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