Good-bye to Turkey

I had an absolutely marvelous time in Turkey these past few days. It was so refreshing to be with my friends and to spend time together. I have some pictures from the resort, and from our outing on Monday, but they aren't on my computer yet, so I will post them over the weekend when I have a chance to unpack and get settled back in at home.
I am sitting in the Istanbul airport now, at Starbucks waiting for my final flight in about 3 hours. This is the first time I've been able to access the internet on my laptop so I am taking the opportunity to update this a bit. I'll have more stories and lots of pictures to share when I get the chance. :)
Now it's back to the daily routine of classes and studying. I was intending to work on my Arabic while I was gone, but I didn't get much accomplished. I'm afraid tomorrow will not be fun trying to get back into class after missing four days. :( At least I'll have the weekend to try and get my feet back under me.
Well, I'm going to keep moving...you'll hear from me soon.

Turkey

I'm here in Turkey and it is beautiful! However my computer is not behaving with the wireless so I'm on my iPod at the moment. That means I probably won't be updating this any more until I get home. So hopefully next Thursday I'll have lots of pictures to share. :)

Reflections

I'm at the end of another week of classes, and I am leaving for Turkey in less than 12 hours!!! I feel a tab bit spoiled that I get to have a vacation after being here less than a month, but I'm also so excited that I don't really care. :) I am so grateful for the chance to connect with some friends and to spend time being "Western" again. Because I live in a more conservative area of the city, I have to dress appropriately. And honestly, most of the time I really don't mind wearing longer shirts and long sleeves and pants, (even though that doesn't hide the fact that I'm a Westerner) but I do remember the feeling of being able to actually be a tourist in India and wear what I would normally wear, and I'm looking forward to that again.

As far as classes go...we are starting to be able to write sentences! Small accomplishments to be sure, but I'm hoping that soon there will be bigger accomplishments to mark. :) We are working with a list of about 60-70+ nouns, and 24+ verbs, and now I can conjugate those verbs into the past tense to create sentences. We also have added to our list most of the question words (i.e. how, where, who, what), pronouns and today we added some prepositions and learned how to make a word possessive (i.e. my book, your house).

All of what I am learning is what they call "foosa", or classical Arabic. I have had a lot of people ask me why I didn't learn the spoken Arabic first, since it is different than foosa, but I feel like this is a good starting point, for me at least. In a few months I'll be able to read and write pretty well, and from there I can work with a language partner to adjust the vocabulary to spoken Arabic. Right now it's hard for me to even wrap my tongue around the sounds anyway, so I feel like at least I'm moving ahead, instead of being mired in a mess of trying to get sounds to come out of my month that I haven't used before. :)

Look for pictures from Turkey in the next few days!

Relief...

...as in, relief from the heat! Today it only reached 28 degrees Celsius, (or at least that all the warmer it was supposed to get) which means only about 82 degrees Fahrenheit. And now after dark, I was sitting out on the balcony and it was chilly enough that I put on my long-sleeved t-shirt!
Al Humdilallah!

Friends

The past couple of weeks I've made a couple of Arab friends that are also attending the University. The first one is named Roa'a. She's studying law and most days I find her outside the language center when I come out after classes. I've had some great conversations with her. :)

The second friend is named Haneen. I randomly sat next to her on the bus on the way home one day, and now I've seen her a few times, and one day soon I'll hopefully be able to visit her home and meet her family.

Yesterday Haneen took me to the balad to show me some of her favorite places. As we were walking from where we got off the bus I took a few pictures of the jabel where I live. :)

This is from the bottom of the hill

And I even picked out my apartment building from the bottom :) It's the one with the corner balcony.

Haneen took me me to the Roman amphitheater, but we didn't go in since there was an admissions charge.

I took a picture with Haneen before we went our separate ways then. In the background you can see the servees, or shared taxis. These taxis run on specific routes, but they are the least expensive kind of transportation.

Today I took a picture with Roa'a. She's quite opinionated, but very fun to talk with. 

Shopping and Weather and Other Exciting News

Today I went out with another friend from the building to Mecca Mall. This mall is at least 4 stories (maybe more) and has about anything you could want, including a grocery store and Ace Hardware. :) I got some groceries (I want to make cookies sometime this week) and also some measuring utensils so that I can actually get the correct portions into the cookies. :)
It was super hot today and then late afternoon the wind picked up, slamming doors in the apartment, and blew in a dust storm. This one didn't last very long, and I managed to get the apartment closed up tight before it got too dusty, so that is one thing to be grateful for.
Anyway, I'm on a countdown now 'til Friday when I leave for Turkey! I'm going to meet up with some friends who are also living in various places in the region. I have to leave super early on Friday morning, but it will be worth it to spend some time with these friends. I'm going to be gone from Friday morning 'til Wednesday night, so hopefully my Arabic studies won't suffer too badly while I'm gone. I'm planning on taking along my book and working on the lessons while I'm in Turkey...maybe. :)
Another exciting thing I am anticipating is an early morning (for me) skype conversation with family. My parents, Reggie, my aunt Brenda and my Grandma all traveled out to Indiana to cheer on Ross and Andrew in soccer. Also on the itinerary was a stop in Ohio to visit Jeryl's and to watch Tanner and Lauren run cross-country. Anyway, I'll get to hopefully talk with all the people in Indiana and hopefully that will help the jealousy I feel at missing out on such a fun time. :)

Girls Night

On Wednesday night my Korean roommate shared some Korean facial masks with my British roommate and I, which we had a lot of fun with. :)

Here are the packets...I used the grape one.

Here are the 3 of us wearing the facial mask things. I also believe that this is the first time since I've been here that I have a picture of myself. :)

I realize we look a bit scary, but these women have become dear sisters already. I am truly blessed to have ended up rooming with them for this fall.