed that Dr. IHaveAnUndergraduateDegreeInMedicine told us that he didn’t know what was wrong with us, so he was prescribing us all antibiotics and some other medication to share, and we should feel better soon.  Thanks, Doc.

None of us are better yet, but we’ll see how it goes.  I have one more pill of my prescription left, then it’s back to square one.  Maybe I can become the Typhoid Mary of Asia Minor.  That wasn’t on the Life Experience List, but I could add it in somewhere between sky diving and seeing the next Twilight movie.

Our next city of destination was Damascus.  On the way there, we stopped at a Christian village called Maayoula.  It is really rare to find a lot of Christians together in one place in Syria, but this village was one of the places.  There is a church there that supposedly has the oldest alter in the world and the only relic that has a depiction of the last supper and the Crucifixion on the same painting.  The town is also one of the last that still speaks a form of Aramaic, which was really unique.

I came down with a Syrian stomach virus my last day in Aleppo, so it’s a little bit harder to report on Damascus, but it was a cool city.  I went to the National Archaeological Museum and the main mosque there, which is where the remains of Saint John the Baptist, Sallah Aldin, and one of the Prophet’s grandsons are kept…supposedly.  I also went to the bazaar there, but it was a little too much for me.  It was a lot like an indoor shopping mall, only dirtier and louder and hotter. Of course, that didn’t stop me from spending way too much money.

It was fun being sick in my hotel room in Damascus (one that wasn’t quite clean).  It would be one thing if I could tell myself that that is just how Damascus is…run-down and dirty.  But it’s not, and my biggest reminder was the view of the Four Seasons across the street from my hotel.  Nice.  I think that that is where my missing the West started in earnest.  The special on living in DC on the BBC didn’t help much, either, but oh, well!  I’ll get over it.  And I still love Syria!

On the way back to the border we went to a crusader castle called the Crac des Chevaliers, which was really, really neat.  You could go exploring anywhere that you liked, and it was very exciting to be able to walk around where the crusaders had hundreds of years ago.   The views over the Syrian landscape were wonderful, as it was not only tall but also on a hill-like mountain.

We got back into Antakya later that night, where we stayed the night in the hotel that we had stayed in during the first couple of nights of our excursion.  We then set out the next morning for another twelve hours of travelling through beautiful yet scary-as-hell Rough Cilicia.  We finally got back, ordered pizza, and commiserated over the fact that we were all sick from dread Syrian diseases, and our damned Internet was out of commission.  Oh, what a trip!

Seriously, though, Syria was amazing and I loved it and I recommend going to anyone and everyone…unless you are a small child, the elderly, pregnant, or have a heart condition, that is.  Just in case!