Explaining

 

I think I owe you an explaination of what went on during my second Thanksgiving Day. Let's start by saying it was the most awesome food day ever! (as Thanksgiving should be)

Well Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday, but it was WAY too complicated to get everyone to Izmir for Thursday, so we decided to have our meal on Saturday.

First of all, I should finish putting faces to names. From left to right: Rotary person, Rotary chairperson (Goksin), Rotary Inbound Coordinator (Zeynep). Then we have: Tove (South Africa), Bess (USA), Torvald (USA), Shannon (Canada), Gabriel (Brazil), Me, Heloisa (Brazil). Then sitting we have: Felipe (Brazil), Lauren (USA), Annie (USA), Riad (Indonesia), and Max (Mexico). These are all the members of my new family. :D It's a really awesome group of people!!
So Thanksgiving!! Well Lauren's family pretty much rented us their house for Thanksgiving dinner. I think that's very brave of them; letting 10 teenagers take over their house. Their house is so lovely though! It's big and had plenty of room for us to cook.
Lauren lives about 1.5 hours away from where I live, if you go by public bus. Lauren's dad, hoewever, rented a private driver to take us all to their house. Really nice.
Saturday, we started out with our 3.5 hours of Turkish class. We have just finished our 4th week, and I can tell my Turkish is benefiting from having those classes. There's nine of us at the classes: Heloisa, Torvald, Max, Gabriel, Bess, Felipe, Shannon, Lauren, and me. Annie and Riad have their own classes in Bursa.
After the classes, we met up with Annie, and went to Lauren's. Then we pretty much went crazy in the kitchen. Some of us had to go to the market to buy supplies. Then we just cooked and cooked. The Brazilians all made really good Brazilian food, and then it took most of us to get the turkey prepped and ready to cook. Thank goodness that the bird had already been cleaned out, we just had to stuff it and slather butter all over it, and pop it into the oven.....and nervously wait until dinner to see if we had ruined it or not. Shannon made a really good stuffing, and once the bird was in the oven, we had to just wait. I will tell you, the smell that started coming from the basesment (the stove the turkey was cooked in was in the basement) was the overwhelming smell of Thanksgiving. I think all of us Americans and Shannon cried. It was perfect. The turkey was a complete success!! Max almost couldn't believe what he was eating and tasting the turkey for the first time made him speechless. Gabriel also thought it was a shame they didn't have this dish in Brazil. Here's to us; 'cause none of us had ever cooked a turkey before!!
I made a really good pie, and we found a container of Ben&Jerry's at the store, so dessert was also pretty American.
Gabriel said something that's stuck with me: 'Am I the only one who thinks we are a family right now?' We really are a family if you think about it. We're not just friends, we know eachothers' weaknesses and strengths, what we all like, how we think, and honestly we treat eachother like a family too. I love it!!! We're a Rotary family. I think the fact that there's only 11 of now, has made our bond even stronger. No one is intentionally left out and we can all get to know eachother really well (possibly too well hahaha).
And on this happy note, I will sign off.

'Til next time :D
Monica



My Second Thanksgiving!!

 

This is Max! Our lone Mexican. He's so funny and here he's chasing chickens.

We got to make Thanksgiving dinner. We had all kinds of dishes. Lauren's family lent us their house and we cooked away.

The blonde here is Shannon, our lone Canadian. She's pretty awesome too, and she lives in Manisa.

Annie is the brunette. She, sadly, lives in Bursa, so we really don't see her much. Bursa's about 5 hours away by bus. However, I'm really glad she got to come for Thanksgiving.

So the guy on the right is Gabriel. He's Brazilian and lives in Manisa now. He's pretty awesome too, and really tall. Like really tall, but it's cool.

Heloisa is the girl in the center (you've already met Shannon). She's also Brazilian, and we're switching houses in January. She's pretty nice, and likes to be in charge.

This is a Brazilian pastel. This one had ground beef and onions in it, and it's fried goodness!

Well we did manage to find a turkey here! After stressing about cooking for days and days, we managed to somehow dress and cook it correctly. It was so amazingly good!! I have to say we did a good job on it, considering NONE of us had cooked a turkey before.

Isn't it beautiful :)

Chef Gabriel!

Some of the food. We were 10 people in all

So there it is. Turkey, mashed potatos, gravy, stuffing, a Brazilian potato dish and a taco!

I'm really so thankful for all these people! We seriously felt like a family while we were eating. I think that having the small nunber of kids that we have helped us to really get to know eachother. I'll intoduce you to everyone else later, but I think that helps you put names to faces.

'Til next time!

Monica

 

 



HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!

Well today is Thanksgiving Day. For any of you who don't know what that is, it's pretty much a day to realize how blessed you are in life, give thanks to God for all the blessings He gives you, and eat a TON!!! The exchange students and I are making Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. We actually found a turkey ('hindi' in Turkish) here. It's going to be a multi-cultural Thanksgiving though, becuase the Brazilian kids and Max (our lone Mexican) are making tradidional dishes from their countries.

I'm thankful, this year, for all the amazing people God has put in my life. My family and friends both in the US and in Turkey are such amazing people. I couldn't imagine life without some of these people. I'm also thankful that Rotary gave me this chance to be on exchange and come to Turkey. I couldn't ask for a better way to spend my year. God has indeed richly blessed my life.

I made dinner for my host family tonight

Before

 

After

 

Apple Pie. This probably turned out the best of everything I made. It was amazing!

Mashed potatos. These were pretty good too. My host dad couldn't stop eating them.

Chicken breasts with stuffing. The chicken turned out well, but the stuffing ended up crisping, and had the texture of crutons. Oh well.

Cooked carrots and onions.

My host mom bought me flowers to decorate with. She's really awesome!

My plate!

It turned out splendidly!! My host family jokes that I could be a chef. I like cooking that's for sure, but it's so much work! But it is really good. :P

I've been really busy lately. I guess that's a good thing. My weekends are almost never spent sitting at home. I'm always out doing things. Tove left us last Thursday. It stinks, but I'm glad she gets to see her family again (Tove was from South Africa and her exchange started last January). We all went to the airport to see her off. Bess and Lauren and I ended up getting really lost, so we had to call one of our Turkish friends and he directed us to the correct places to be.

I'm taking math!!! We're working on logarithems now, so it's probably Algebra II or Pre-Calculus. At least I get to take math. I'm actually going to a different classroom to have math lessons. Normally, I'm in 11-D all day, but for math I hop up the stairs to 11-C. I have 6 hours of math a week. It's perfect. My math teacher is hilarious, and he likes having me in the class. I'm really, really happy. True, it's in Turkish, but math is math. I'm learning all the Turkish ways of answering in math. I love, love, love it!! I even went and bought a notebook and everything.

Well I'm skyping my family tomorrow at 7am so I'm going to sleep to make sure I'm rested at that hour of the morning.

Again, Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Monica

 

 

 

 

 

 



Turkish Classes, New Friends, and Everything in Between

Hi everyone! Sorry I haven't posted in a while. The good news is that I've been too busy to post. That is a good thing, really! I've found ways to keep myself busy. =D
Turkish classes started last Saturday. Thank goodness; I figure now my Turkish should pick up. I have two teachers: one teaches conversational Turkish and the other teaches grammer and vocab. The first teacher speakes no English at all which is very good. I understand most of what she is teaching, so that's already really good. The grammer is getting easier to understand mostly because there are no exceptions. If you add -lar to a word to make it plural, that's the way it ALWAYS is. No random, nonsensical exceptions (the more I learn about Turkish grammer, the more I see that English grammer is rediculously complicated). It's still hard to form sentences because everything is backwards, but it helps to not worry about exceptions.
After Turkish classes, the other exchange students and I spend the rest of the day hanging out. We'll go get something to eat, or bring stuff for a picnic, and then basicly sit around and talk, or walk around looking at shops. It's so much fun to all hang out together. No one knows and exchange student better than another exchange student.
I made a cake for my host family last weekend. I've started to realize that I really like cooking and being in the kitchen. I've also realized that metric units are much easier to memorize than U.S units. Honestly 280g of flour is easier to remember than 2 1/3 cups. I made a white cake and it turned out pretty well.

 I think we finished it in less than a week.

Above are pictures from my class trip to the zoo. We spent probably 2 hours wandering through this huge zoo. Since it was the middle of the week, we pretty much had the whole place to ourselves. I loved it! The last time I went to the zoo was probably when I was 7 or so. There were no panda bears which was a tad disapointing, but there were a bunch of other really cool animals to make up for the lack of pandas. Funny thing: they had horses in the zoo. I had to stop myself from laughing because everyone was excited to see the horses, and I kept thinking 'what are horses doing in a zoo?' I guess it's because I'm from the country where you see horses way more often. Ahhh gotta love city people!

 





  

This is a picture of most of the people in my class. There's 16 of us total, 8 boys and 8 girls. As you can tell, we have a uniform. I don't hate the uniform, but I'm not sure I really love it either. Eh, at least I don't have to worry about what to wear in the mornings.

I don't think I can say enough about these people. They completely accepted me from the start of my exchange here, and they have become like my family here. I mean for them to accept me right away is not something I had expected. They never judged, they were just curious about me, my hometown, and my life in the U.S. I have been SO blessed with my class. They are a great example of the hospitality of Turkish people! They think I'm really cute and sweet, and I love being seen that way. I don't have to be the super smart nerd here, I can just be me. It takes a lot of pressure off.  

One final note: I really hate all you Quincy people who are getting snow! Okay I don't hate you, but I wish that snow was something you could send across the continents. Sadly, this dream will not be realized. :( SO ENJOY YOUR 4+ INCHES OF SNOW!! (and know that I'm really jealous) :D

 

Monica

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quick overview of what I did on holiday.

 

Well as the title suggests, this will be brief. I have so much I want to tell you all, and yet I'm so behind.

Last week, from Wednesday to Sunday, we had the Muslim festival of Ed-Ul-Adha. This is a holiday where people cut lambs and give half to the poor. Turns out, watch the lamb bleed to death is what everyone does. I started and then felt sick and couldn't watch the rest. Then on Monday, we had the national Independance Day. The Turkish Republic is only 89 years old and there is a ton of national pride in Izmir.

So here's the overview of my holiday:

• Spent 3 days in Tire where my grandparents have a house. (my host mom's parents)
• Met an insane amount of family, all very very nice people.
• Ate lamb for the first time. I have decided I don't really care for lamb. Maybe I just need to eat it a LOT more to really decide my feelings for it. (I don't think watching the poor thing choke to death helped my taste buds)
• Ate way too many sweets and drank too much tea. (not that that's a BAD thing hehe)
• Played Uno in Turkish.
• Came back to Izmir and met my other grandmother (my host dad's mom)
• Spent 5 hours in a car on the way to Marmaris.
• Spent the night on a boat!
• Played backgammon with a friend of the family and discoverd I need a LOT more practice. I got schooled.
• Improved my rock skipping tecnique.

So that's my Bayram (as we call it) in a nutshell. It was sort of fun, but like all holidays, you're ready to go back to school by the end.

The day I got back to school, though, was more Turkish Independace Day stuff. 11th and 12th grades got to march through part of the city preceeded by the band and a whole bunch of Turkish flags.That was pretty cool! People everywhere along the way were cheering from their apartments. Honestly I've never seen so much pride for one's country before. I mean, this is only the 89th year too. I want to be here when they have their centennial. It'll be amazing.

More coming later, I promise!

Monica 

 

 

KAPADOKYA!!!

Well this definitely the coolest thing I've done to date. Sorry it's been forever since my last update. I was gone for Kapadokya, then was home for 2 days then went to Tire for Bayram for 3 days(no internet) then was home for less than a day before being wisked off to Marmaris(also no internet there). Yeah I've been just a little busy :)
Anyways I need to tell you all about Kapadokya (although in the States I think it's Cappadocia).
Well 11 of us awesome Rotary kids got on a bus at 11 o'clock on Thursday the 18th. It was just us, the tour guide, the driver and the switch off driver who started out sleeping in the back on the ledge above the luggage. It was a little creepy when we discovered him sleeping back there. Well the goal of leaving in the middle of the night is so that we all sleep. The fundamental flaw in that theory is that us exchange kids hadn't seen each other in 2 weeks and needed to catch up. However, at 3am when our first driver left and the second driver abandoned his sleeping post, we decided maybe we needed some shut-eye. In the back of the bus was a row of 4 seats: Bess, Lauren, Torvald and me. Bess took the abandoned ledge, Lauren ended up sleeping in the aisle, Torvald took the seat next to Tove, which left me with the entire back row of seats. I slept pretty well hehehe
Anyways, we arrived in the Kapadokya region at maybe 10:00 and the first things we say were the mountains with the caves carved into them. There were hundreds and hundreds of them!

 

Our first stop was at this BEAUTIFUL valley/canyon place. I'm not kidding, it was so beautiful. We decended into this canyon and there's a river flowing through it and since it's fall, all the leaves were this amazing yellowish green color. Yeah, I can safely say I love nature. 

 

 

 

This pic is all the American girls on the bridge. You can see the fall colors on the trees and the sun peaking through. (Dad, I will now admit that all those camping trips in the rain and cold have been worth it. They have given me a deep appreciation of God's beautiful creation. So thanks even though there were times I fought the trips)



 

 

So this valley contained a lot of old churches. This valley was a place that monks fled to during the persecutions during the Roman Era. The churches had frescos (aka. wall painting) all over the walls and ceilings. How cool is that? I mean sure it's all beat up, but it's at least 1,500 years old. We saw a lot of frescos on this trip, but in most places you couldn't take pictures. It makes me wonder-why don't churches these days look this beautiful? If we can practice our faith in the open, why are our churches so plain, while the churches of those in hiding are so beautiful? Hmmmm

 

 

 

Next stop on our list: two underground cities where thousands of Christians lived during the persecutions. Some cities could hold as many as 20,000 people. They are huge! One thing though, these people must have been really short. All of us ended up ducking to go through most of the doorways. They were pretty cool though.

 

 

 

 

Above is a pic of Shannon's and my room. We got to stay in one of the triple suites and I think this room could have passed for a room from the Middle Ages. It was all stone, except for the floor, and the ceiling was high and arched over this bed. The bathroom was all stone. It had no seprate shower space, so when you took a shower, the water went everywhere! But, it is the coolest room I've ever stayed in! I literally felt like a Mideval princess in this room. The one downside was that it was really cold, being that it was all out of stone.

 

The next morning we headed to the above city in the mountians. There were several different churches with amazing frescos (that we couldn't take pictures of). There were a couple we could take pics in though, so below are a few of those pictures.

 

 

 

Yes! That ^ is a camel. My first camel sighting:D While we're on the subject of animal, I want to mention that we spotted a turkey while on the road. So in answer to the millions of quesions: yes, there are turkeys in Turkey. :D

 So the picture on the left is this awesome tree we found at a panoramic point. It is covered in evil eyes. There were actually two of these random trees, and I just thought they were really cool! The picture on the right is of the fairy chiminies. There were a lot more than I could fit into one photo, but I think you get the idea. I think these were also little houses for people.

 

 
This is the panorama of a part of the Kapadokya region. It's amazing! Even the little towns that are scattered along the region don't really disturb the natural landscape. The town just build around the fairy chiminies, rocks and other landscape. Sometimes a town will even use part of a rock for a building.

 

This was one of our last stops on the second day.

After this stop, we stopped at a pottery shop. We got to watch one of the workers throw pottery and then Max got a chance to try it. We then got to look around at all the merchendise. Everything in that place was handmade and beautiful. I can't even imagine all the work it takes to make the designs on some of the pieces. They are all hand thrown and hand painted. It is most definitely an art!

That night, we got to eat dinner in this really cool semi-underground place and watched traditional Turkish dancing. However, we got there an hour before anyone else so we played the game similer to telephone, but where you just say the first thing that comes to mind. I think we might have used up all of our energy laughing in that hour. The dancing was pretty cool. The men and women danced both separately and together. Their costumes were really cool too. My camera died so I couldn't take any pictures of them:( We got back to the hotel at 11 but we're exchange students and sleep never comes until at least 2 in the morning. In our case, it was 2:30 when we decided to call it a night and go to sleep. The kids who were going on the balloon trip had to be up at 5:00. Yes, some lucky kids got the permission from their parents to ride a ballon over the Kapadokya area. My parents said no. On the bright side....... nope can't find one that satifies me.

The rest of us slept until 7:30 and were off at 8:30. We drove for probably 3 hours and most everyone slept. I couldn't so I took over that ledge and waved at everyone we passed :D

 

 

Konya was our final stop of the trip. There's a really nice mosque there and Konya is where the whirling dervishes are. We didn't see any, which was rather upsetting. The mosque was pretty cool though, but there were tons of people. The two pictures below are not of this mosque, but they are of a mosque so it fits...right?

 After lunch in Konya, it was an 8 hour bus ride back to Izmir, but almost none of us slept. At about 7, we drove through a hard rain and lightning storm, so that was pretty cool. We were all pretty sad to leave eachother, but this coming Saturday we'll see eachother for language classes.

I have to say this is (again) one of the coolest things I've done. Life here is getting better and I think I'll survive. Haha just kidding, I'll do much more than survive; I think I'll thrive here.

One last thing:

Mithapasa Caddesi No. 790 Venüs Apt. Kat. 4 D. 8
Izmir, Turkey 35280

(That is my address^)

If you feel like sending me anything, please do. It could be a note, or a package or anything you want to send. Surprise me ;-)

 

Monica